I don't necessarily agree with Dr. Jonathan Brown on his recent handling of some contemporary issues.

That being said, his @JonathanACBrown "Islam and Blackness" is a pioneering piece of Islam-ethics discourse that needs to be read more widely.

Let me walk y'all through this 🧵 For those who want to read something more than a thread - I recently uploaded my detailed review of the book on my Academia page. I want to avoid posting the link here to avoid restriction of post reach - just look up "Zaid Abu Hurayra" on Academia. (2/

This is a key difference in how Muslims and Christian polemics work.

Muslims are inerrantists: the Qur'an = God's word = True. This view is theologically unproblematic, but it means Muslims accept the burden of proof of showing how scripture is, in fact, free of errors 🧵 (1/7)

https://twitter.com/waldenpod/status/1800911061744546076

This shapes the priorities of our apologetics. So much energy is spent defending *each* proposition in the Qur'an and Hadith against allegations of scientific, historical or moral error. Even seemingly insignificant ones. That's worth it, bcuz we take inerrancy seriously. (2/7)

LONG thread on the so-called Adamic Exceptionalism model of human origins 🧵 (1/22)

What is it? Is it true? Is it useful to Muslims? Read on to know. A few years ago, Professor David Solomon Jalajel proposed a novel way to read the descriptions of human origins in Islamic scriptures that, surprisingly, doesn’t commit one to rejecting human evolution.

It was received with mixed response. 2/

BLOGGING THEOLOGY APPRECIATION THREAD 🧵

Look, I'll be real with y'all. you wouldn't understand the impact @freemonotheist and Blogging Theology are having unless you were a Muslim kid growing up on 2000's internet.

(1/12) The net back then was rife with anti-Islamic content with little scholarly material to counter any of it. It was common for net-surfing young Muslims to be stricken with doubts.

That part hasn't changed.

Today though, we actually have some help. Enter Blogging Theology. (2/12)

Important exceptions aside, #abortion is haram in Islam once the soul enters the fetus. There's a good scriptural case for that corresponding to six weeks of fetal age*.
LONG THREAD on the best rational argument against abortion - without appealing to religious justifications. 🧵 *For a survey on Muslim scholarly views on the ethics of abortion, see the back half of this @thinking_muslim podcast:

Definitely a range of opinions, but there's a general (and exception-permitting) agreement on the status of post-ensoulment abortion.thinkingmuslim.com/podcast/roe-ab…

The belief in animism - the idea that "natural" things like plants, animals, rocks, mountains, or even phenomena like thunder have souls, interact with humans and possibly impact our lives - is an *extremely* common one.

Why is such a seemingly odd belief so pervasive? 🧵 In a recent survey of isolated hunter-gatherer societies across Africa, Australia, the Americas and far eastern Russia, a whopping 100% of tribes were found to profess a belief in animism.

Caveat: the sample size was 33, but it's still interesting.

link.springer.com/article/10.100…

A decade and a half ago, my Islamic content IV feed consisted of late 90's Salafi-style AudioIslam lectures. An oft-repeated claim I heard was, the best evidence for God's existence is the Fitra (natural human disposition to believe in God).

This is probably true. Buckle in. 🧵 To be clear, this is not to understate the importance of the other evidence for God's existence - contingency, finitude, design and fine-tuning of the universe, our moral and epistemological faculties - I am *big* on all of that.

The Fitra claim is also worth taking seriously.

So while a lot of y'all were sleeping, one of the best contemporary books on science-religion apologetics dropped in the market and received nowhere near the amount of appreciation it deserved.

Sit down and let me walk y'all through why this is nothing short of a masterpiece. 🧵 First, this book is not primarily about "the height of Prophet Adam (pbuh)". It's

(i) a detailed blueprint and
(ii) a case study

...on how to deal with the most difficult cases of science-Islam conflicts. You don't have to agree with its conclusions to benefit from the book.