Palestine: A Liberation Theology Response
Colonialism is not a thinking machine, is not a body endowed with reason. It is violence in the state of nature and can only bow to greater violence. – Frantz Fanon[1] Before the dust had…
[IMTF] Mosques as Cosmopolitan Spaces in the Malay World
In his study of mosques in Europe, Roemer van Toorn noted that a mosque “is not just a house to honour God, but a place to come together, a collective space for the community. In…
[IMTF] “A Third Space within the Masjid”: The Origins of the Qahwa Café and Youth Center of the ADAMS Center
“Muslim minorities in the non-Muslim world will ultimately realize that their history has put them in a position somehow reminiscent of the Prophet’s Meccan period. Their isolation will purify and strengthen their belief. It will…
Akbarian Metaphysics: A Brief Elaboration
The positivistic attitude brought forth by modernity, insofar as its insistence on perpetuating a reductionistic epistemological model founded on empiricism and materialism is concerned, contradicts the Islāmic viewpoint not only in terms of its metaphysics,…
Forum on Tazeen Ali’s The Women’s Mosque of America: Authority and Community in US Islam
This forum brings six scholars into discussion with Tazeen Ali’s The Women’s Mosque of America: Authority and Community in US Islam. In line with the book’s main argument, the reviewers [amina wadud, Esra Tunc, Iman…
[Book Review] Prophet al-Khidr: Between the Qur’anic Text and Islamic Context by Irfan A. Omar | Reviewed by Zhenshan (Alex) Dong
The hermeneutical transcendence of the stories of al-Khidr appears as the resonance of faith in human yearning for the world beyond our reach. Professor Irfan A. Omar’s Prophet al-Khidr: Between the Qur’anic Tet and Islamic…
[IMTF] An Automated Language of Virtue Ethics in Islamic Finance
Is money dirty? Is it wrong to be rich? How can a Muslim build their wealth in a “halal” or “religiously permissible” way? These are some of the questions that Islamic finance companies, especially those…
Are the Writings of Yasir Qadhi on the LGBTQ Movement Incompatible with Liberal Democracy?
Over the last few months, it seems not a day passes without another conservative criticism of gender fluidity and the complete delinking of gender roles from sex, with arguments that some LGBTQ rights conflict with…
How to Renew Islam in Seven Days? Three Recent Contributions to Ulema Studies
A recent poetry collection intriguingly titled ʿInd al-thamānīn badaʾt shiʿrī (“At eighty, I Began My Poetry”) by litterateur, senior Azhari Shaykh, theologian, and member of the Supreme Council of Scholars, Ḥasan al-Shāfiʿī (b. 1930), contains…
[IMTF] The Beneficiary as Benefactor: Ghazālī (d. 1111) on the Etiquettes of Charity
In his Oft-Repenting Ones, Ibn Qudāma (d. 1223) recounts the story of Awlāsī, a pious ascetic from the early centuries of Islam. It so happened that in his youth he stumbled across a sick, homeless…