Saturday, June 22, 2019

ARCHIVE: QUEST FOR MODERN ISLAM

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Reposted on June 22, 2019

ISLAM AS A CHRISTIAN HERESY

UPDATE: Thomas Aquinas was a 13th-century scholastic and is regarded as one of the most eminent philosophers and theologians. He introduced the principle of reason into the Roman Church. He considered a question first from the perspective of reason. Only if a rational explanation failed to explain it, he conceded to faith. Aquinas' most fateful feat for Western civilization was his re-introduction of the philosophy of Aristotle, opening the way out of the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. As it happens, he also offered a biting critique of Islam based in large part on the questionable character and methods of its founder, Mohammed.

Tags: Religion, Philosophy




Dec. 8, 2015

ISLAM VERSUS ISLAMISM



Dec. 8, 2015 Tarek Fatah on the difference between Muslim and Islamist.

Since Islam is a totalitarian doctrine, its problems are manifold, but what makes it fundamentally incompatible with Liberty is the stranglehold it has on the mind of the individual and where Islam transgresses into state craft and politics. Tarek Fatah addresses the latter problem in the video. Official website Tarek Fatah (Source)

Tags: Religion, Philosophy, War & conflict




Nov. 28, 2015

CHALLENGING  WAHHABISM WITH EAST INDIES ISLAM



Nov 18, 2015 The Divine Grace of East Indies Islam - Trailer

(..) In a way, it should not be surprising that this message comes from Indonesia, the home of Islam Nusantara, widely seen as one of the most progressive Islamic movements in the world. The movement — its name is Indonesian for “East Indies Islam” — dates back more than 500 years and promotes a spiritual interpretation of Islam that stresses nonviolence, inclusiveness and acceptance of other religions. (...) A prevention center based in Indonesia, expected to be operational by the end of the year, will train male and female Arabic-speaking students to engage with jihadist ideology and messaging under the guidance of N.U. theologians who are consulting Western academia. The film, “Rahmat Islam Nusantara” (The Divine Grace of East Indies Islam), has been translated into English and Arabic for global distribution, including online.

The film explores Islam’s arrival and evolution in Indonesia, and includes interviews with Indonesian Islamic scholars. In scene after scene, they challenge and denounce the Islamic State’s interpretations of the Quran and the Hadith, the book of the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings, as factually wrong and perverse. The Islamic State’s theology, rooted in the fundamentalist Wahhabi movement, takes its cues from medieval Islamic jurisprudence, where slavery and execution of prisoners was accepted. The filmmakers accept the legitimacy of those positions for the time but argue that Islamic law needs to be updated to 21st-century norms. Other sects and Muslim leaders have made this argument before. And non-Arab countries like Indonesia tend to have less influence on the practice of Islam, especially in the Middle East. “The problem with Middle East Islam is they have what I call religious racism,” said Azyumardi Azra, an Islamic scholar and former rector of the State Islamic University in Jakarta. “They feel that only the Arabs are real Muslims and the others are not.” (...) (Source)

Tags: Religion, Philosophy, War & conflict




Aug. 3, 2015

HOW TO BREAK THE VICIOUS CYCLE?



Jul 31, 2015 The Glazov Gang: Choudary, Spencer and Jasser Battle It Out.

This is a new insight building on the psychological concept of the locus of control. If you haven't heard of it, scroll down to the bottom of the page. The tribal mind is controlled by external forces (extended family, tradition, religion, etc.). When we describe a person as "highly susceptible" we mean that he has a lack of inner controls i.e. values/morality to correct false, external manipulation. Cultures that are still largely functioning at the tribal level of development can't be expected to live in liberty, because that requires the opposite process: individual control over external forces (Government, devious politicians, religious leaders, false prophets, etc.). The ballot box does nothing for those societies. 'Democracy' in itself is useless. What is required, is a process of individualization. From this follows the creation of a civil society (voluntary cooperation) and the requirement of the rule of law. The ballot box is merely the cherry on the cake. You cannot reverse this process. Individualization does not spring from a walk to the polling station. It's a deeply personal process and hard work for which there is no short cut. An additional problem for Islamic societies, is that Islam itself prevents this development. It's a vicious cycle. So the question now is, how do we break the cycle?

Tags: Religion, Philosophy, War & conflict




March 25,2015

AYAAN HIRSI ALI ABOUT HER NEW BOOK



March 23, 2015 Ayaan Hirsi Ali Discussing 'Heretic' with Megyn Kelly.

UPDATE: Read it all - get the books now! Here are links to both the English and the German editions of @Ayaan 's new book. 'Heretic'.






Tags: Religion, Philosophy




Jan. 25, 2015

AVERROëS  (1126–1198) PART II



YouTube Channel Cropper Lyceum: Is there a relation between Aristoteles and the Golden Age of Islam? 

UPDATE: As we saw in part I Averroës was the custodian of Aristotle's rational world view. Aristotle's school of philosophy was pushed out of Europe by Christian thought in the early Middle Ages. During the Islamic Enlightenment -- of which Averroës was the main pillar -- translations of Aristotle's work appeared in Arabic and Syriac. Via  the Almoravid Caliphate (wiki) Aristotle's ideas could emerge in the West, specifically after Albertus Magnus and his follower, Thomas Aquinas adapted the philosophy for Catholicism. This laid the foundation for the Renaissance (lit. re-birth) and Western Enlightenment. Both periods of enlightenment do not only share a root; their fall is also strikingly similar. Just as Ibn Taymiyyah was responsible for the retreat of the Islamic Enlightenment, so the German philosopher Kant is the Ground Zero of the triumph of the school of Western irrational thought. Read also: Kant, Aristotle. Yet, there is no reason to suppose why both civilizations wouldn't be able to come to new fruition if Aristotle's school would be again adopted.

Note: an alternative view of this history (Source)

Tags: Religion,  Philosophy




Jan. 24, 2015

AVERROëS (1126–1198) PART I


Averroës (April 14, 1126 – December 10, 1198) is the epithamy of the Islamic Enlightenment. His name is the Latinized form of Ibn Rushd, full name ʾAbū l-Walīd Muḥammad Ibn ʾAḥmad Ibn Rušd, was a Berber mediæval Andalusian Muslim polymath. He wrote on logic, Aristotelian and Islamic philosophy, theology, the Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence, psychology, political and Andalusian classical music theory, geography, mathematics, and the mediæval sciences of medicine, astronomy, physics, and celestial mechanics. Averroes was born in Córdoba, Al Andalus (present-day Spain), and died at Marrakesh in present-day Morocco. His body was interred in his family tomb at Córdoba. The 13th-century philosophical movement based on Averroes's work is called Averroism. (Wiki)

Tags: Religion,  Philosophy




Jan. 17, 2015

INTERNAL VERSUS EXTERNAL LOCUS OF CONTROL




Locus of Contol by Julian Rotter. 

The following quote from Nicolai Sennels' article makes plain what the consequences are for an individual who is almost exclusively determined by external controls:
They (Muslims) have strict external rules, traditions and laws for human behavior. They have a God that decides their life's course. (...) They have powerful Muslim clerics who set the directions for their community every Friday. These clerics dictate political views, child rearing behavior, and how or whether to integrate in Western societies. 
The locus of control is central to our understanding of problems and their solutions. If we are raised in a culture where we learn that "…I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul," as William Ernest Henley wrote in his famous poem Invictus in 1875; we will, in case of personal problems, look at ourselves and ask: "…What did I do wrong?" and "…What can I do to change the situation?" 
People who have been taught throughout their entire lives that outer rules and traditions are more important than individual freedom and self reflection, will ask: "Who did this to me?" and "Who has to do something for me?" Thus, the locus of control is central to the individual's understanding of freedom and responsibility. (...) 
In societies shaped under Islamic and Qu’ranic influence there may be fewer feelings of guilt and thus, more freedom to demand the surroundings to adapt to one's own wishes and desires. This may include demands to wear Islamic costumes which can result in more Muslim demands for Islamization of our Western societies, but it is also a powerful source of victim mentality and leads to endless demands on one's surroundings. 
In a very concrete way this cultural tendency, shows itself in therapy, as a lack of remorse. The standard answer from violent Muslims was always: "…It is his own fault that I beat him up. 
He provoked me." Such excuses show that people experience their own reactions as caused by external factors and not by their own emotions, motivation and free will. Even though one's own feelings, when experiencing an insult, can be moderated by one's own point of view, this kind of self reflection does not happen to the same degree among Muslims as it does among Westerners.
Muslims apparently have an entirely different set of mental hardware than those raised on a Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian mentality based on free will and personal responsibility for our conduct and attitude towards life. It is the consequence of Western philosophy since Aristotle.

But it stands to reason that tribal life in the Middle East requires a very different attitude towards reality. A tribe is a miniature totalitarian state. The individual has no right to exist for himself; his life is entirely subordinate to the welfare of the tribe. Every bit of personal life and individuality is suppressed from a very young age. This means that everything that determines human morality, free will, evaluation, the acceptance and rejection of values has no chance to develop.

But humans are creatures of self made soul. Thought is a voluntary process. Which means we have it in our capacity to do something about our mental makeup and take charge of our lives.

Tags: Religion,  Philosophy, War & conflict




Jan. 15, 2015

FREE WILL VERSUS DETERMINISM



Free will (internal Locus of Control) versus determinism (external Locus of Control).

Key to a more modern approach to Islam is a concept that is used in psychology: the locus of control. In philosophy we know it as morality based on the personal values we accept or reject by our own free will. These are the inner controls. The external controls are made of secular law and the ethos, which is the sum total of common customs, traditions and religious values. The Danish therapist Nicolai Sennels explains the term in an article entitled Muslims and Westerners: The Psychological Differences. (Source)

Sennels worked with young criminals and discovered that almost all were exclusively moved by external controls, more precisely, the ethos. We'll come back to that later on in detail. What concerns us here is that apostates from Islam initially reported the feeling of falling into a "black hole". This is to be expected when the only controls known to an individual -- the external control -- are being removed. This experience subsides with time, once the inner self becomes more developed and the individual is ready to finally take control over his own life by making his own choices. This is a very crucial process of individualization that Muslims must develop if they want to transcend the current state of Islam, which is unsustainable in its premodern, unquestioned form.

An editorial co-production.

Tags: Religion,  Philosophy




Sep. 10, 2014

ONLY MUSLIMS CAN SAVE ISLAM FROM ITSELF

A group of British Muslims is resisting the atrocities and bloodthirst of the Islamic State. Great! But it comes with a few hard conditions. A hashtag just isn't enough for fundamental change from within. 



Sep 10, 2014 #NotInMyName: Young British Muslims at Active Change Foundation show their solidarity against ISIS and their actions.

Dyab Abou Jahjah has written a very interesting piece about the war on the Islamic State. (Source, Flemish) He states the following:
‘Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win’. This is a quotation from Sun Tzu's The art of war. (Source) This may answer the question if the American strategy to fight the organization known as 'Islamic State' stands a chance of success. 


Read more...

Tags: Religion,  Philosophy, War & conflict


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