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{ Category Archives } education

Islam 101 - science and faith

Again, a condensed excerpt from Murtaza Mutahhari’s “Fundamentals of Islamic Thought: God, Man, and the universe”. This is taken from the section on science and faith:
“Does our science carry us in one direction and faith in another? Or do science and faith fulfill and complement one another?…. Science shows what is; faith inspires insight into […]

Islam 101 - argument by definition

Here is Mutahhari’s condensed presentation of the “argument from attributes” - the definition of Divinity and its properties leads to recognition of the necessity for God’s unity and uniqueness and the impossibility of multiple divinities. I’ve edited it down to a few lines - the full text can be found in “Fundamentals of Islamic Thought“.
From […]

Islam 101 - necessary being

I was recently re-reading my heavily underlined and dog-eared copy of Murtaza Mutahhari’s excellent “Fundamentals of Islamic Thought: God, Man, and the Universe” (a book which should be more widely used as a fundamental primer text on Islam) and thought I ‘d post a few bits and pieces taken from its contents. This particular section […]

Modernity, Ulama, and intellectuals

“Unlike the traditional ulama, who never go beyond the texts that they read, the modern intellectual will be able to read deeper into the text in a critical, imaginative manner.” (AbdolKarim Soroush)
Actually, among the traditional ulama there are many who “read deeper into the text” albeit more cautiously and using different tools than “modern intellectuals” […]

Cultivating literacy

Literacy that goes beyond the simple ability to read and write, that is connected with the ability to comprehend a text, involves hermeneutics. It involves decoding the symbol world of texts to gain access to the source meanings which underlie the text - of which there may be many, multiple, layered meanings.
Literacy, in this sense, […]