When there is no connecting thread that ties information together the way is opened for someone to overlay a story (a way of viewing the information) onto events and in this way to color and shape perceptions. Rather than looking for patterns which naturally emerge from events and which best explains all the information, a […]
The Qur’an is a transformative document - its power evident in the fact that it impacts significantly all who come across it - whether they consider it in a negative or positive light, whether they are hostile to it or devoted to it. And so it also becomes a battlefield, it’s words a vast, expansive […]
Political instability and turmoil, war, conflict, oppression - all contribute to shape individuals who act and react in desperate ways and who in that desperation are susceptible to the manipulation and influence of those who see, in conflict, an excuse and opportunity to pursue suppressed ambitions - sometimes through unbalanced (one-sided), tilted, slanted interpretations […]
Wrapping oneself snugly in the garments of a particular ideology allows one to be uncritical of their own assumptions. While a person, group, or nation may be enviably efficient and rational about process and instrumental, technical knowledge and methods, they could simultaneously be blind and unreasoning about inhuman ideological methods and goals. Witness the holocaust, […]
Whether we adhere to a religious tradition or a secular one, it is possible to fall prey to the allure of raising political ideology (and doctrine based on that ideology) to a position and level that is hierarchically above the truths encoded into the source documents of the tradition. Such a situation is most likely […]
Islam from inside (recent posts)