106 entries
Great literature reveals man to himself, and Shakespeare turns a father’s counsel into a complete map of conduct. Read through Islam, these lines become a discourse on adab: restraining speech, disciplining desire, guarding friendship, dignity, wealth, and the soul. To be true to oneself is to return to fitrah — the self that stands before Allah.
Atheism in Muslim lands rarely begins with an open denial of God. It begins much earlier, when the Muslim mind is trained to trust only the measurable, the Muslim family is recast as a site of oppression, and religion is stripped of its cultural and spiritual body in the name of reform or purity. By the time disbelief becomes explicit, the deeper work has already been done: culture has thinned, hierarchy has collapsed, family has weakened, and revelation no longer stands at the center of life. What appears as modern liberation is often only a more sophisticated road to civilizational unbelief.
The essay argues that the deepest transformations in a civilization do not begin with visible changes in fashion, language, or institutions, but with the replacement of its first principles—the foundational beliefs about truth, morality, the sacred, and the purpose of life. A society may appear outwardly continuous, yet once its metaphysical core is altered, it has already undergone a revolution of the soul. For Muslims facing modernity, the crisis is therefore not merely political or institutional, but civilizational: we still use Islamic vocabulary, but often no longer think from Islamic premises. The essay calls for a recovery of those first principles, for without them culture becomes hollow, religion becomes semantic, and a people slowly forget who they are.
Across the first four chapters, we have been unravelling culture as the unseen loom silently weaving our identities, judgments, and reflexes. We began by exposing how seemingly personal convictions, like a café owner’s choice to retain or abandon nun-chai, the transformation of Friday bazaars into selfie-spots, or even how we interpret friendship through digital responsiveness, are not independent acts of rational reasoning, but expressions of cognitive templates quietly installed by culture.
When leaves fall in every season, the arborist does not polish the leaves; he checks the root. So too here. When the sign loses its power, it is rarely because the thread or the dye has failed; it is because the meaning that once animated the loom has thinned. The craft survives as a costume, the word as a shell, the ritual as choreography without covenant.
Following is how Plato described the moments of Socrates’ death in what Will Durant calls “one of the greatest passages of the world’s literature”. “When he had spoken these words, he arose...
The fundamental problem that lies beneath almost every issue plaguing the human society in these days and times is somehow related with the ideas of knowledge and education. The massive information...
“…..when your Lord said to the angels, “Indeed, I will make upon the earth a successive authority.”…….” This is part of the verse number 30 from Chapter 2 of the Quran, when man has...
Question: Why does Dr Zakir naik's way of debates or recently Mufti Shamail Nadwi Sahab's debate with Javed Akhtar make me highly uncomfortable…that this is not the way even if temporarily it looks...
Question: I was in a discussion earlier today about jobs in gig companies and nepotism, kids of MD’s getting it because who their parents are. Whilst I recognized that it is unfair for someone who...