بِسْمِ اللَّـهِ الرَّحْمَـٰنِ الرَّحِيم

I decided to write a few brief comments about the topic of the Enlightenment and the topic of so-called “Islamic terrorism”, even though the connection between the Enlightenment and what is termed as “Islamic terror” may not even occur to most people.

The reason why I believe this topic is important is because the enlightenment and its secularist offspring intervened in the Muslim world in a manner that cannot merely be cast aside when mentioning anything about “Islamic terrorism”.

In order to understand this issue, we have to understand that Islam is a system of life where its teachings are passed from chest-to-chest. The books written by the scholars have their relevance, but we cannot say that the primary means of transmitting knowledge in Islam is through the written material. Thus, the teacher-student relationship is paramount in traditional Islamic scholarship. Continue reading →