THE TRUTH ABOUT WOMEN IN ISLAM | Lily Jay & Shaykh Khalid Yasin

In this inspiring and thought-provoking episode, Lily Jay sits down with renowned Islamic scholar Shaykh Khalid Yasin to discuss the true essence of women’s rights in Islam. Together, they explore misconceptions, the elevated status of women in the Qur'an and Hadith, and how Islam empowers women through justice, respect, and equality.

my journey to MAKKAH 🕋

Why this Muslim is pushing back against Andrew Tate

 

In late October, a video went viral on Twitter, showing former British kickboxer Andrew Tate learning how to pray like a Muslim from a friend and fellow MMA fighter, Tam Khan. Days later, Khan confirmed Tate’s conversion to Islam.

It was a blow to Muslim women like myself, and to parents and others in the community who had been breathing a sigh of relief since Tate was banned across every major social media platform in August. Our big fear: this might cement his popularity with some Muslim men. It is a worry that has only been amplified by Elon Musk’s decision to reinstate Tate’s Twitter account.

In one of Tate’s most notorious videos, he talks about how he would respond if a woman was to accuse him of cheating: “It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up b**** … slap, slap, grab, choke,” he says. Tate has previously said in a tweet that “if you put yourself in a position to be raped, you must bear some responsibility”.

Comments like these have made Tate a central figure in digital red pill culture and its increasingly violent overtones. The term, “take the red pill”, is a pop culture reference taken from the 1999 sci-fi movie The Matrix; it means opening your eyes to the truth. What was actually a transgender allegory according to the film’s creator Lily Wachowski is now used to describe a digital movement of mainly white ultraconservative men who believe that they are victims of feminism and are mistreated by society.

What has been particularly worrying for many in the Muslim community in the West is that Tate has become a role model for some Muslim men, especially after expressing his admiration for Islam in this YouTube video. These men have taken to Twitter, in a corner of the social media platform that some in the community have nicknamed MT or Muslim Twitter, to align themselves with Tate and his views.

But many Muslims — both women and men — are also pushing back against this trend, warning of the risks involved if the poisonous material being peddled by the likes of Tate gains acceptance among broader sections of the community’s youth.


As secondary school teacher Nadeine Asbali wrote in the New Statesman in August, Tate’s content “has its hooks” into Muslim boys, some of whom share his content on social media. “Figures such as Tate even praise Muslims, inflicting their own patriarchal ideas onto a faith that is predicated on the very opposite,” she wrote.

Prominent Muslim intellectuals in the West — such as author Khaled Beydoun and Shabana Mir, professor at Chicago’s American Islamic College — have also publicly expressed worries about the rise of red pill culture among young Muslim men.

Others have been more direct in condemning the misogyny of men like Tate and in explaining how their words and actions contradict the teachings of Islam.

Bilal Ware, professor of history at the University of California in Santa Barbara, posted a series of Instagram posts criticising da’wah influencers who have been hosting Tate on their podcasts and in YouTube videos. “Giving platforms to unrepentant misogynists, whether converts or lifelong believers sends a clear message: abusers welcome.” He also took a stance against toxic masculinity by saying, “The Muslim ‘manosphere’ has become a preserve for emasculated, intimidated men to play tough by bullying women. This is not Islam.”

Joseph Lumbard, an associate professor of Quran studies at the Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha, has been tweeting to challenge the suggestion that by converting to Islam, Tate’s reputation is fully rehabilitated — despite no denouncement of his violent misogyny. “Too many Muslim men are seeking to give him a pass, claiming ḥusn al-ẓann [having a good opinion] and that Islam wipes away all sins,” Lumbard tweeted on October 29. “These are indeed important Islamic principles that apply in the vast majority of cases, but not when they are employed to excuse violent misogyny, grifting, and all manner of fisq [wickedness] and fasād [corruption] that AT’s [Andrew Tate’s] social media platforms continue to promote.”


This pushback from within the community — and especially from teachers and scholars — is critical because Tate’s popularity represents a broader trend of red pill culture taking hold among some Muslim men.

In recent years, digital platforms like Twitter and Reddit have given rise to what the Muslim online community calls “mincels” – Muslim incels. They use Twitter and Redditt threads to troll Muslim women online, blaming single mothers for the ills of society, saying that a man has the right to beat his wife, and calling for the return of female concubinage and advocating a “no-strings-attached nikah”.

The irony is that many of those spreading red pill culture online belong to a white, ultra-far-right worldview that is often openly Islamophobic.

I am both wary and sceptical of Tate’s conversion, because I question what it was that attracted him to my faith. Consider his earlier video, where he reacted to Will Smith’s “red table talk” with his wife Jada Pinkett-Smith regarding her infidelity by saying that watching the clip had made him want to convert to Islam because in a Muslim country she would have been stoned to death. I suspect that it is white Islamophobic and Orientalist misperceptions of Islam as being a religion that permits violence towards women that are the basis for Tate’s conversion. “I am going to find myself a nice Islamic-a** wife, and build up a big pile of rocks in case she gets fresh,” Tate says at the end of the video.

I worry that Tate is taking advantage of his popularity among alt-right Muslim men to rehabilitate his image and rebrand himself.


We as a community have to acknowledge that we also hold part of the blame for Tate’s popularity among some of our male youth. Our madrassas, Saturday schools and households are often lacking when it comes to educating our Muslim youth on healthy relationships and on respecting girls and women from a young age.

We need more and more Muslim men to join us in pushing back on misogyny in all its forms — online, on campus, at home, on the streets, and in the masjid. 

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Why Muslim women are upset with Andrew Tate’s conversion

 

Many have asked why Muslim women are upset with Andrew Tate’s conversion. That is the wrong question. We should be overjoyed when anyone accepts Islam.

The issue is the celebration connected with definitive declarations such as, “The top G accepted Islam!” and, “He’ll bring real masculinity back into this Ummah!” The issue is some Muslim men viewing a man who *domestic violence shelters* described as “capable of radicalizing men and boys to commit harm offline,” as a paragon of manhood. The issue is the glorification of a personality – pre-Islam – associated with exploitation of women. The issue is expressing unfettered jubilation without nuancing, “inshAllah through Islam he can find the best form of reformation.” The issue is the celebration, without any acknowledgement of the ramifications that the celebration is of his messaging before.
The Prophetic Tradition of Honoring Women
The Prophet ﷺ took a generation of men and women who were from a culture which buried their own baby girls alive, to a generation of men who honored women, and women who saw honor in themselves.

This mentorship started from infancy, even in the most sacred space. The Prophet ﷺ used to pray while carrying his granddaughter Umāma, and when he prostrated he placed her down and when he got up he carried her. [Bukhari, Muslim] Ibn Hajar quotes the scholar Fakahani in explaining that the Prophet ﷺ  did so to show them in action how to honor girls. [Fathul Bari].
The comprehensive change of a generation is summarized by Omar’s raḍyAllāhu 'anhu (may Allāh be pleased with him) statement, “In the times of ignorance, we used to have no regard for women whatsoever. But when Islam came and Allah made mention of them, this caused us to realize that they have rights upon us…” [Bukhari]
Revelation transformed a culture of violence, ownership and objectification of women to one in which women and men were, as described by t

he Prophet ﷺ “partners” [Ahmad], and as the Quran describes, “allies” [Surat At-Tawbah: 9;71]
Islamic law and Islamic history have shown us the depth of care and critical participation of women, as established by the mentorship of the Prophet ﷺ :
1.Spiritual space: Aishah raḍyAllāhu 'anha (may Allāh be pleased with her) narrates about a Mother of the Believers that she was in i’tikaaf with the Prophet ﷺ “and she was bleeding in between her periods. She used to see the blood and she would perhaps put a dish under her for the blood.” (this was the bleeding of istihaadha, not menses, which take different rulings for prayer) [Bukhari]
If a Mother of the Believers would go to the masjid in istihaadha, and because of not having today’s hygienic resources would put a tray under her to protect the masjid from her blood, but would still pray in the masjid – then what does that say about a woman’s access and connection to the house of God?
2. Intimacy: While there is a depth and breadth of discussion on the issue from a legal perspective, Ibn Taymiyyah’s words speak to a recognition of women’s needs even in spaces wrongfully considered taboo: “Causing harm to the wife by not having intercourse is grounds for annulment in all cases, whether the husband did that intentionally or otherwise, and whether he was able to do it or not; it is like maintenance and even more important.” [Fatawa alKubra]
How often have women been made to feel like sex is only for men, that being sexual beings is only for men? And yet Omar himself changed law on how long men could serve in the army when he overheard just one woman complain she was sexually lonely without her husband. [Ibn Qudamah, alMughni]
3. Scholarship: Women scholars played a critical role in Islamic history. Aisha, the daughter of the great saw]companion Saad ibn Abi Waqqas, taught Imam Malik. Sayyid Nafisa, the great granddaughter of the Prophetﷺ himself, was the teacher of Imam alShafi. Karimah alMarwaziyyah, the greatest hadith scholar of her time, was the teacher of alKhatib alBaghdadi. Shaykha Fatima bint Muhammad alSamarqandi was a scholar who the famous Salahudin alAyoubi and his predecessor Noor alDin would seek fatawa from, seeking advice on state matters. These are simply a handful of thousands of women scholars in our history. [Sh Akram Nadwi’s AlMuhadithaat, Ibn Hajar’s alIsabah fi Tamiz alSahaba, Ibn Sa’ad’s al-Tabaqat, and alSakhawi’s alDaw’ al-Lami’]

A Dangerous Following & The Muslim Male Reaction
The Prophet ﷺ is associated with uplifting women. Contrast this with Andrew Tate, whose brand is associated with men who harm and objectify women. In fact, a sister who is working on publishing a study with a university sent me a message explaining, “I work in social services in England, I’ve come across several young men newly referred to the social services for violent behavioral challenges, and when interviewing and working with each of these young men in the last year we have identified at least 65% of them had consumed Tate’s material.” While she recognized this may be correlation rather than causation, she mentioned that the fact so many of them cited him by name is alarming.
Despite all this, before Tate even accepted Islam, some men micro-influencers were hosting him on podcasts and promoting him on their pages. They were platforming someone who was proud to have a webcam business of exploiting women for entertainment, who spoke and joked openly about committing violence against women and objectified women in some of the most derogatory ways. These micro-influencers who platformed him are not scholars. In fact, I have heard men scholars in the past denounce Tate and warn Muslim men from following him. Why were these men hosting him as an example of manhood before he even became Muslim, when these views are so blatantly far from Islam?
Dear Brothers: When you praise Tate as a “true man” who can bring that manhood into the Ummah with his conversion, you communicate to many women that you literally do not care about what happens to your sisters.
Can you see why Muslim women, especially women who are victims and survivors of domestic violence and those who work with women and children who are, could be terrified that Muslim men will adopt Tate’s pre-Islamic attitudes towards women? And even worse, now take Tate’s previous attitudes and deem them Islamic?
This week, sisters who have written publicly regarding feeling terrified about staying in this community because of many Muslim men’s loudly celebratory and un-nuanced reaction, have received death threats from Muslim men who follow Tate. These women were told they aren’t actually believers and they saw Muslim men on multiple live social media streams joking about raping them. Yes, they did report these accounts. But the fact that this has been the experience of so many women who have vocally expressed their concerns, is certainly in line with that same type of branding.
Conversion
We welcome conversion joyfully. And we should all recognize that rectification takes time, support, and mentorship. Conversion is an opportunity to perfect not only one’s beliefs, but also one’s character in following the pinnacle of character ﷺ
We should pray Andrew Tate will become the best of us and that we all become better. We should want him to have incredible support and mentorship to become his best self in front of Allah and in the footsteps of the Messenger (peace and blessings of God be upon him). But that process- as we all recognize- takes time. And the fact that we aren’t giving him time before he is immediately lauded as an example and hosted on so many platforms, is alarming and speaks to the real issue.
This is not an issue of conversion. The issue is commentary on the reaction of some men in our community, the silence of too many in the face of those men, and the willingness for them to not only not recognize how their reaction is so viscerally painful for women, but also how violent some of these same “brothers” are when they disagree with their sisters, and the double standards of these same men when it comes to women.

So celebrate conversion, yes, but also recognize the necessity for public accountability and responsibility to uphold the Prophet’s ﷺ mandate to men:
“…I enjoin you to be good to women.” [Bukhari] 

From Maryam Amir fb

"You're Not My Son Anymore" - The Story of a Japanese Imam

 

Very emotional convert story from a Japanese imam.

Why and How the Mongols became Muslim

 

Why I Became Muslim - Revert to Islam

PAKISTAN DAY 1 🇵🇰 _Travel vlog

5 Ways To Deal With Doubts About Islam for New Muslims (and All Muslims!)

Fame & The Spiritual Life | Russell Brand & Yusuf Cat Stevens

How a kidnapped aid worker who converted to Islam shook Italy

In November 2018, Italian aid worker Silvia Romano was kidnapped by gunmen linked to the Somali armed group al-Shabab in northeast Kenya. At the time of the attack, which left several people wounded, Romano was volunteering for an Italian NGO in an orphanage in the village of Chakama.

The news of Romano's kidnapping caused not only sadness and worry, but also controversy in her home country. Right-wing politicians and public figures, and some members of the public, accused the aid worker of "looking for trouble" by going to Kenya, and claimed she should have "stayed in Milan and helped people there".

They called her decision to go to Kenya as a volunteer aid worker an expression of "bravado" and claimed she was seeking attention. These accusations were countered by outraged liberals who talked of the "importance" of idealistic youngsters like Romano going abroad on voluntary aid missions, and helping those in need in other countries.

In the following weeks, the news cycle moved on and the discussions about Romano, and the work she had been doing in Kenya, slowly came to an end. 

Las month, however, Romano once again found herself at the receiving end of right-wing attacks, this time not only for going to Kenya and "causing trouble", but also for voluntarily choosing to convert to Islam during her ordeal.

The outpouring of Islamophobia and hate
On May 9, when Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte announced on Twitter that Romano had finally been freed, most Italians were overjoyed. Soon after, however, it was revealed that the aid worker had chosen to become a Muslim during her 18 months in al-Shabab captivity and that she had changed her name to "Aisha". This dampened the celebratory mood and led many on the Italian right to once again question Romano's motivations for going to Kenya in the first place. 

After Romano landed in Rome wearing a light green jilbab - a loose-fitting robe that covers the entire body and is often worn by Somali women - her conversion swiftly became the sole focus of right-wing Italian media outlets. They published "before and after" photos showing the aid worker's "transformation" and embarked on a quest to shed light on "the mystery surrounding the conversion": Was she forcibly converted? Was she brainwashed? Was she a victim of Stockholm syndrome?

"We have freed a Muslim woman," declared conservative daily Libero Quotidiano, as if only Christian Italian citizens, and not Muslim ones, deserve to be protected by the government of the country they call home.

"Islamic and happy. Silvia the ungrateful," read the front-page headline of an article by Alessandro Sallusti, the editor of Il Giornale. In the same article, Sallusti accused Romano of wearing the "jihadist uniform of the enemy" and claimed her conversion is as absurd as a Jew coming back from a concentration camp dressed as a Nazi.

Several right-wing politicians also used Romano's ordeal and conversion as an opportunity to promote Islamophobic views. The leader of the right-wing League party, Matteo Salvini, for example, framed Romano's kidnapping and conversion within an alleged clash of civilisations, and claimed that "Islamic terrorists" have won "the cultural battle in the name of the Islamic veil and conversion". Salvini's deputy, Alessandro Pagano, meanwhile, branded Romano "the new terrorist" during a parliamentary session.

The right-wing media's aggressive and accusatory coverage of Romano's release and conversion to Islam, coupled with prominent League politicians' hateful and discriminatory comments, exposed how entrenched Islamophobia has become in Italy.

But, Romano was not only targeted by these usual suspects. 

Some Italian feminists also attacked the young aid worker for converting to Islam and wearing "Islamic clothes". 

Prominent feminist historian, Nadia Riva, who in the 1980s was one of the founders of the influential and radical feminist group the Cicip & Ciciap club, for example, in a Facebook post referred to Romano as "a smiling woman in a green recycling bag". Claiming Romano's jilbab is a symbol of male oppression rather than an expression of her religious identity, she explained that she could not believe a woman would choose to dress that way willingly.

Many Italian feminists came to Romano's defence and distanced themselves from Riva's controversial comments. However, the fact that some prominent Italian feminists found it appropriate to attack a fellow woman because of what she chooses to believe in and the way she chooses to dress demonstrated how embedded is the idea of moral superiority in parts of the Italian and Western feminist movement.

Reproducing 'white saviour myths'
Italian liberals and the left wing openly condemned the hate Romano received for converting to Islam and celebrated her return home. Their response to the hateful right-wing rhetoric surrounding the aid worker's liberation, however, was equally problematic, albeit for different reasons.

In their response to the whole Romano saga, Italy's liberal media organisations and public figures tried to highlight the human side of the story, and celebrated her safe return home without any reservations. But in their undoubtedly well-intentioned celebration, they promoted deep-rooted and highly damaging stereotypes about Africa. They not only portrayed the continent as a savage and abandoned place, but they also implied Africans are in need of "white saviours".

Liberal newspapers published countless images showing Romano surrounded by Kenyan children, but did not attempt to preserve the privacy of these children as they would normally do with European ones. These images, and articles that accompanied them, were perfect reproduction of decades of "white saviour" myths, which talked of selfless Western men and women who travelled to Africa to "save" African children with no agency.

Italy's leading centre-left daily La Repubblica even published an article claiming Romano "was betrayed by the same village she wanted to save" - a claim that reaffirms baseless and damaging tropes about the ungratefulness of African people in the face of Western attempts to "save" them.

One of the most obvious reproductions of the "white saviour myth" came from best-selling author and vocal anti-fascist Roberto Saviano. In an article published in La Repubblica, and on his Facebook page, Saviano portrayed Africans - perhaps unintentionally - as people living in a desolated place who are in need of help and guidance from the West.

In his article welcoming Romano back to Italy, Saviano described the Kenyan children she worked with as "forgotten and abandoned" and claimed they will likely become al-Shabab fighters themselves in the absence of Western "saviours" like Romano. Ignoring Kenya's own fight against the armed group, he even went as far to say "a young European woman who arrives unarmed to stay next to the children" like Romano is the "great enemy" of such terrorist organisations. 

This narrative is not only problematic and simplistic, but also misleading and paternalistic. It presents a decontextualised image of the region and ignores the role Europeans themselves played, and continue to play, in the ongoing calamity in the Horn of Africa. 

Indeed, according to a study released in 2018, many of the orphaned children in Kenyan towns like Chakama will not go to Somalia to fight for al-Shabab, but will most probably move to nearby international tourist spots like Malindi, Mtwapa or Mombasa to try and make a living. There, the biggest threat facing them would not be the possibility of radicalisation, but being pushed into the sex trade. In these regions, it needs to be noted, the main clientele of sex workers are mainly European sex tourists, including Italians.

The Italian media's coverage also ignored Italy's past crimes in Africa. As newspapers and TV channels discussed the role Turkey played in the liberation of Romano, and claimed the country is now "the new master of the Horn of Africa", their nostalgia for those times when Italy had power over these parts of Africa was apparent. In these think pieces, of course, there was no mention of the disaster Italy's colonial enterprise caused in the Horn of Africa in the last century.

In the shortage of relevant thoughts and critical commentaries, one of the few voices out of the chorus was that of Somali-Italian writer Igiaba Scego, who took the opportunity to remind people, "Italians must be decolonised from their own colonial imagination. Even in language we carry too many legacies, not only of fascism, but of the typical rhetoric of the nineteenth century."

There is not much to be gained from questioning Romano's motivations for embarking on a volunteer aid mission to Kenya after her 18-month ordeal and safe return home. We should do everything we can to shield this young woman from the attacks of Italian right-wing media and politicians, who target her only because she chose to convert to a religion that they see as "the enemy". 

Nevertheless, we should also not ignore the damaging narratives that some liberal media organisations and figures utilise in their defence of the aid worker.

While we should reject Islamophobia - whether it comes from right-wing figures or renowned feminists - we should also challenge discourses that present millions of Africans as savages who need to be saved by altruistic Westerners.

Link

Islam, in my own image

A close friend was mortified that I might have been asked — much less have accepted — to write about life as a Third-Culture Kid (“TCK”). “You’re a white male who lived exclusively in the United States until the age of 27!” he laughed. Guilty as charged, so why contribute here?

I may never win my friend over to my TCK bona fides, but I believe my life may in fact be characterized by some of the tensions inherent in the TCK experience — the precarious (hopeless?) balancing of competing commitments, traditions and values, for example, has dominated my life about the last nine years. I assumed somewhat, when I converted to Islam as a college sophomore, that I might live out the rest of my days in a state of blissful, spiritual self-confidence and inner tranquility. Not quite! I hadn’t the faintest sense of what I was getting myself into.

I grew up with Buddhist parents, went to Jewish preschool, occasionally observed Shabbat, and then, in high school, I nearly converted to Catholicism during a summer of going to Mass every single morning. I think it’s pretty clear there was a significant spiritual void that I was trying to fill.

In college, around the same age my hippie father had apparently first dabbled in Zen mysticism, I attended on a whim a lecture on Jihad and Just War Theory. What was said in that discussion I couldn’t tell you, though it certainly kindled anew my spiritual curiosity. I became quite enamored by this Muhammad fellow, so that summer I drove regularly the few hours across state lines to and from the nearest mosque. (Note, there was actually a mosque in my hometown I would later learn... their website just wasn’t up and running.) I felt at peace in the ritual prayer, addressing directly the Creator of the Cosmos in a way I had never known. By summer’s end, I converted to many a warm welcome, with offers of unconditional existential support and/or South Asian food, depending on the offeror.

I considered my life’s quest for ultimate meaning to have wrapped up by the ripe age of 20. I just had to adjust my sleep schedule — to be up for the 4:30 morning prayer — to donate 2.5 percent of my non-existent college student income, abstain from things like usurious loansharking and premarital sex, and travel to Saudi Arabia at least once if I ever did find a job.

This spiritual high lasted a solid month. At this point, I started contemplating the fate of my parents (and probably lightly evangelized them), reading about the problem of evil and suffering, and the incompatibility of human free will and divine determinism. Oh, and perhaps I had to decide what kind of Muslim I was (i.e., Sunni, Shi`i, or neither). These were questions which I was fantastically unequipped to answer.

I switched my major to religious studies, and I spent hours, days even, in the library. This is technically true; on one occasion, I refused to put down the text I was reading, and I got locked inside overnight. I’m confident that to this day, if blindfolded, I could still find my way to the Islamic studies section of Davis Library in Chapel Hill.

One strategy I adopted for answering my questions was to turn to the Qur’an. This was where things really deteriorated.

Prior to converting, I’d read mostly about Muhammad’s life; my firsthand knowledge of the Qur’an itself was limited to a few passages relevant to the ritual prayer. I was fairly confident I knew what “All-Merciful” and “All-Compassionate” looked like, and how these descriptions of God would play out in the pages of scripture. Yet, when I searched the pages of the Qur’an for this being, He’d apparently stepped out for tea. The more I read, the more unsettled, and at times revolted, I became. Scarcely would a page go by without some reference to hapless polytheists receiving merciless, grossly excessive torture (forever) in the afterlife. And the text’s speaker seems quite self-satisfied about doing so. There is no indication, either, that this fate is confined to “only the evil polytheists” — without proper faith, even a gentle, virtuous atheist or polytheist merits this agony of perdition:

“Garments of fire will be tailored for those who disbelieve; scalding water will be poured onto their heads, melting their insides as well as their skin; there will be iron crooks to restrain them; whenever, in their anguish, they try to escape, they will be pushed back in and told, ‘Taste the suffering of the Fire.’” (Qur’an, 22:19-22)

This is not “just punishment” for a crime; this is the consequence of a mere mistake of ontology (a philosophical belief about what exists). An eternity of physical agony is what the All-Merciful and All-Compassionate has freely decided should await these desperate souls.

I was still attracted to Muhammad, and I thought I must be missing something, but nonetheless, the Qur'an was not a text that I would have wanted my friends and family to read and think I agreed with. It did little good to consider these morally and emotionally painful passages “excusable” or “forgivable” based on the time period. This text was — by definition — supposed to be the greatest conceivable sum of words that could ever be put together, more meaningful and spiritually powerful than any work of poetry or literature past, present or future.

At precisely the same time, I was discovering the works of masters of logic and rational thought — Socrates and Plato, Spinoza and Mill, Rawls and Grayling — philosophers whose arguments, elegantly constructed and intellectually impactful, were, to me, objects of aesthetic beauty. They didn’t say, “You had better agree with this set of ideas or else you ought to be tortured.” The implicit claim of philosophy is that any idea, argument or perspective only has authority if it can be proven to be true (much like science, something of a popular spinoff of classical empiricism, I am told).

So then, where to go from here? Atheism? Not quite. My belief in God persists (most of the time) with a vision of a morally perfect, metaphysically necessary being; I just don’t think the Qur’anic description of God works in any straightforward way. So then, leave Islam for a rival religion? I’m quite certain this same tension exists between contemporary moral philosophy and any of the descriptions of God that developed in antiquity.

Since those early years as a Muslim, I’ve done the only thing I know how to do: fill my apartment with books, converse with friends and hope to God that, somehow, my affection for Muhammad and his family can be reconciled with a non-negotiable commitment to rationalism. I am also blessed to teach classical and modern Islamic political philosophy, and thus I get paid (minimally) to continue to reflect on some of these issues. (Some readers may balk at the notion — reflected self-consciously in the title of this piece — that I have just distorted "true Islam" into something I am comfortable believing in. If there is, however, any uncontested truth in Islamic studies, it is that there is in fact no "Islam out there" (reified or hypostatized, as they say); we all create our own, unique Islamic metaphysics. There is simply no vision or idea of Islam that is unshaped, unqualified and unimpacted by the believer in whom the idea subsists.)

Every once in a while, moreover, I am delighted to study a figure in Islamic history who doesn’t fit with traditional expectations. Ibn Tufayl, for instance, wrote the philosophical novel “Hayy ibn Yaqzan,” wherein the protagonist discovers all Absolute Truths with his reason, and without any aid from divine revelation, thank-you-very-much. Or even Ibn Sina, who could enjoy a good glass of wine and saw nothing contrary to the divine will about it.

I’m sure some restlessness in my psychology will never permit me to rest with any final conclusions about the meaning, relevance or authority of the Qur’an in my life. I will probably never understand exactly its relationship to the divine will. The belief that God chose very specific words in Arabic and narrated them (through Gabriel) to Muhammad is a belief that has gone for me and I am quite sure will never return. For some time, I have inclined optimistically toward a metaphor offered by Sa`id Nashid:

“The Qur’an is not the speech of God, just as the loaf of bread is not the work of the farmer. God produced the raw material, which was inspiration, just as the farmer produces the raw material, which is wheat. But it is the baker who turns the wheat or flour into bread according to his own unique way, artistic expertise, and creative ability. Thus it is the Prophet who was responsible for interpreting the inspiration and turning it into actual phrases and words [of the Qur’an] according to his own unique view.”

This is a vision of the nature of the text that at once begins to resolve some of its more uncomfortable passages and simultaneously makes its spiritual flourishes all the more sublime — emerging in some sense, if this vision is true, in the person of Muhammad, in the windswept desert of the Hijaz, in a humble corner of late antiquity. I look to the Qur’an not as the be-all and end-all of my thinking about God, but rather as one waypoint, and I try to hold fast to the intellective tools of history’s greatest philosophers as the brightest lanterns for the conceptual paths ahead.

John Miller teaches Islamic political thought and political theory in Connecticut. He has degrees in law and Islamic studies from the University of North Carolina. He lives with his wife and their cat, Tiramisu.  

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Crossing the Styx: Conversion Story

Love this brother alhamdulilah his blog his well worth reading.


I moved on from Christianity and studied many other religions.  Based on the above, all religions of cyclical time were immediately eliminated from consideration.  All religions of a polytheistic nature were also eliminated.  Christianity was eliminated from consideration and all I had left was – Judaism.  Islam was never on the list.  I did not like the ‘Islam’ portrayed by the Muslims.  Judaism seemed the perfect initial fit.  After all, Christianity developed as a Jewish sect.  And yet, after much study, Judaism itself was found wanting.

One day, the clerk at the finance office asked me, why I never thought of becoming a Muslim.  I replied quite indignantly that I would never, ever convert.  But surely Allah (s.w.t.) has a sense of humour.  One day, I passed by a bookshop in Arab street and on a whim, I bought an English translation of the Qur’an.  I read it on the bus on the way back.  And I could not put it down.  I read it over days afterward and I looked up the exegesis of the passages.  I bought a copy of the story of Muhammad (s.a.w.).  The first sirah book was Shaykh Martin Ling’s (q.s.) ‘Life of Muhammad’.  Now, this Muhammad (s.a.w.), this was a man I could follow.

It was a shock to the system and I remember that I had a very high fever for days.  I went back to Novena church almost every evening and sat in the pew outside long after the rest of the church was closed.  Only these days, I stayed until well into the morning and I had the King James’ Version of the Bible in one and the ‘Abdullah Yusuf ‘Ali (r.a.) translation in the other.  This went on for several nights.  This ummah that I read about; that was what I wanted to be part of.  And Jesus (a.s.) was no longer a Pharisee wandering rabbi; he was a prophet of God.  And Muhammad (s.a.w.) was indeed the final Messenger and the evidence of everything, I found in the Bible.  It was in the beginning that I found the end of the search.  Most importantly, the Qur’an is about tawhid.  And the exercise that I had done to find out that God is One was done, perhaps more than 5,000 years earlier by Abraham (a.s.).

Then I read the story of Pharaoh, when the seas closed in, he said, “I believe in the God of Moses.”

And God Replied; “Now you believe?  It is too late.  You had every chance before this.”  I remembered that storm in 1994 that began this journey.  But I was given that chance.  I believed in the God of Moses (a.s.), the God of Jesus (a.s.) and finally, the God of Muhammad (s.a.w.).  It was there, alone in the dark, at three in the morning, 06^th December, 1999 that I said the shahadah.  I did the sujud in the church, near the altar.  It was not most conventional thing to do.  But that was how my voyage as a Muslim began.

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