Papers

A case study in Islamic Law and Ethics by Musa Furber. Animals are at the heart of many of today’s heated ethical and legal debates. This paper presents a survey of Qur’anic verses and prophetic narrations related to kept animals, and a study of one school’s application of this evidence to the topic of kept animals. This ethical and legal study will also throw into relief some of the mechanism of madhhab based jurisprudence and fiqh reasoning. This study serves as a basis for understanding and applying Islamic moral theology to the numerous contemporary issues related to kept animals.

Addressing a number of major moral and legal questions of our age, Shaykh Bin Bayyah describes how Muslim jurisprudence works to alleviate human hardship and to account for cases of compelling necessity while remaining true to the moral vision of God’s final Shari‘ah.

This essay seeks to delineate points of entry for Muslim theological reasoning into conversations in the field of philosophy of mind. By equating the Kalam principle of soul with its foremost faculty, intellection, Muslim theological reasoning lends itself well to these modes of inquiry. By looking at the work of Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam, the collapse of “reductionism” is shown to give way to the concept of a non-physical mind, as well as an indication toward the sustainable plausibility of theism in general. The essay demonstrates that contemporary obstacles and challenges to the theological principle of a human soul are surmountable,and adds to mounting scholarship in the field that calls into question the physicalist interpretation of the universe.

This paper offers an operational framework for establishing an authentic expression of indigenous Muslim culture. This framework consists of five operational principles, which are discussed at length and illustrated with examples: trusting reason, respecting dissent, stressing societal obligations, setting priorities, and embracing maxims. These five principles are central to the Islamic tradition and embody the practical wisdom and consummate sensibility of the Prophetic teaching. The paper emphasizes the need for Muslim communities as a whole to become directly involved in their self-definition and the construction of their future as individuals and communities. This task cannot be left to others or to chance; the five operational principles provide an invaluable resource for determining the way forward. While the paper focuses on the American Muslim community, the framework is relevant to Muslims everywhere, especially those in the West.

The purpose of this paper is to present an integral critique that explores the underlying conceptual structure of the work of Muhammad Shahrur. It is the author’s contention that every thinker and writer is an inheritor of a chain of ideas or an intellectual system that he necessarily manifests in his writings, consciously or unconsciously. There is no such thing, in other words, as an orphan idea or an idea without a conceptual genealogy. This means that the integrity or soundness of any idea is narrowly dependent on the pedigree of its genealogy or silsila. The value of Shahrur’s thought is therefore inevitably linked to the value of the origin of his ideas, which we have briefly attempted to trace and evaluate in this paper. It is hoped that this model of critique may become an effective tool in understanding the mechanics of the varying and hybridised conceptual systems that ‘reformers’, or one should say ‘intellectual adventurers’, have recently introduced into the Islamic world.

Actions of an earlier generation affect whether later generations will exist at all as well as the quality and type of life they will have. Discussions concerning the obligations earlier generations owe later generations have proven to be useful when thinking about the environment, economics, sustainability, and other issues. Western thinking about obligations to future generations has become very sophisticated since the 1970s. Western ethicists consider it a litmus test for evaluating ethical theories, and expect it to be a main recurring theme in the new century. The Shari’ah already provides the fundamentals for thinking about obligations to future generations. These basic fundamentals are not developed enough to shed light on these issues within the Muslim Community, let alone compete in the open market of ideas. Shari‘ah experts will need to develop these fundamentals before a Shari‘ah-informed conception of obligations to future generations can be offered.

Perhaps the most looming challenge before Islam today is to be understood. Mis-representation on the part of international media punditry does contribute much to this dilemma, as well as general myopia within the consciousness of Western publics regarding their own “others”; a category within which Islam, more often than not, features as the primary candidate.

A study and analysis of the philosophy underlying the Catholic Church’s approach to dialogue with non-Catholics and non-Christians. The study includes a presentation of the official Church position on Islam and Muslims following the SecondVatican Council.

Taha Abderrahman, the author, holds that a critical window of opportunity remains open for theistic world views to collectively provide a program of shared ethics. However, it is his assertion that recent attempts to furnish a set of fundamental criteria, in the name of world religions, have failed to deliver on the promise. Drawing on the richness of Islamic theological systems, the author endeavors to provide both a critical analysis and a corrective prescription.