Sunday, August 4, 2024
Thursday, August 1, 2024
(Dr. Hamza el-Bekri el-İktisâd fî’l-i’tikâd 1. Dersi) الاقتصاد في الاعتقاد الدرس ١
"Born in Jordan in 1982, Dr. Hamza Muhammed Wasim Bekri completed his BA (2004) at al-Balqa Applied University, where he graduated from the Department of the Methodology of Religion with honors. He went on to complete his MA and PhD at the University of Jordan’s Department of Hadith. He has published many beneficial articles and works and is currently an assistant professor in the Faculty of Islamic Sciences at Ibn Haldun University. In addition to this, he has taught and continues to teach kalam, aqidah, fiqh, usul al-fiqh, and hadith at such institutions as Istanbul Sultan Ahmet Vakfı, EDEP, ISM, and ISAM."
Saturday, May 25, 2024
Saturday, May 18, 2024
Friday, May 17, 2024
Thursday, May 16, 2024
Wednesday, May 15, 2024
Tuesday, May 14, 2024
Monday, May 13, 2024
Friday, May 10, 2024
Thursday, May 9, 2024
Wednesday, May 1, 2024
Tuesday, April 30, 2024
President Serene Jones of Union Theological Seminary (April 26, 2024)
In a community letter, I let our students, faculty and staff know that Union is an institution committed to being a safe haven for all – but especially our most vulnerable communities. And as an institution committed to academic freedom for deeply moral and spiritual reasons, we never silence voices of protest. We value these voices, even at times when that protest is against us.
Most importantly, I reminded our students that the aggressive police action being taken on other campuses across the country will not be taken here. As their president, I have their back.
[...]
Whatever our differences, I firmly believe campuses must be places for lively, rigorous debate, where we struggle collectively to find better ways to live together on this planet, and where students have the chance to find and strengthen their voices. Education is to experience the power of collective action, to become a passionate, engaged citizen. These precious values do not flourish when protests are squashed. Democracy itself cannot flourish.
With the events that unfolded at Columbia last Thursday, we are seeing encampments of peaceful student protestors rise up on campuses across the country. While university leaders are under tremendous pressure to respond with full force, I hope this tide of intolerance can be turned towards our highest values – including a commitment to freedom of speech. Campuses should be spaces where we learn to build a better world, not a more destructive one.
In these precarious times, it is all the more important that these values be upheld. Please join us in the struggle to manifest these values. That, at its core, is what it means to be true educators.
Serge Schmenann in NYT: "Student Protest Is an Essential Part of Education" (April 29, 2024)
The classic account of Columbia ’68, “The Strawberry Statement,” a wry, punchy diary by an undergraduate, James Simon Kunen, who participated in the protests, captures the confused welter of causes, ideals, frustrations and raw excitement of that spring. “Beyond defining what it wasn’t, it is very difficult to say with certainty what anything meant. But everything must have a meaning, and everyone is free to say what meanings are. At Columbia a lot of students simply did not like their school commandeering a park, and they rather disapproved of their school making war, and they told other students, who told others, and we saw that Columbia is our school and we will have something to say for what it does.”
That’s the similarity. Just as students then could no longer tolerate the horrific images of a distant war delivered, for the first time, in almost real time by television, so many of today’s students have found the images from Gaza, now transmitted instantly onto their phones, to demand action. And just as students in ’68 insisted that their school sever ties to a government institute doing research for the war, so today’s students demand that Columbia divest from companies profiting from Israel’s invasion of Gaza. And students then and now have found their college administrators deaf to their entreaties.
Certainly there’s a lot to debate here. Universities do have a serious obligation to protect Jewish students from antisemitism and to maintain order, but it is to their students and teachers that they must answer, not to Republicans eager to score points against woke “indoctrination” at elite colleges or to megadonors seeking to push their agendas onto institutions of higher learning.
Like Mr. Kunen, I’m not sure exactly how that spring of 1968 affected my life. I suspect it forced me to think in ways that have informed my reporting on the world. What I do know is that I’m heartened to see that college kids will still get angry over injustice and suffering and will try to do something about it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/29/opinion/student-protests-columbia-israel.html
Monday, April 29, 2024
Saturday, April 27, 2024
Wednesday, April 3, 2024
CNN: "Palestinian American doctor walks out of Biden meeting in protest" (April 2, 2024)
Later Tuesday night, Ahmad again pleaded for the Biden administration to take a stronger stance on protections for aid workers and civilians in Gaza, telling CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, “It cannot just be rhetoric. It can’t just be the president saying he’s very sorry and demanding answers.”
“Gaza is becoming unlivable. I mean, there is nothing left there. There’s no schools, and people are living in tents in a very cramped area. … It just seems that the White House has not decided to take that leap and really put their foot down,” he added on “The Source.”
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/02/politics/white-house-ramadan-meeting/index.html
Tuesday, April 2, 2024
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Saturday, March 9, 2024
Thursday, March 7, 2024
Tuesday, January 16, 2024
The Qur'an in Context 4
This is also why the popular assumption that a contextualist reading of the Qur'an is necessarily inimical to Islamic belief is mistaken. Much of the current media buzz surrounding the Qur'an in fact appears to be predicated on the assumption that the hypotheses and reconstructions of philologists have the power to profoundly unsettle, or even conclusively disprove, a religious belief system.
Yet at least in academic Christian theology, which is after all faced with a similar problem, it has become something of a commonplace that historical-critical scholarship does not as such preclude a subsequent 'committed' reading of the Bible.
Historical analysis, it is usually held, constitutes a preparatory stage delimiting the borders of any truly responsible interpretation of the canon; it delineates the ground upon which any attempt to derive contemporary guidance from the canon must operate (rather than eroding this very ground, as some would object." [32]
There is no reason, we believe, to assume that this model is not applicable to the Qur'an; in fact, scholars as diverse as Amin al-Khuli, Fazlur Rahman, Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid, Mehmet Pacaci, or Omer Ozsoy have all argued that a contextualist hermeneutics of the Qur'an is not only theologically unproblematic, but can also be seen as an extension of important aspects of traditional Islamic tafsir. [33]
Abu Zaid, for example, distinguishes the universal Qur'anic message from the historically contingent 'code' in which it is expressed. He then insists that in order to make himself understood to an audience within a particular historical context (namely, seventh-century Arabia), God had to make use of his addresses' 'cultural and linguistic semantic system': since human beings are inevitably situated at a particular time and place, they simply will not be able to understand a revelation that is not geared to their cultural and religious horizon. [34]
Thus, what contextual readings of the Qur'an aim at is not to unmask the Qur'an as a mere blueprint of earlier Christian and Jewish 'sources,' but rather to reconstruct, as fully as possible, the cultural lexicon of the Qur'an's audience, i.e., the linguistic and cultural 'code' employed by the text -- whoever its author may be -- in order to make itself understood. [34a]
Nicolai Sinai and Angelika Neuwirth, "Introduction" in The Qurʼān in context: historical and literary investigations into the Qurʼānic milieu / edited by Angelika Neuwirth, Nicolai Sinai, Michael Marx (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 14-15.
The Qur'an in Context 3
However, to assemble the textual background that may shed light on a given Qur'anic passage is not identical with the interpretation of that passage itself; it is an indispensable preparatory step, yet by no means a sufficient one. Indeed, intratextual contextualization of this kind does not provide the only relevant background to a Qur'anic passage; it is perhaps just as important to situate a given text at a particular position within the diachronically extended sequence of Qur'anic discourses, which frequently also generate their specific literary formats.
Nicolai Sinai and Angelika Neuwirth, "Introduction" in The Qurʼān in context: historical and literary investigations into the Qurʼānic milieu / edited by Angelika Neuwirth, Nicolai Sinai, Michael Marx (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 13.
The Qur'an in Context 2
This is underscored by Sydney Griffith, himself intimately familiar with pre-Qur'anic Syriac literature:
Hermeneutically speaking, one should approach the Qur'an as an integral discourse in its own right; it proclaims, judges, praises, blames from its own narrative center. It addresses an audience which is already familiar with oral versions in Arabic of earlier scriptures and folklores. The Qur'an does not borrow from, or often even quote from these earlier texts. Rather, it alludes to and evokes their stories, even sometimes their wording, for its own rhetorical purpose. The Arabic Qur'an, from a literary perspective, is something new. It uses the idiom, and sometimes the forms and structures, of earlier narratives in the composition of its own distinctive discourse. It cannot be reduced to any presumed sources. Earlier discourses appear in it not only in a new setting, but shaped, trimmed, and re-formulated for an essentially new narrative.
fn30: Sydney Griffith, "Christian lore and the Arabic Qur'an: the 'Companions of the Cave' in Surat al-Kahf and in Syriac Christian tradition," In Reynolds (ed.), The Qur'an in its Historical Context, (London, 2008), 116.
Nicolai Sinai and Angelika Neuwirth, "Introduction" in The Qurʼān in context: historical and literary investigations into the Qurʼānic milieu / edited by Angelika Neuwirth, Nicolai Sinai, Michael Marx (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 13.
The Qur'an in Context
To a contemporary audience, research of the kind undertaken by Speyer easily appears as obsessed with the notion that to understand a text is equivalent to unearthing its 'sources.' While such an approach is already frowned upon when applied, for example, to the Bible or to ancient Greek and Latin literature, with regard to the Qur'an it is often suspected of serving an underlying political agenda as well, namely, of aiming to demonstrate that the Qur'an is nothing but a rehash of earlier traditions in order to discredit the Islamic faith and assert Western cultural superiority. [9]
And it is true that the title of Geiger's study--"What did Muhammad borrow from Judaism?" -- does seem to bear out such misgivings: Muhammad, it is implied. 'borrowed' existing religious concepts and motives--or, worse, he borrowed and misunderstood them -- and passed them on to his followers. An obvious suspicion about the line of research initiated by Geiger would thus be that in his eagerness to demonstrate the Jewish origin of many Qur'anic conceptions, he is prone to overlook the substantial modifications these have undergone on the way, or to dismiss such modifications are mere 'misunderstandings' rather than functionally meaningful transformations.
Nicolai Sinai and Angelika Neuwirth, "Introduction" in The Qurʼān in context: historical and literary investigations into the Qurʼānic milieu / edited by Angelika Neuwirth, Nicolai Sinai, Michael Marx (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 4.
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