history
-
From Lived Suffering to Juristic Categories Islamic law is not abstract speculation. From its earliest centuries, fiqh grew by watching how people actually lived, suffered, and acted. Jurists observed how human minds worked, how illnesses disrupted capacity, and how treatments affected dignity, then classified these realities into the framework of taklīf (legal responsibility). The majnūn
-
1. The Historical Problem: Why Creativity Was Devalued Across intellectual traditions — Islamic, Western, and modern — creativity has often been sidelined compared to science and rationality. Several reasons explain this: a. The Legacy of Rationalism Greek philosophy (Aristotle, Plato) ranked imagination (phantasia) as a lower faculty of the soul, below reason (logos). Aristotle saw
-
Within the Mujaddid Model of Intelligence (MMI), Creative Intelligence (CI) is not merely artistic expression, but the faculty that transforms khayāl (imagination), basīrah (insight), and ilḥām (inspiration) into vehicles of divine remembrance and discernment. Among the profound ways Islam cultivates this faculty is through ruʾyā ṣāliḥa (true and righteous dreams). The Qur’an itself records dreams
-
Is Reason its Own God, or a Servant of Truth? “ʿAql without wahy is lost; waḥy without aql is unapplied. But aql with waḥy is light upon light.” This paradox captures the Islamic answer to a crisis that has long haunted both philosophy and neuroscience. On one extreme, modern neuroscience reduces reason to an illusion
-
The Need for Purification of Intellect When Muslims hear the word tazkiyyah (purification), they usually think of the heart (qalb) — purifying the self from pride, envy, arrogance, or anger. But what about the ʿaql (intellect)? Just like the heart, the mind can be clouded by disease. The most dangerous disease is not ignorance, but
-
In the modern age, the study of the mind has been absorbed almost entirely into the domain of neuroscience. To the psychiatrist, psychologist, or neuroscientist, human reason is a product of the brain: networks of neurons, chemical transmitters, and electrical circuits. The mind, in this view, is reducible to matter. Thought is an illusion produced
