Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Muslims and Their Chronic Intellectual Stagnation

Featured on islamicity.com and iviews.com.

According to a quotation usually attributed to Einstein, insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again and yet expecting different results. In my view, this describes the state of the understanding and interpretation by Muslims of their way of life, i.e., Islam, for about the last few hundred years.

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Gezi Park Protests in Perspective

Featured on islamicity.com and iviews.com.

One has to distinguish between two kinds of protests that emerged from the Gezi Park demonstrations in Istanbul, Turkey: an innocent and legitimate one that took place in the early days of the protests, and a transmogrified version of the latter into a social engineering project to bring down the democratically elected and widely popular government of the AKP, Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party. The latter had been attempted numerous times within the decade-long rule of the AKP. 

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Islamic Extremism: A Clarion Call for Islamic Renaissance

Featured on islamicity.com and iviews.com.


Islamic extremism/terrorism is not a purely religiously motivated phenomenon at its roots. Like most human affairs, it is ultimately rooted in socio-political dynamics. In the case of the Islamic extremism: it is the culmination of two socio-political factors that made it to be the powder keg that it is now: A sclerotic (Islamic) civilization and the Western post colonial involvement in the Middle East, i.e., exploitation of the Middle Eastern oil, the plight of Palestinians etc.