Critical-Progressive Muslims: On Islamic hermeneutics, Gender and Interreligious Dialogue

  From Cult to Cosmopolis: Why Our Religious Future Depends on How We Read Our Traditions Adis Duderija The same religious text. The same inherited tradition. Yet radically different outcomes. One community nurtures compassion, intellectual humility, and moral growth. Another breeds fear, conformity, and hostility toward outsiders. A third transforms faith into a tribal badge, weaponised for political or cultural supremacy. What explains this divergence is not the text itself, nor even the tradition as such. It is the mode of approach. Broadly speaking, religious traditions today are approached in three dominant ways: cult-like, sectarian, and cosmopolitan. The future of religion, and , in some cases,  social cohesion—depends on which path we choose. The Cult-Like Approach: Obedience Without Thought A cult-like approach treats religious texts and authorities as infallible, closed, and beyond questioning. Interpretation is monopolized. Doubt is framed as moral failure. Loyalt...

  When “Highly Trained” Isn’t Enough: What the Towering Fatwas Reveal About Clerical Power in Islam Adis Duderija There is a particular kind of modern Muslim anxiety that doesn’t come from atheism, secularism, or even Islamophobia. It comes from within: the sinking feeling that, at any moment, a “highly trained” cleric—credentialed, authorised, and amplified—may issue a ruling so spectacularly unmoored from reason and moral sensibility that it becomes difficult to explain, even to ourselves, how such things can pass as “Islamic guidance.” The Critical Muslim list of “ Top Ten Towering Fatwas ” is written in a satirical register, but the underlying material is not fiction: it is a catalogue of rulings attributed to official muftis, senior seminary institutions, and state-linked councils.  The list begins with a Saudi grand mufti’s insistence—after “considerable study,” we are told—that the earth is flat and the sun revolves around it. If satire works here, it’s because the ru...

  Deconstructing Revelation: Toward a Radical Critique of Religious and Secular Reason Adis Duderija In an era where religious fundamentalisms clash with secular dogmas, and where the specter of ideological extremism haunts global discourse, it is imperative to revisit the foundations of our intellectual traditions. As a scholar who has devoted decades to the study of Islam, Mohammad Arkoun  (d.2010) has persistently challenged the unquestioned pillars upon which religious thought rests. From his earliest publications to his most recent, he has sought to interrogate the cognitive status of what Muslim theologians, exegetes, historians, and jurists have long regarded as revelation —a concept often accepted without scrutiny as an immutable given. This acceptance has erected a formidable edifice of tradition, rich in its intricacies yet perilously dependent on vast expanses of the unthought and the unthinkable. Conservative and fundamentalist forms of contemporary Islam, burden...

  The Inconvenient Truth About Muslim Diversity: Why Progressives, Liberals, Secularists, and Cultural Muslims Are the Real Face of Islam Adis Duderija In an era of polarizing headlines and echo-chamber debates, there's an inconvenient truth that shatters the narratives pushed by both Islamophobes and fundamentalist Muslims: the vast majority of the world's 1.9 billion Muslims aren't the rigid traditionalists or dogmatic enforcers that extremists on either side would have us believe. Instead, they are progressives, liberals, secularists, and cultural adherents who embrace Islam not as a straitjacket of rules, but as a civilisational and cultural heritage that in some forms can offer a  profound moral and ethical framework. And crucially, these Muslims are no less Islamic for it—their views stem from deep conviction, rooted in thoughtful interpretation of the faith, not some watered-down compromise or external pressure. Let's dispense with the myths. Islamophobes pai...

  Embracing the Fluidity of Divine Revelation: Amina Wadud's Vision for an Inclusive Qur'anic Interpretation "There has never been one static notion of what it means that the Qur an is the literal word of God/Allah. Consensus does not exist. There is however endless debate about whether any speech-act or text can capture the totality of divine sovereignty. Because of the breadth of those discussions, I am never inclined to say that either we take it all or we must take nothing. Actually trying to capture both the transcendent nature of the sacred and the concrete manifestation that revelation becomes as it solidifies into text is one of the saving graces to these discourses over the application of text to real lives and real policies, and to the transformation of ethical and moral standpoints. As soon as we acknowledge that none can know fully what Allah meant, then the door is open to both patriarchal and feminist egalitarian readings. " amina wadud  in https:...

  The Prophets Were Visionaries, Not Scholars: Why Religious Fundamentalism Is Holding Us Back   Adis Duderija In an era of rapid scientific advancement and global interconnectedness, it's tempting to view ancient religious figures through a modern lens—as profound philosophers or rigorous theologians whose words form the bedrock of eternal truths. But this is a profound misunderstanding. The prophets of traditional religions, from Moses and Isaiah in Judaism to Muhammad in Islam and the seers of Hinduism's Vedas, were not scholars poring over texts in ivory towers. They were visionary preachers and mystics, speaking in kerygmatic bursts of proclamation and theopoetic flourishes of divine poetry. They weren't constructing systematic theologies or debating metaphysics (e.g. like Plato or Aquinas). This fundamental truth is what religious fundamentalism and traditionalism stubbornly refuse to acknowledge, ensuring their role as regressive forces in our contemporary worl...