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...