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

  Living in the Ocean of God ‘God and the world live together in a mutual coinhabitation, mutually immanent to, and caught up with, one another in a mutual adventure of relationality and creativity, compassion and beauty, love and surprise’ (Faber 2019, 59). Roland Faber, The Ocean of God What if God is not somewhere “up there,” watching the world from a safe distance, but is instead living with us—deeply involved, responsive, and vulnerable to what happens here and now? That is the unsettling and deeply hopeful vision offered by theologian Roland Faber, who writes that “God and the world live together in a mutual coinhabitation, mutually immanent to, and caught up with, one another in a mutual adventure of relationality and creativity, compassion and beauty, love and surprise.” This is not the God many people imagine. The familiar picture—especially in popular religion—is of an all-powerful, all-knowing being who stands above history, unmoved by pain and untouched by change. In ...

  Toshihiko Izutsu’s God and Man in the Qur’an: Semantics of the Qur’anic Weltanschauung stands as a watershed moment in the history of Islamic studies, representing a rigorous application of linguistic analysis to the foundational text of Islam. Published originally in 1964, the work introduced a methodological framework—semantics—that sought to move beyond traditional philology or purely theological exegesis to uncover the "structural genius" of the Qur’anic world-system. By treating the Qur’anic vocabulary not as a collection of isolated terms but as a dynamic, interconnected "Gestalt," Izutsu provided a blueprint for understanding how the revelation fundamentally reconfigured the Arabian mental universe. The Methodological Innovation: Semantics as a Cultural Science The primary importance of the book lies in its methodological clarity. Izutsu defines semantics as the analytic study of key terms with the goal of arriving at a conceptual grasp of a people's W...

  The below is the transcript from an interview with boardering on belief you tube channel (that has not yet happended )   1. What is meant by Progressive Islam (PI) and where does it sit in the traditional–modernist spectrum? Progressive Islam is best understood not as a fixed school of thought but as an evolving intellectual and ethical orientation toward the Islamic tradition. It is characterized by a commitment to ethical humanism, epistemological openness, and methodological pluralism. On the traditional–modernist spectrum, PI does not simply occupy a midpoint; rather, it seeks to transcend the binary. It critically engages the pre-modern tradition without being bound by it, while also resisting uncritical adoption of modernity. Instead, it advocates a dynamic, process-oriented understanding of Islam that is historically conscious and ethically driven. --- 2. Why do we need PI? What are the problems that a traditional view causes in today's world? Traditionalist app...