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Showing posts from October, 2020

The Arab Spring 10 years on: What went wrong in Egypt and Syria? - Dr Osman Bakash

From The Thinking Muslim Ep.37 - The Arab Spring 10 years on: What went wrong in Egypt and Syria? - Dr Osman Bakash Listen using the links below and remember to subscribe so you never miss a show Apple • Spotify • Google • Breaker • PocketCasts • RadioPublic • Stitcher • TuneIn or on Alexa We are coming to the tenth anniversary of the Arab Spring, the momentous series of events that started in hope with the desperate act of a Tunisian vegetable seller. With the return of another pharaoh in Egypt, the impunity with which he has meted out retribution upon those that were opposed to the regime and the killing field of Syria, whose soil today stands soaked with the blood of martyrs, makes even the most optimistic person surmise that the Arab Spring has turned into what can be called a cold winter. Over the coming weeks and months, The Thinking Muslim takes a look at the tumultuous decade from multiple perspectives. What went wrong? How did an event that reverberated across Muslim c

The First Call To Secularism in Islamic Clothing

  Adapted from “The Inevitable Caiphate” 2012, Hurst and Oxford University Press Raziq appeared as a critic dressed in “Islamic clothing”, who saw Islam like Christianity, and the caliphate like the rule of the Church, and so for him secularism became “an Islamic solution to an Islamic problem” Ali Abdul-Raziq was an al-Azhar graduate from a political family who founded the Liberal Constitutionalist party, and the author of the book entitled “Islam and the Fundamentals of Ruling” which challenged the orthodox concept of caliphate. It was published shortly after the official abolition of the Caliphate by Mustafa Kemal in 1924. Due to family influence and affluence he was able to study in Oxford University before the outbreak of the Great War, but returned to Egypt to work as a judge in the shari‘a courts. In the midst of the general mourning over the fate of the caliphate post abolition, and a general consensus among the scholarly class in Egypt that the caliphate