{"id":8615,"date":"2015-09-23T12:39:17","date_gmt":"2015-09-23T17:39:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/?p=8615"},"modified":"2015-09-23T12:39:17","modified_gmt":"2015-09-23T17:39:17","slug":"an-extraordinary-scholar-redefined-islam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/2015\/09\/23\/an-extraordinary-scholar-redefined-islam\/","title":{"rendered":"An Extraordinary Scholar Redefined Islam"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Noah Feldman: Ultimately, Shahab Ahmed concluded that Islam is not a religion in the usual Western sense, or primarily a system of religious law or a set of orthodox beliefs, as many contemporary Muslims have come to believe. Islam is rather a welter of contradictions &#8212; including at the same time the tradition of orthodoxy and law and the contrasting, sometimes heterodox traditions of philosophy, poetry and mystical thought. [&#8230;] Islam is thus in some ways a kind of culture or a civilization &#8212; but more than that, this contradictory Islam is a way for those who call themselves Muslims to make meaning in the world. Islam is made, Ahmed argued, through three things: the text of the Quran; the context of lived ideas and culture produced by actual Muslims; and the nature of the universe itself against which the Quran is revealed, which Ahmed called the \u201cpre-Text.\u201d Defined this way, Islam contains multitudes. It incorporates the scientific study of nature, the philosophical inquiry into reality, and the mystical experience of seeking after the divine &#8212; understood in its deepest sense of true love. More <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloombergview.com\/articles\/2015-09-20\/an-extraordinary-scholar-redefined-islam\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Noah Feldman: Ultimately, Shahab Ahmed concluded that Islam is not a religion in the usual Western sense, or primarily a system of religious law or a set of orthodox beliefs, as many contemporary Muslims have come to believe. Islam is rather a welter of contradictions &#8212; including at the same time the tradition of orthodoxy &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/2015\/09\/23\/an-extraordinary-scholar-redefined-islam\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">An Extraordinary Scholar Redefined Islam<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[12,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8615"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8615"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8616,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8615\/revisions\/8616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}