بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
2 years ago, I had virtually no problem understanding a lecture or class taught in classical Arabic. My comprehension was at 99%, given contextual clues. It, therefore, came as a surprise to learn that I was incapable of reading a single page of a book of Arabic literature without having to refer to the dictionary at least 10 times per page. Poetry was little more than sweet-sounding jibberish to me.
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
The late American philosopher Mortimer J. Adler compiled a list of books that he deemed “The Great Books of the Western World.” Introducing this list of books at the end of his best-selling book “How to Read a Book” (recommended by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf), he writes:
On YouTube, there is a rise of channels (The Vegan Atheist comes to mind) of super-smart-unbiased-intellectual-smartherthanthou-amazinglyintelligent-skeptics who are now making it their primary business to ridicule the Creator of the Universe’s Last Covenant with mankind.
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
In my recent video on Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s interview with Jordan Peterson I mentioned an example of something which is actually attributable to Islamic primary sources and which modern Westerners would find reprehensible, namely, child marriage.
If God created everything, who created God?
–> If I’m driving a car, who is driving me?
We’re all atheists about 10’s of thousands of gods out there. Atheists just take it one god further.
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
I constantly see this argument that Leftists (and consequently their Muslim acolytes who seek protection in their masters’ arms) like to use. It goes something like this: Oh, you’re going to quote the Quran and say that Muslims are all violent? Well guess what? Christianity was violent too! Look at the Crusades! Look at the Inquisition! Look at all these horrible persecutions of minorities that Christians have done over the centuries! Thus we cannot judge Muslims to be violent just because of what their scripture says. There are multiple interpretations!
The reason why this is a bad argument is twofold. First of all, and the more important of which, it feeds into this narrative that religion is evil and violent. “Religion is the cause of violence” is a common New Atheist argument and all we’re doing is enforcing that (false) narrative. In fact, I frequently see people comment on articles that invoke this kind of argument something along the lines of “this is why all religions are evil/stupid. We shouldn’t persecute Muslims, but why would anyone believe in anything that stupid anyway.”
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
A few weeks ago, I watched the following episode of Shoaib Malik‘s series Academic Access:
The following summary was taken from Ustadh Mobeen Vaid‘s Facebook post on this subject:
بسم الله الرحمن اللرحيم
This is my latest video. In this episode we discuss the following questions:
How can I be confident in an afterlife, even though it seems unlikely?
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
I have recently went on a binge of Shoaib Malik‘s series “Academic Access” (sometimes converting them into mp3’s and listening to them while driving, working out or doing other tasks). While I have not listened to every episode, I’ve listened to quite a few. The episodes are generally good, but, like with everything else, there are hits and misses and so there were some episodes that I considered to be much better than others. What I’d like to share here are 7 episodes that I found to be worth the listen.
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
We’ve all heard the following narration, attributed to the Prophet of Islam (s):
اطلبوا العلم من المهد إلى اللحد
Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave.
