Book: Exploring Islam in a New Light: An Understanding from the Quranic Perspect
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Exploring Islam in a New Light An Understanding from the Quranic Perspective
By Abdur Rabhttp//www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?isbn=0-595-47940-5
Emphasizing the Quran?s messages of peace, tolerance, and compassion, this book intentionally avoids Hadith-based ideas to significantly contribute to the ?Quran only? movement in Islam.
Book Description
This Islam is spiritual, humane, and scientific, far from its fanatic and militant image it carries in the West. It shows how man can evolve spiritually to lead an enriched, progressive, and blissful life. It advocates tolerance and peaceful co-existence and disapproves of gender or human discrimination and harsh punishments. Abdur Rab argues that, regrettably, the Hadith undermines and misrepresents Islam. Numerous Hadith texts contradict the Quran, reason, and science and send conflicting, confusing messages. The criteria used to authenticate the Hadith are flawed and simply inadequate.This book is an impassioned call to understand Islam solely in Quranic terms and to reform practiced Islam, distorted by Hadith-based ideas.
I just received the book and skipped through it. The first thing I noticed was the foreword by Prof. Riffat Hassan, the well known feminist Muslim scholar and student of GA.Parwez. Next to this the very good reviews by convert Prof. Jeffrey Lang (author of "Loosing my Religion" & "When angels ask", prof. in Islam) and prof. Reza Aslan (author " No God but God" and others.
All of them praised its' Qur'anic approach and also agreed on the need to return to the Qur'an. This coming from 2 well-known Islamic professors shows that the Qur'anic stance is gaining ground everywhere.
The topics are laid out very good and his approach is very professional. Next to laying out some well-known issues, he also brings in some fresh ideas. Good use of footnotes and quoting of Qur'anic verses makes this a very good work and important for us to have. There are some minor things which i disagree on, but there will be always differences on issues, but this only accounts for not more then 10-20% at most.
A must have for progressive Muslims!
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Peace to all,
thanks for the ingo Arnold, it does seem that the Quran alone movement is slowly gaining hold, so when are you going to write the definitive book that defines our movement for us? We need it and now is the right time.
Kurt
Salam Kurt,
No problem. As for the book that defines our movement is a bit difficult since I can only display my own ideas, which is maybe shared by some people here. The main introduction to my understanding of the Qur'anic Message is displayed in my 60 page Qur'anic Cosmology
http//deenrc.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/quranic-cosmology-a-short-introduction-by-ay-mol-f.pdf
Which is upgraded almost on a weekly level. Prof. Amina Wadud has just reviewed and said she really enjoyed it. Prof. Aisha Musa is also reviewing it at the moment.
I hope that in a year or so I have upgraded it to around a 100 or more pages so I can publish it. It will be probably taken into a larger writing in a few years from now, which will lay down all the Qur'an's System. But first study more.
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Jeffrey Lang on Abdur Rab's book
"Abdur Rab offers a comprehensive vision of Islam using the Quran as his sole religious textual source. He intentionally avoids Hadith literature, which he believes, and argues, has done much damage to the message of the Quran. His work provides many thought-provoking insights and should be a significant contribution to the Quran only movement in modern islam."