Islam, like most religions at conception, was produced to liberate the oppressed before it was seized by oppressors and weaponized against those who had discovered a restoration of freedom and rights through it. The most striking, recurring incident of this confiscation of perspective and unashamed hypocrisy is the application of verse 2:282 (which calls for …
Category: Quran
Loving this World, Work, and the Privilege of Contemplation
Religious leaders during sermons often advise their congregations not to love this world, explicably sensing that love of this world will replace the love of God. While this is a justifiable claim—people enraptured in the material often experience emptiness which they attempt to fill with more material, believing they are achieving what the material superficially …
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On Interpreting the Qur’an and Subjectivity
As someone who has studied Arabic for a couple of years, compelled primarily by a desire to understand the Qur’an, and who remembers the frustration of not being able to understand it (and is aware of it still, because I have not mastered the language) I’m heartbroken when religious people—particularly women—dismiss their own interpretations on …
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Rejecting Your Sense of Justice is Rejecting a Device of God
This post is brought to you by a bewildering conversation I had a while ago in which an XY tried to mansplain to me that his interpretation of a specific verse pertaining to women is not unjust because it is from God, and therefore [what is from God] cannot unjust. (Read: His interpretation is from …
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Taken Out of Context: the Feminization of Divinity
I’ve received questions, a couple in passing and one in an email, regarding the intense opposition in the Qur’an against worshipping female deities as well as the incidental clarification that angels are not female (chapter 53) and the apparent misogyny that this suggests, particularly when men explain the occasional verses away by stating that God …
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Interpretation: the Qur’an as a Holistic Text
A methodological approach that has been mentioned on this site numerous times in passing is the consideration of the Qur’an holistically; that is, each verse contains the message of the entire Qur’an within it. One verse cannot be isolated from the rest of the religious text. The Qur’an is continuous, self-clarifying, and self-defining. This is …
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Inequality Resulting from the Separation of Moral and Social Spheres
For an overwhelming number of verses, the Qur’an holds men and women equally accountable in communal spheres of responsibilities such as upholding equity and securing justice (4:135), contrary to the misconception that women are not expected to maintain financial security or become protectors of society. In fact women who are privileged enough to be wealthy …
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the fatal feminist 