This website (Old)
This website is dedicated to exploring faith in practice and brings together what I’m doing out there in the real world. It’s an outlet where I engage interested souls, curious minds, and seeking hearts.
In the categories section, you’ll find there are a range of topics I address, and this is because the challenges facing western believers widely vary, starting at how to conceptualise the Most High and what shape heartfelt subservience takes, to engaging guidance from God and seeking to functionalise it in our complex lives.
- I want to address how we deal with divine guidance in a way that doesn’t induce cognitive dissonance and leave us with a fractured way of doing things.
- I want to show how we institute reason and rationality as a mode of engaging with God in a way that is faithful to what God wants.
- I want to unpick notions of religiosity so that the believers might unburden themselves of illegitimate social and cultural pressures, and instead seek happiness and productivity in a continuous state of godliness.
- I want to show how can we celebrate God and treat revelation as a source of upliftment and positivity, whilst simultaneously seeking guidance on how to deal with the social, political, economic and psychological challenges we face.
The strapline
The strapline for this site (which is in the header) is faith, insight, reason, progress, and I pray that it comes across that the work on this site comes from, and advocates, a deep seated faith in God, learned insight into revelation, intelligent and informed reasoning, and aims for progress in the form of positive outcomes in life and after death.
How does the site work?
My aim is that the content on this website comes together to provide a holistic picture and cognitive framework that positively informs that way we practically do faith, as gleaned from revelation. The website offers a range of differing formats: short blog posts, longer in-depth articles, essays and research papers, podcasts, videos, recorded lectures and sermons. It also provides updates of my on-going endeavours in the real world, such as lectures, public lessons, and workshops.
I acknowledge that some of the thoughts and ideas on this website will be new to some visitors; things they might not have heard or known before, or put in a way they’re not used to. Of course, the point of being informed is to learn something we didn’t know and not dismiss it simply because we didn’t know it for that would be illogical. Secondly, this reflects the fact that much of the scholarly tradition has yet to find itself articulated in the English language, and much of what we’re used to has been taken from the rhetoric of preachers. The frames of reference I commonly employ tend to come from the Qur’an, the hadiths, or used widely by jurists and theologians.
Changes on the website
Occasionally, the articles on this website will be updated, categories will be moved around, or particular posts grouped together to provide visitors a set of readings that speak to a particular theme. I envisage that it’ll also be the case that posts might be reposted or edited to reflect ongoing developments in the real world.
Sometimes I’m asked, “Do you think you’ll change your views?” I expect so, and it’d be a damning indictment of my aptitude were I to remain in the same place for the rest of my life. Learning necessitates a process of discovery and transformation where adjustments are made and positions renegotiated – it’s a private journey for there’s little need to confuse others in the process. But there comes a point where one settles on particular positions and then simply seeks to enhance and develop those positions. Since this is an endless journey, it’s inevitable that others will get to enjoy it with me.