Left or Right? The Straight Path Please

We embark on our study of Western feminism by examining its historical development through the first wave of women's struggle for equality: The suffrage movement.

We focus on England as a case study to see how bitterly women fought a decades long battle to be granted voting and other very basic social rights.

Throughout our overview and analysis of this period at the end of the 19th century and up to the years between the two world wars, we compare how the revelation of Islam granted women the same and more rights than British women were fighting for, without even asking for them!

We propose a shift in thinking about ourselves as Muslim women and our rights enshrined in the Divine law (Shari'ah), and question the authority and validity of a western feminist paradigm through which it is assumed that we will understand and theorize ourselves both currently and historically.

After exploring the sociological theories of the Right and Left, we turn now to the Islamic scholarly and spiritual tradition to see how our own scholars have observee and theorized society.

In this episode, we briefly mention the main concepts of the theories of both Imam Raghib al-Asfahani (d.1108 CE) and Ibn Khaldoun (1332-1406 C.E), before embarking on a fairly detailed explanation of Imam al-Ghazali's Book 26 of the Ihya 'Ulum al-Din.

Book 26 is called Dhamm al-Dunya, The Condemnation of Worldy Life. In it, he outlines the physical needs of the human, the skills and trades that developed to make the tools and implements required to process natural resources into fulfilling human needs, and the states of the heart that a human must seek to endow him/herself with in order to live in this world, without losing sight of the real purpose of life - the worship of Allah Ta'ala and the ultimate meeting with Him that awaits in the next life.

MISK Women presented our first FB Live on June 23, 2020 on our private group MISK Women Halaqa.

This is an unedited recording of the session, uploaded for those who were unable to attend. The topics covered included the development of MISK, women in Islamic scholarship and Surah Ibrahim, ayats 24-27 about the parable of the goodly tree and the rotten tree. Most questions and answers were about contextual competence, how to protect ourselves and our children from the trials of the times we live in and looking to the pious for stability and guidance.

Beginning to 6:05 mins: Reading of Surah al-Waqi'ah

6:05 - 40 mins: Presentation

40 mins to end: Questions and Answers.

Join us in this episode as we explore Marxism, the fundamental ideology of leftist thinking in the contemporary world. Due to the prevalence of Marxist thought in all spheres of political, economic, social and cultural life, it is essential that we develop a firm understanding of the basics of the philosophy, as we will be exploring in greater depth how Marxist ideas inform our global reality today.

Some of the questions addressed in this episode include:

Who was the famous 19th century German philosopher and economist Karl Marx?

What were his ideas and what impact did they have in his lifetime?

How have his ideas been developed since 1848 and where do we find them today?

By the end of the episode, you should have an awareness of the origins of this ideology, and the many branches of thinking that it itself is the origin of.

This episode introduces an historical overview of the political, economic and social philosophies of the Right.

We look at the development of 'reason' and the 'reasonable' man who sought freedom, the pursuit of wealth and happiness.

How was the Muslim world impacted by these philosophical and political developments imposed on it through colonialism?

How do we understand these phenomena from the Islamic scholarly and spiritual tradition?

** For further reading, please refer to the works of the following conservative thinkers:

John Locke (political theory)

Immanuel Kant (enlightenment)

John Stuart Mill (social philosophy)

Edmund Burke and Adam Smith (economics)

The online services of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Stanford University and Wikipedia also provide very good summaries and analyses.

We take a brief overview and analysis of the most significant events in the last 500 years of European history, in order to understand the basis and foundations of modern Western society.

What was the dominant vision, mission and method enacted in this epoch, and how does it compare to the vision, mission and method outlined in Surah al-Fatihah?

We introduce the core values of the status quo and mention the origins of conflict theory, in the form of Marx and Engles observations of the working class in England in the 19th Century.

Join us for an overview and roundup of the key concepts in Surah al-Fatihah in six short questions.

We are reminded to check ourselves by the question asked of us in the Quran: "Where are you going?"

What's your answer?

The Voluntary Journey means the choices that we make in our daily life.

What informs our choices and to what extent do our choices reflect our al-Fatihah informed understanding of being on an involuntary journey?

In this episode, we look at the second part of Surah al-Fatihah and what it tells us about who we are and the choices we make.

We also look at the vastness of the knowledge that it contains by mentioning the 8 Quranic themes and the 14 branches of philosophy in it.

However...perhaps the greatest statement about Surah al-Fatihah is reflected in what is often the most overlooked aspect of it. Tune in to find out what that is.

In this episode we look at how some of the scholars of our rich, intellectual tradition have conceptualized existence and understood its parts to contain anywhere from one to 100,000 levels of being!

We then read selected parts of Imam al-Haddad's book The Lives of Man, in which the Involuntary Journey is understood to be comprised of five key stages of existence.

Our aim is to further strengthen our foundation of the Involuntary Journey in Surah al-Fatihah and Straight Path worldview, and build upon it with some detail and new levels of understanding.

This is essential knowledge for anyone concerned with developing a sound Quranic worldview and grounding themselves in a universal, holistic Islamic scholarly perspective.

What is the 'Involuntary Journey'?

We establish the first part of our al-Fatihah world view by understanding this fundamental aspect of human existence, from the ب in the Basmalah to the Yawm al-Din.