John locke contributions to society by muslims

Ibn Tufayl’s novel tells the tale of Hayy, a boy growing up alone on a deserted island, with animals. As he grows up, Hayy uses his senses and reason to understand the workings of the natural world. He explores the laws of nature, devises a rational theology and entertains theories about the origin of the universe. He develops a sense of ethics: Out of mercy for animals, he turns vegetarian, and out of care for plants, he preserves their seeds.

Hayy then leaves his island and visits a religious society. He finds that the teachings of reason and religion are compatible and complementary. Yet he notices that some religious people may be crude, even hypocritical. He returns to his island, where he had found God and developed his concepts of truth, morality and ethics by relying on observation and reasoning.

Ibn Tufayl’s message was clear — and for its times, quite bold: Religion was a path to truth, but it was not the only path. Man was blessed with divine revelation, and with reason and conscience from within. People could be wise and virtuous without religion or a different religion.

The translations of “Hayy ibn Yaqzan” in early modern Europe — by Edward Pococke Jr. into Latin in 1671, by George Keith into English in 1674, by Simon Ockley into English in 1708 — sold widely. Among the admirers of Ibn Tufayl’s work were the Enlightenment philosophers Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and John Locke, who were trying to advance a sense of human dignity in a Christendom long tormented by religious wars and sectarian persecutions.

Fans of the novel also included a new Protestant sect: Quakers. Mr. Keith, a leading Quaker minister, who translated the novelinto English, helped publicize it in European intellectuals circles. He admired the novel, for it echoed the Quaker doctrine that every human being had an “inward light” — regardless of faith, gender or race. That humanist theology would have prof

Some day in January 2013, I got on a plane from Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, to Istanbul, the metropolis of Turkey. What made the otherwise unmemorable flight rather memorable was the dress code of some female passengers that changed dramatically from the departure to the destination.

In Riyadh, they all boarded on the plane all covered, from head-to-toe. When the plane approached Istanbul, however, I noticed some of these women walk back to the lavatory and emerge dressed in a very different fashion. Now, they were all wearing much more relaxed dresses—a few of which were quite revealing—along with heavy makeup. One woman, I can say, was wearing one of the shortest miniskirts I had ever seen. Apparently, she was ready to party in Istanbul’s famous nightclubs.

I tell this story in the beginning of my latest book, Why, As a Muslim, I Defend Liberty. The point I make out of it is a simple fact: Religious coercion does not lead to genuine piety. It only leads to hypocrisy. If people are forced to practice a religion, they don’t do it out of a sincere will to obey God. They do it out a disdained obligation to obey men.

This simple fact must be intuitively obvious to most people, but it isn’t to the mutawwa, or the “religion police” forces that Saudi Arabia has employed for decades, in order to discipline society in the name of God. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a similarly oppressive religious regime, as the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” will now become, for the second time, under the harsh rule of the Taliban.

But the same simple fact — that coercion isn’t good for religion — wasn’t obvious also to many Christians, for many centuries. That is why they established theocratic kingdoms, persecuted “heretics,” and even tortured victims to “save their souls.” And that is why John Locke, the father of liberalism, had to write his 1689 classic, A Letter Concerning Toleration, in w

CAIRO - 14 June 2017: Today’s American political landscape can be quite a confusing and frightening place. The ideas of the Founding Fathers are commonly cited as the foundation of the nation. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are seen as the infallible documents on which American life are based. Freedom, democracy, and liberty are the cornerstones of political and social ideas in the United States.

At the same time, however, the rising tide of Islamophobia is making its presence felt. Politicians support the characterization of Islamic life as incompatible with American society. Media “pundits” decry the supposed influence Muslims are having on destroying the basis of American political and social ideas.

The truly ironic part of this is that Muslims in fact helped formulate the ideas that the United States is based on. While this article will not argue that Islam and Muslims are the only cause of the American Revolution, the impact that Muslims had on the establishment of America is clear and should not be overlooked.

Islamic philosophy and enlightenment

The political and social ideas that caused the American colonists to revolt against the British Empire were formulated in a movement known as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that argued that science and reason should be the basis of human society, not blind following of monarchs and church authority. On July 4th, 1776, in Philadelphia, the American revolutionaries signed the Declaration of Independence, a document written by Thomas Jefferson and heavily influenced by the Enlightenment, which made official their break from Great Britain and the establishment of the United States of America.

The Enlightenment was driven by a group of European philosophers and scient

Last week, it was highlighted that in 2007 the now newly elected Prime Minister, Mr Boris Johnson, claimed that Islam had resulted in the Muslim world being “literally centuries behind”. A bodacious claim, which Mr Johnson supported by arguing that the printing press was not introduced into the Ottoman Empire until the mid-19 century, centuries after the printing press had already been introduced in mainland Europe. He then seeks to highlight that it was because of Islam that there was “no spread of democracy” amongst Muslim countries leaving them “literally centuries behind”. Such attacks are wildly inaccurate and somewhat obviously so considering that the Islamic civilisation gave rise to inventions from clocks to cameras, universities, algebra and maps. The Islamic civilisation was also paramount in preserving, translating, and contributing to Western understandings of ancient Greek philosophy that was all but forgotten in the ‘West’.

It is often forgotten in modern times that the Islamic civilisation for many centuries was the hub for scholarly thought, a pioneer of scientific discovery, and agents of engineering marvel. The example of the printing press is interesting in particular as the Islamic civilisation was paramount in its production. Indeed, the very production of paper was an art that was practiced in Baghdad 1,100 years ago, circa 751 CE (133 AH). The first paper mill in Egypt was introduced in 850 CE (236 AH), 459 years prior to the first paper mill in England (1309 CE, 709 AH). It was not that the ‘Muslim world’ was adverse to paper, or even the printing press (indeed, Evliya Çelebi, a 17-Century discusses the implications of the printing press in his work), rather the knowledge about the role of the Islamic civilisation has been forgotten. The first printing press, belonging to Muslims, was established by Ibrahim Müteferrika in 1727 only 36 years later than the