Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Reading Benazir’s Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West There are some important books that Muslim world should have taken better note of. They have something important to say though certain things might be objected to on both religious and philosophical grounds. Some selections from them deserve serious consideration. Such works include works of almost all the authors approvingly quoted in the last chapter of Benazir Bhutto’s Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West . The problems that Benazir highlights are indeed noteworthy. She notes, for instance, that “now almost half the world’s Muslims are illiterate. The combined GDP of the member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) is about the same as that of France, a single European country. More books are translated annually from other languages into Spanish than have been translated into Arabic over the past one hundred years. The 15 million citizens of tiny Greece buy more books annually than do al...

Reading Muslim Philosophers on Women Question Granting that the term feminism would be understood rather loosely as struggle to restore women’s legitimate dignity or rights as humans would not be objected, and rescuing it from loaded ideological content given to it in academic discourse by extremist secular and fundamentalist elements alike, one might note that there are Islamist feminists who defend what they see as rights of women given by Islam and interpreted by traditional scholars, especially medieval authorities or fuqaha (such women wear and ideally preach niqab/ hijab and believe in normativity of home or private vs. public binary as far as possible). There are secularist feminists who though may be culturally a Muslim or otherwise or even devout Muslim in their own view  say invoking historical Islam is part of a problem and struggle for women’s rights should be purely secular (they generally resist hijab ) and Muslim feminists who say Islam is part of solution...