Writers, when they come to teach you the humanities, run away.
The divorce of dignity and method afflicts and impairs every system of thought. Law, for example, ceases to serve the ends of providing for human dignity if it restricts itself to a blind allegiance of rules, or to a rigorous imposition of doctrine. Dignity is the first victim of such tyranny.
The incapability of contemporary Islamic Legal Theory to attend to today’s problems is a consequence of the enthronement of particular methodologies to a level of authoritativeness simply due to said methodologies’ old age. What has happened, in time, is that today’s Muslim can find no feasible “Islamic” way of inserting the ideas of human decency into the status quo because the emphasis is on rules, not people.
Old rules, however, don’t give a cruel world a conscience. The result, today, is that there is only one Islamic culture - that of helplessness. Man suffers for the sake of adherence to words that have become sacrosanct because of how much dust has collected on them.
Apathy is the opposite of helplessness but is the child of the same father - stasis. Instead of emerging from a lack of things, as helplessness does, it occurs despite overabundance and luxury. Whereas the Muslim world’s inability to emphasize the value of a person leads it into a spiral of sadness and grief, modern American culture suffers from a similar disease which leads to a culture of apathy.
Consider this:
The pet-theories of the most prestigious scholars, are, on the whole, methodological masturbation. Read More
