The Salafi movement or Salafism is a revival movement within Sunni Islam, which was formed as a socio-religious resistance to European imperialism during the late 19th century and has remained influential in the Islamic World for over a century. The name "Salafiyya" refers to advocacy of a return to the traditions of the "pious predecessors", the first three generations of Muslims, who are believed to exemplify the pure form of Islam. In practice, Salafis maintain that Muslims ought to rely on the Qur'an, the Sunnah and the 'Ijma (consensus) of the salaf, giving these writings precedence over later religious interpretations. The Salafi movement aimed to achieve a renewal of Muslim life and had a major influence on many Muslim thinkers and movements across the Islamic world.
Hassan Hanafi was a professor and chaired the philosophy department at Cairo University. He was a leading authority on modern Islam.
The Islamic University of Madinah is a public Islamic university in Medina, Saudi Arabia. Established by King Saud bin Abdulaziz in 1961, the institute is said to have been associated with Salafism, while claiming to have exported Salafi-inclined theologians around the world. Others disagree and state that the institution is objective and scientific, being detached to any singular ideology. It received institutional academic accreditation without exceptions from the National Commission for Academic Accreditation and Assessment in April 2017.
David Frank Ford is an Anglican public theologian. He was the Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, beginning in 1991. He is now an Emeritus Regius Professor of Divinity. His research interests include political theology, ecumenical theology, Christian theologians and theologies, theology and poetry, the shaping of universities and of the field of theology and religious studies within universities, hermeneutics, and interfaith theology and relations. He is the founding director of the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme and a co-founder of the Society for Scriptural Reasoning.
The Association of Christian Universities and Colleges in Asia (ACUCA) is an organization of Christian universities and colleges in Asia, dedicated to Christian witness and service in the field of education. It consists of 69 institutions: 3 in Hong Kong, 2 in India, 15 in Indonesia, 15 in Japan, 7 in Korea, 1 in Myanmar, 13 in the Philippines, 9 in Taiwan and 4 in Thailand.
Growth of religion involves the spread of individual religions and the increase in the numbers of religious adherents around the world. In sociology, desecularization is the proliferation or growth of religion, most commonly after a period of previous secularization. Statistics commonly measure the absolute number of adherents, the percentage of the absolute growth per-year, and the growth of converts in the world.
The South East Asia Graduate School of Theology (SEAGST) is a Protestant graduate school of theology, established in 1966 and operated by the Association for Theological Education in South East Asia (ATESEA) in cooperation with and on behalf of member schools of ATESEA. The headquarters is located in the offices of ATESEA in Manila, Philippines.
Islamic modernism is a movement that has been described as "the first Muslim ideological response to the Western cultural challenge," attempting to reconcile the Islamic faith with modern values such as democracy, civil rights, rationality, equality, and progress. It featured a "critical reexamination of the classical conceptions and methods of jurisprudence", and a new approach to Islamic theology and Quranic exegesis (Tafsir). A contemporary definition describes it as an "effort to re-read Islam's fundamental sources—the Qur'an and the Sunna, —by placing them in their historical context, and then reinterpreting them, non-literally, in the light of the modern context."
Clinton Bennett is a British-American scholar of Religious studies and participant in interfaith dialogue, specializing in Islamic studies and the relations between Islam and other religions. He is also a published author.
Sidney H. Griffith is a professor of Early Christian Studies at the Catholic University of America. His main areas of interest are Arabic Christianity, Syriac monasticism, medieval Christian-Muslim encounters and ecumenical and interfaith dialogue.
Islam in Lebanon has a long and continuous history. According to an estimate by the CIA, it is followed by 63% of the country's total population. Sunnis make up 31.9%, Twelver Shia make up 31.2%, next to smaller percentages of other Shia branches, such as Alawites and Ismailis. The Druze community is designated as one of the five Lebanese Muslim communities, even though most Druze do not identify as Muslims, and they do not accept the five pillars of Islam.
Shabbir Akhtar was a British Muslim philosopher, poet, researcher, writer and multilingual scholar. He was on the Faculty of Theology and Religions at the University of Oxford. His interests included political Islam, Quranic exegesis, revival of philosophical discourse in Islam, Islamophobia, extremism, terrorism and Christian-Muslim relations as well as Islamic readings of the New Testament. Shabbir Akhtar was also a Søren Kierkegaard scholar. Akhtar's articles have appeared both in academic journals and in the UK press. Several of his books have been translated into the major Islamic languages.
Non-denominational Muslims are Muslims who do not belong to, do not self-identify with, or cannot be readily classified under one of the identifiable Islamic schools and branches. Such Muslims do not think of themselves as belonging to a denomination but rather as "just Muslims" or "non-denominational Muslims."
Education has played a central role in Islam since the beginnings of the religion, owing in part to the centrality of scripture and its study in the Islamic tradition. Before the modern era, education would begin at a young age with study of Arabic and the Quran. For the first few centuries of Islam, educational settings were entirely informal, but beginning in the 11th and 12th centuries, the ruling elites began to establish institutions of higher religious learning known as madrasas in an effort to secure support and cooperation of the ulema. Madrasas soon multiplied throughout the Islamic world, which helped to spread Islamic learning beyond urban centers and to unite diverse Islamic communities in a shared cultural project. Madrasas were devoted principally to study of Islamic law, but they also offered other subjects such as theology, medicine, and mathematics. Muslims historically distinguished disciplines inherited from pre-Islamic civilizations, such as philosophy and medicine, which they called "sciences of the ancients" or "rational sciences", from Islamic religious sciences. Sciences of the former type flourished for several centuries, and their transmission formed part of the educational framework in classical and medieval Islam. In some cases, they were supported by institutions such as the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, but more often they were transmitted informally from teacher to student.
Djohan Effendi was the Secretary of State of Indonesia, under President Abdurrahman Wahid from 2000 to 2001. He was an Ahmadi and belonged to the Lahore branch and was an ardent advocate for the Ahmadiyya movement. He was known for having been a prominent liberal thinker of Islam in Indonesia, more specifically based in Yogyakarta and a part of the Jogja-based liberal Islamic intellectual group known as the Limited Group led by Mukti Ali. He also served as chair of the International Centre for Religious Pluralism and voiced criticism toward the issuance of the fatwa by Majelis Ulama Indonesia targeting religious pluralism in 2005.
Budhy Munawar-Rachman is an Indonesian progressive Islamic scholar. He is a lecturer of Islamic studies at Paramadina University and an editor of Islamic journal Ulummul Qur'an. He is influenced highly by the renowned Indonesian Islamic scholar Nurcholish Madjid and considered as the successor of Madjid's strand of progressive Islamic thoughts, namely Islamic neo-modernism.
Ahmad Wahib was an Indonesian progressive Islamic intellectual. He is known for his reformist thinking especially from his diary in the publication Pergolakan Pemikiran Islam edited by his fellow progressive Islamic thinkers Djohan Effendi and Ismet Natsir. In his diary, he criticized heavily the perceived rigidity and the absolutism of Islamic traditions and advocated for the radical reapproach on religious norms. He was a part of the Yogyakarta based progressive Islamic intellectual circle Limited Group led by Mukti Ali. In one interview with Douglas E. Ramage, an Indonesian intellectual graduated from the University of South Carolina, he referred to Wahib as one of the revolutionary Islamic thinkers. He died in a traffic accident on March 31, 1972, at the age of 30.
Sunan Ampel State Islamic University Surabaya, also abbreviated as UIN Sunan Ampel, is one of the state Islamic universities in Indonesia based in Surabaya which organizes multidisciplinary Islamic education as well as secular education including science and technology. The university has history of cultivating the intellectual background for Islamic movements and organizations, especially for Nahdlatul Ulama. UIN Surabaya is named after Sunan Ampel, one of Wali Sanga, the legendary Sufi figures who greatly contributed to the spread of Islam in Indonesia.
Sunan Gunung Djati State Islamic University Bandung, also known as UIN Bandung or often abbreviated as UIN SGD, is a state Islamic university based in Cibiru District, Bandung, West Java. The university has a history of cultivating the intellectual background for Islamic movements and organizations, Nahdlatul Ulama. The university is named after Sunan Gunungjati, who was one of the Wali Sanga, the legendary Sufi figures who contributed greatly to the spread of Islam in Indonesia.
Christine Schirrmacher is a German academic who specialises in Islamic studies. She is professor of Islamic studies at the University of Bonn and at the Evangelical Theological Faculty (ETF), Leuven.
