Al-Ghazali, full name Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad aṭ-Ṭūsiyy al-Ġazzālīy, and known in Persian-speaking countries as Imam Muhammad-i Ghazali or in Medieval Europe by the Latinized as Algazelus or Algazel, was a Persian Sunni Muslim polymath. He is known as one of the most prominent and influential jurisconsults, legal theoreticians, muftis, philosophers, theologians, logicians and mystics in Islamic history.
The Al-Azhar University is a public university in Cairo, Egypt. Associated with Al-Azhar Al-Sharif in Islamic Cairo, it is Egypt's oldest degree-granting university and is known as one of the most prestigious universities for Islamic learning. In addition to higher education, Al-Azhar oversees a national network of schools with approximately two million students. As of 1996, over 4,000 teaching institutes in Egypt were affiliated with the university.
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.
Muhammad Nasir al-Din Al-Albānī, commonly known by his nisbaAl-Albāni, was an Albanian Islamic scholar. In particular he was a famous Salafi hadith scholar. A major figure of the Salafi methodology of Islam, he established his reputation in Syria, where his family had moved and where he was educated as a child.
Khaled Abou el Fadl is the Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law where he has taught courses on International Human Rights, Islamic jurisprudence, National Security Law, Law and Terrorism, Islam and Human Rights, Political Asylum, and Political Crimes and Legal Systems. He is also the founder of the Usuli Institute, a non-profit public charity dedicated to research and education to promote humanistic interpretations of Islam, as well as the Chair of the Islamic Studies Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has lectured on and taught Islamic law in the United States and Europe in academic and non-academic environments since approximately 1990.
Maqasid or maqāṣid al-sharīʿa is an Islamic legal doctrine. Together with another related classical doctrine, maṣlaḥa, it has come to play an increasingly prominent role in modern times. The notion of maqasid was first clearly articulated by al-Ghazali, who argued that maslaha was God's general purpose in revealing the divine law, and that its specific aim was preservation of five essentials of human well-being: religion, life, intellect, lineage, and property. Although most classical-era jurists recognized maslaha and maqasid as important legal principles, they held different views regarding the role they should play in Islamic law. Some jurists viewed them as auxiliary rationales constrained by scriptural sources and qiyas. Others regarded them as an independent source of law, whose general principles could override specific inferences based on the letter of scripture. While the latter view was held by a minority of classical jurists, in modern times it came to be championed in different forms by prominent scholars who sought to adapt Islamic law to changing social conditions by drawing on the intellectual heritage of traditional jurisprudence. These scholars expanded the inventory of maqasid to include such aims of sharia as reform and women's rights ; justice and freedom ; and human dignity and rights.
Muhammad Abu Zahra, (1974-1898) was an Egyptian public intellectual and an influential Hanafi jurist. He occupied a number of positions; he was a lecturer of Islamic law at Al-Azhar University and a professor at Cairo University. He was also a member of the Islamic Research Academy. His works include Abu Hanifa, Malik and al-Shafi'i.
Omid Safi is a Shia, Iranian-American Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. He served as the Director of Duke Islamic Studies Center from July 2014 to June 2019 and was a columnist for On Being. Safi specializes in Islamic mysticism (Sufism), contemporary Islamic thought and medieval Islamic history. He has served on the board of the Pluralism project at Harvard University and served as the co-chair of the steering committee for the Study of Islam and the Islamic Mysticism Group at the American Academy of Religion. Before joining Duke University, Safi was a professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Prior to joining the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he was on faculty at Colgate University as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion from 1999 - 2004.
Asma Afsaruddin is an American scholar of Islamic studies and Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Indiana University in Bloomington.
Sheikh Mohammed al-Ghazali al-Saqqa (1917–1996), was an Islamic scholar whose writings "have influenced generations of Egyptians". The author of 94 books, he attracted a broad following with works that sought to interpret Islam and its holy book, the Qur'an, in a modern light. He is widely credited with contributing to a revival of Islamic faith in Egypt in recent times. Another sources have called him "one of the most revered sheikhs in the Muslim world".
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."
Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din bin Abdil-Qadir Al-Hilali was a 20th-century Moroccan Salafi, most notable for his English translations of Sahih Bukhari and, along with Muhammad Muhsin Khan, the Qur'an, entitled The Noble Qur'an.
Religious liberalism is a conception of religion which emphasizes personal and group liberty and rationality. It is an attitude towards one's own religion which contrasts with a traditionalist or orthodox approach, and it is directly opposed by trends of religious fundamentalism. It is related to religious liberty, which is the tolerance of different religious beliefs and practices, but not all promoters of religious liberty are in favor of religious liberalism, and vice versa.
David Bakewell Burrell, was a priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross and an American educator, theologian, writer and translator. He was the Theodore Hesburgh Professor emeritus in Philosophy and Theology at University of Notre Dame, US. He wrote around thirteen books on Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions. He knew several languages; he translated two books of Al-Ghazali from Arabic into English. He also taught comparative theology, ethics and development at Uganda Martyrs University, Nkozi, Uganda; Tangaza College, Nairobi, Kenya; and Hebrew University, Jerusalem. During 1960s, he was involved in Anti-Vietnam War Movement. He was also a professor at Notre Dame University Bangladesh.
Starting in the mid-1970s and 1980s, Salafism and Wahhabism — along with other Sunni interpretations of Islam favored by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies — achieved a "preeminent position of strength in the global expression of Islam."
Robert Scott Appleby is an American historian, focusing in global religion and its relationship to peace and conflict, integral human development, and comparative modern religion. He is a Professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, and currently the Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs.
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.
Abul Fadl Mohsin Ebrahim is a Seychellois scholar of Islamic bioethics and emeritus professor of Islamic Studies in the School of Religion and Theology at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. He is a Senior Professor and researcher at the Regent Business School in Durban, South Africa and the Academic Research Director of the International Institute of Islamic Thought.
Islamic advice literature may include collections of stories or anecdotes such as legal opinion, interpretation of religious text, legal theory, guidance, consultation, or Islamic stories.
What Is a Madrasa? is a book authored by Islamic scholar and intellectual Ebrahim Moosa. The book is a blend of autobiography, advocacy, ethnography, and history and gives an insider perspective of the Deobandi madrasas in the Indian subcontinent. It was published by University of North Carolina Press in April 2015.
