On January 30, The Washington Post published a report that came as a pleasant surprise to Muslim reformists. It said that that Saudi Arabi...
On January 30, The Washington Post published a report that came as a pleasant surprise to Muslim reformists. It said that that Saudi Arabia was purging its textbooks of anti-Semitic, homophobic and misogynist content.
Among the passages that were removed was a section that supported capital punishment for homosexual relations, adulations of extremist martyrdom and its characterisation as the highest aspiration of Islam, misinterpreted Quranic verses that extolled the superiority of men over woman and justified domestic violence, and a statement attributed to the Prophet that spoke of the killing of all Jews by Muslims as one of the signs of the Day of Judgement.
This momentous theological shift is without doubt a kairotic moment in the history of Sunni Islam and needs to be welcomed by all Muslims. The Islam propagated by Prophet Muhammad was never meant to be a supremacist ideology (mazhab). It was an egalitarian social system (deen) that sought to include in its benignant embrace the whole of humanity.
To emphasise this, the Quran described God as rabb al aalameen (the cherisher of humanity) and the Prophet as rahmatal lil aalameen (the embodiment of universal compassion).
The “Muslim” too was not defined in identitarian terms nor was Islam presented as a propitiatory creed. Islam was the House...
