Renovatio

06/13/2024

“The realm of existence where sense perception dominates constitutes the relative existence of flux and shadow. Intriguingly, works of Islamic mystical or Sufi literature have adopted the imagery of shadows to represent this relative existence. According to Javad Nurbakhsh, the late Iranian mystic and master (pīr) of the Nimatullahi Sufi order, the “field of shadows” that can be found in several works of Sufi poetry “refers to relative existence whose appearance becomes manifest by the determined forms of contingent essences.”
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https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/spirituality-in-the-postmodern-world

06/12/2024

Sacred scriptures, and the literary works spawned by them, are replete with imageries of paths and passages, of wandering and wayfaring.
https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/what-walking-can-do-for-our-souls

06/12/2024

Abū Nasr al-Fārābī was born in about 870/2561 beyond the Oxus River—either in Farab, Kazakhstan, or Faryab, Turkestan. He studied Islamic jurisprudence and music in Bukhara, then journeyed to Marv, where he studied Aristotelian logic with Nestorian Christian monks, most notably Yūhannā b. Haylān. Not long afterward, he went to Baghdad to continue studying logic with Ibn Haylān. In Baghdad, he attended the courses of the famous Nestorian Christian translator and student of Aristotle, Mattā b. Yūnus, and sought to improve his grasp of Arabic by studying with the prominent philologist Ibn al-Sarrāj.
https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/alfarabis-political-teaching

06/11/2024

Have you watched our Seven Deadly Sins series? Here's a behind-the-scenes moment between Editor-in-Chief

and filmmaker Omar Mullick.
Watch the entire 7-part series here: https://zaytuna.edu/Seven-Deadly-Sins

06/11/2024

Just as there is order in the universe, such that some existing things are subordinated to others according to their functions, so should there be order in the political realm.
https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/alfarabis-political-teaching

06/10/2024

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming”

https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/the-incoherence-of-secular-messiahs

06/10/2024

NEW from Philosophy Professor Muhammad U. Faruque: "We Are Not Our Brain"

An article on how poets and philosophers saw the immaterial life of the self.

https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/we-are-not-our-brain

06/09/2024

“With his famous madman shouting in the marketplace to proclaim the ‘death of God,’ Nietzsche diagnoses the post-religion West as a culture that has denied God’s existence… has denied all absolutes, such that ‘nothing necessary remains in one’s hands.’”
https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/the-incoherence-of-secular-messiahs

06/09/2024

"We Are Not Our Brain"

The authority of science in culture has reduced the human self to the brain, but if we relearn how the poets and philosophers of the past understood the self, we’ll see how we’ve regressed, not progressed.

06/08/2024

We often understand philosophy as secular and rational and faith as transcendent and irrational. But are the two really separate?
https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/how-we-split-the-world-apart

06/08/2024

Al-Farabi's reflection on the challenges philosophy presents to revealed religion seems to prompt his focus on the way philosophy relates to religion and his founding of political philosophy within his cultural milieu.
https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/alfarabis-political-teaching

06/07/2024

NEW PODCAST: "The Trouble with Consciousness" with Mark Damien Delp and Esme Partridge https://t.co/LWXGT4vmVi

06/06/2024

Awakenings are of many kinds and can come at any age. https://youtu.be/ojyCGp9yDgA

06/06/2024

Does consciousness really belong to a human being, or is it just something that happens to be in a human being, or accessible to a human being?

https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/media/the-trouble-with-consciousness

06/05/2024

In this episode of the Renovatio podcast, Esme Partridge and Mark Delp discuss how the study and observation of consciousness have changed historically and where we land in our current era.

https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/media/the-trouble-with-consciousness

06/05/2024

For Nietzsche, the dictates of morality are not sent down from heaven but merely reflect the human psyche, specifically, man’s “will to power.” The way forward is to move, as expressed in the title of one of his works, “beyond good and evil,” because the ancient designations of good (denoting power and pride) and bad (denoting weakness and meekness) were inverted by Abrahamic religion to, respectively, the notions of evil (as sin) and good (as virtue and piety). In Nietzsche’s world, the latter terms are mere designations of a “slave morality” invented by the impotent, in revolt and spiteful resentment against “master” warrior elites. The collapse of metaphysics allows Nietzsche to provide this genealogy of morals from a historicist approach; with a pessimism reminiscent of Schopenhauer (who greatly influenced him), he proceeds to “philosophize with a hammer” and deconstruct absolutes, one after another. Good and evil are now reduced to values, which are relative or perspectival. Nietzsche boldly asserts, “There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena” (again, echoing Hume’s is/ought dichotomy). Later, he continues to use his proverbial “philosophical hammer” to smash ethical truth, this time to reveal its alleged bedrock of feeling: “In short, moralities too are only a sign-language of the emotions.” Objective, universal, absolute Truth does not exist and hence cannot be pursued, let alone ground the claims and concerns of mankind, for they inhabit “a world whose essence is will to power.”
https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/the-incoherence-of-secular-messiahs

06/04/2024

"The New Age definition of consciousness, which has so permeated Western societies as to be virtually ubiquitous, is exceedingly broad: consciousness can signify spiritual states of the human mind, the illumined minds of quasi-divine beings, a field of awareness belonging to the earth and to the cosmos itself, and God."

https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/on-the-minds-devotion-to-reality

06/04/2024

The modern world knows it faces a void of meaning—and in a strange recurrence of history, some secular intellectuals are now calling for various forms of paganism.
https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/the-incoherence-of-secular-messiahs

06/03/2024

To read more about the history of inter-religious companionship and life-saving solidarity read this recently published article: https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/the-sin-of-cosmocide

04/17/2024

NEW: The Incoherence of Secular Messiahs:
Why the New Paganists Cannot Fill the Void of Nihilism by Faraz Khan

https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/the-incoherence-of-secular-messiahs

04/17/2024

True justice requires a commitment to temperate behavior and the exercise of self-restraint, even in the face of extreme provocation.

True justice requires a commitment to temperate behavior and the exercise of self-restraint, even in the face of extreme provocation.

04/15/2024

NEW: Justice, Nonaggression, and Military Ethics in Islam

True justice requires a commitment to temperate behavior and the exercise of self-restraint, even in the face of extreme provocation.

03/30/2024

The modern world knows it faces a void of meaning—and in a strange recurrence of history, some secular intellectuals are now calling for various forms of paganism.

Read "The Incoherence of Secular Messiahs" by Faraz Khan

https://bookstore.zaytuna.edu/products/renovatio-the-incoherence-of-modernitys-messiahs

03/29/2024

Without grounding in traditional Islamic philosophy and metaphysics, Muslims risk jeopardizing a profound intellectual heritage that can contribute, on its own terms, to modern society.

Read "The Importance of Being Earnest about
Islamic Philosophy" by Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Hamza Yusuf
https://bookstore.zaytuna.edu/products/renovatio-the-incoherence-of-modernitys-messiahs

03/19/2024

In the new edition of Renovatio, writers take aim at the totalizing ideologies that plague our world today. These ideologies seek—but inevitably fail—to fill the void left by the absence of religion in modern society.
Pick up your copy of the new edition to read new essays by Caner Dagli, Asma Asfaruddin, Rosabel Ansari, Charles Butterworth, Juan Cole, Muhammad U. Faruque, Mark Damien Delp, Faraz Khan, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Carl R. Trueman, Sophia Vasalou, and Hamza Yusuf

"The Incoherence of Modernity's Messiahs", Renovatio’s Winter 2024 edition.

03/18/2024

"States, in their pompous pronouncements on security, indemnify themselves against charges of terror by specifying the term solely for non-state actors, whereas of course it is states that have killed the bulk of innocent civilians in modern conflicts." Read the new essay by Juan Cole

For Jews and Muslims, killing a soul means killing all of humanity according to their own scriptures. Yet, adherents of both faiths persist in betraying God’s teaching.

03/17/2024

"If extremism and terrorism are a self-evident horror, they do not always come out of nowhere. They can be instruments of overweening ambition and grasping sa**sm, of the quest for power. They can also be wounded and monstrous reactions to state war crimes and crimes against humanity."

For Jews and Muslims, killing a soul means killing all of humanity according to their own scriptures. Yet, adherents of both faiths persist in betraying God’s teaching.

03/16/2024

Messiah | a professed or accepted leader of some hope or cause

Our new collection of essays demonstrates how modernity's totalizing ideologies—which seek to 'save' us—exacerbate the void left by religion's departure from culture.

https://bookstore.zaytuna.edu/collections/renovatio/products/renovatio-the-incoherence-of-modernitys-messiahs

03/15/2024

Does Islam exist as an ever-unchanging reality? Or is Islam whatever Muslims happen to say it is?

Caner Dagli explores these questions in his new essay "Islam as One Thing, Anything, or Nothing: What the Western Academy Gets Wrong"

Despite often impressive erudition and empathy, Western academics attempting to “conceptualize Islam” miss something significant: that they must first identify a group of Muslims they take as a standard before theorizing their practice and their legacy.