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Family Feud: The Islamic Version
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Family Feud: The Islamic Version

Breaking down the Islamic monolith

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Cymposium
Apr 30, 2025
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Family Feud: The Islamic Version
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I swear by the One Whose Hand is the soul of Muhammad, my nation will split into seventy-three sects, one of which will be in Paradise and seventy-two in Hell.

-Sunan Ibn Majah 3992

Islam, that ever-present spectre looming over 21st-century geopolitics, has been at the heart of modern upheaval—first with the attacks of 11th September, then with the so-called War on Terror, and the cascading ruin of the Middle East that continues to unfold even as we speak. In a region where culture and religion are so inextricably bound, Islam—whether as origin, justification, solution, or scapegoat—is invariably woven into the narrative. It is the thread that stitches together every crisis, the backdrop against which each catastrophe is framed.

But what, precisely, is Islam? A question so deceptively simple that Western policymakers, particularly those who launched themselves headlong into Afghanistan and later Iraq, never felt the need to ask it. Their acquaintance with Islam, if it could be called that, extended little beyond the occasional kebab shop in their hometowns, the Arabian Nights fables of Ali Baba and Aladdin, and a vague sense of an exotic, inscrutable faith. Over the years, scholars, journalists, and self-styled experts have laboured to demystify it—some with genuine curiosity, others with ideological agendas masquerading as insight. Yet the result, predictably, has been a divided discourse. The liberal left, ever eager to parade its cultural tolerance, bends over backwards to accommodate Islam within the framework of modern pluralism, while the right-wing sceptics see it as a fundamental and existential threat to their way of life.


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