Conceptual Islam - new book published

Below are some selected quotes from my new title "Conceptual Islam - Escaping false paradigms" published on Kindle. A print edition may follow.

Most textbooks on Islam tell us that Islam is a way of life. The briefest of reality checks will tell us that Muslims’ way of life is today shaped by a plethora of other influences with Islam as an add-on. This apparent discrepancy has relegated the notion of true Islam into either the past as a praised, but lost historic example from the days of the prophet and his companions or into the future as a utopian dream of a return to the golden age "when the Mahdi comes". Neither offers much solace or hope for the Muslim struggling with the here and now.

Conceptualising Islam means to move away from the narrow constraints of mere practices and to discover the underlying purpose. Naturally, Islam being a divinely inspired, or rather ordained, way of life, not a man-made system, such a road of discovery must always be guided by the teachings of both the Qur’an and the prophet. Yet, at the same time, it must not get stuck in the environment in which the Qur’an was first taught. Early Muslim scholars well understood this need for adaptability. Sadly, most of today’s Muslim scholars are only apt at passing on knowledge, not wisdom.

My analysis postulates that we are trying to hold on to an Islamic paradigm whilst having willingly surrendered to non-Islamic (secular) concepts. Examples for these are heliocentricity, relativism or evolution. We inertly resent some of their teachings, because they challenge the divine origin and destiny of all that is, and that is exactly what they intend to do. Yet we have become unable to assess their merits and shortcomings since we have accepted "science" as the benchmark of truth, adding a little bit of "Islamisation" at the frills, instead of measuring its claims against the yardstick of revelation.

Truth is absolute and cannot be divided. The claim that there may be many truths is an aberrant mind game defying basic logic. Whatever is true cannot, at the same time, be false, hence the opposite of an established truth cannot, at the same time, also be true. Relativism, therefore, is an erosion of truth.

Power can be taken or given. Sometimes, power feels the need to be justified, at other times it views this as a weakness. However, power does not exist in a vacuum. It has both a source and a purpose. We need to understand where a given power is derived from and what it aims to achieve.

Knowledge can be learned. Wisdom needs to be acquired through experience. Experience is gained from both success and failure. Too much success tends to make people careless, too much failure, on the other hand, despondent. The latter very much describes our present reality. Sadly, Western philosophy did not embrace the clarity of Kant (whose PhD certificate incidentally is headed with the Bismillah formula), but rather the materialism of Darwin, nihilism of Nietzsche and confusion of Heidegger. Where reasoning is applied consistently and consequently, empirical research ultimately reaches the same conclusions as those imparted through revealed knowledge.

Secular science has replaced geocentrism with heliocentrism, that is, it has replaced the earth as the centre of the universe with the sun. Again, there is more to this than meets the eye. If the earth is not special, then man is not special; he evolved rather than purposefully having been placed there.

Sun and star worship has always been a substitute for the worship of Lucifer, the false light made from fire who pretends to free man’s spirit and actions from the yoke of God, and thus making the sun replace the earth as the centre of our world is also symbolical of replacing worship of God with the worship of the devil.


In Islamic cosmology, there are seven heavens, our universe, ornamented with stars, being the lowest of them. ... Allah’s throne rests above all of them (carried by eight) and is the only permanent point of reference, everything in creation being subject to the cycle of life and thus circling around it. The circumbulation of the Kaabah is a visual representation of this fact on earth, with the black stone, besides representing a handshake between all Muslims, the first and the last of them, being a "portal" to other dimensions. The concentric circles surrounding the Kaabah of the faithful praying establish an energy field on earth which provides a measure of protection from harm. That the Tawaf was halted completely during the lockdown period of the alleged pandemic is therefore not insignificant, nor is the continuous barring of pilgrims from touching or kissing the black stone. It indicates a triumph of materialism over the spiritual, yet I am not aware of a single contemporary Muslim scholar having raised objections to these arrangements.

Instead, the very same "teachers" of Islam who earlier insisted that the media and politicians who were peddling the Islamic terrorism narrative were corrupt, spreaders of immorality and could not be trusted, suddenly, when supporting the Covid-19 narrative and the permissibility of and need for the vaccination programme, tried to convince us that the same media and politicians only had our best interests at heart and worked tirelessly to protect us from a deadly virus...

We now live in the age of the Dajjal, the great liar and deceiver. For centuries we have been lied to until it is hardly possible to distinguish the truth from falsehood. Good manners are deemed old-fashioned, immorality and rudeness considered liberating and progressive. Most of what we have been taught as reality is built on a lie. The fiat money we use has no intrinsic value. In the name of freedom we have been enslaved to an industrial process. Democracy sells us the illusion of power and influence whilst all relevant decisions are made without our involvement. In fact it is an adversarial system of competing parties which prevents cooperation for the greater good, just as the adversarial court system prevents the dispensation of true justice.

The "divide and rule" method of control goes deeper than commonly thought. In computing it is known as digitisation: a real image or sound are reduced to binary digits from which a representation or semblance of the image is created for ease of control, in this case portability and manipulation. Society, likewise has been remodelled by breaking it down into constituents which can be more easily re-arranged.

A further tool in the arsenal of the deceivers is virtualisation: reality is replaced by a projection of reality. Advances in communication technology have made us largely dependent on devices through which we perceive the world around us. Real friends are replaced by virtual ones, real relationships by commercialised encounters, real news by infotainment, real convictions by pseudo-beliefs.

The solution can therefore not be based on the same false premises which lead to the problem. For Muslims, wanting to escape from the bondage of secular concepts, a complete rethink is required.

Having been disarmed, dispossessed of land and deprived of sound Islamic education, it is difficult for the Muslim Ummah to find its feet. Some individuals or groups may be more fortunate in being able to limit the effects of the system around them, especially those living in rural areas, however for most Muslims living in cities this is extremely difficult. Since our scholars, mostly bought or blindfolded, have let us down, we need to rely on our own resources and mutual support. In attempting to do so, paradoxically, we depend on the very structures provided by the system which we are trying to evade or escape: the internet, smart phones, digital payment methods etc. Alternatives, such as barter trading, are limited to a locality. Resolving this contradiction appears an almost impossible task and must be given high priority.

In economy, the debt- and interest-based exploitative system must be replaced with a charitable system of mutual support. For decades already, Muslims have tried to compete on the market place of financial instruments and derivatives, looking for novel legalistic interpretations to make the haram halal, such as alleged Islamic mortgages which are usually more expensive than others available from high street banks. If standard mortgages are taking advantage of the need of the poor, then “Islamic mortgages” do so to an even greater degree by charging them even more overall. The prophet of Islam was not sent as a lawyer or accountant, he was sent with justice.

Never before in known human history has there been so much mass slaughter as since the advent of industrialised "civilisation". Contrary to history teaching, these global wars were engineered by a hitherto hidden power elite who used interest of a means to manipulate the economies of the world and enslave its people and used wars to consolidate their power. War and interest are inextricably linked.

A sound analysis of a problem or correct diagnosis of a disease is a mandatory requirement prior to prescribing a course of treatment. It does not mean that a treatment is readily available or even that a cure exists or will be found. Yet, once a problem is known, solutions tend to present themselves over time.