“I’ve long felt that walking away from the faith would be running away… Notice that I use the word ‘faith’: I try not to use the word ‘religion’ – I’m not that interested in organised ritual. I’m interested in the notions of faith…”

Maybe when you have that great “conversation with God” you’re deluded to look forward to on That Day, you can ask Him why He insists on using the word “Deen” all the time and giving us all these “rituals”.

Idiot.

“After high school, Aslan set off for a degree in religion from Santa Clara University, a Jesuit-run school, where he spent Sunday evenings at church services. In class, he learned how to do textual analysis on theological writings to study religion. It was an area in which Christians had a modern-day head start on Muslims, and learning to master it was going to serve Aslan well. [...]
“Aslan earned a master’s degree in theological studies at Harvard and then a master of fine arts in fiction at the University of Iowa—unusual credentials for a scholar of Islam, but valuable assets in today’s war of ideas in the Muslim world.”
http://asranomani.com/writings/archives/2005/12/post.php

Not just “unusual credentials”, not that there’s anything wrong with having a broad education to inform Islamic scholarship. The problem is that they are insufficient credentials to begin reinterpreting Islam. If anything, they are proof of the problem.

Islamic scholars developed sophisticated sciences of interpretation (tafseer) from the earliest days of the Qur’an, and these precede biblical hermeneutics by many centuries. No way do Christians have a “head start”. The Muslim exegetes analysed every word and inflection, and discussed the challenges posed by the Qur’anic discourse.

I wonder how the Jesuit methodology has skewed Aslan’s approach to Qur’anic interpretation.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060619/lalami