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13th Century Scholar Ibn-Taymiyyah’s Solution to Online Toxicity
Navigating Islamic thought has always been a minefield. If you’re not well-versed on the intricacies of the way jurisprudence interacts with faith, you’ll end up quickly believing that Allah decreed a punishment of the harshest proportions upon people who did not will it. While His Wrath, unescapable, his Love, unending, He still provided nuggets of truth that prove useful to a large portion of the human population until this very day.
In examining the disparities Islamic thought has with say, more orthodox forms of Christianity and Judaism, one can’t help but notice a pattern that is neither uniform nor monolithic, but nonetheless interesting to deconstruct when Islamic literature is concerned — philosophers and theologians responsible for its bulk hail from an era when the Abbasid Caliphate had asserted absolute civilizational dominance over the rest of the globe. Baghdad was a hub for important translation work of once-forgotten Hellenic poetry and philosophy. That ended up infusing many aspects of stoicism with the then-young prospect of Islamic philosophy — one that marries the utilization of sound thinking processes with the divined wisdom found in the Quran and the Hadith.
One of the most influential figures in Islamic literature has undoubtedly been Ibn-Taymiyyah. His work on faith wasn’t only pivotal for so much of the ideological currents when the Caliphate started to…