Behind the Masks: From Shock to the Certainty of Abstraction

The examples I have given — Sheikh al-Albānī, Abu Malik, Dr Muhammad Shahrur and my late friend Maher Hasan, may God have mercy on them all — are only a drop from the ocean: a few chosen moments from a journey that searched every corner of the map of Islamic thought. I did not settle for one school over another. My migration in knowledge was a journey of enquiry through the depths of the schools and sects. I kept company with the Sufis in their retreats, studied Ashʿarī logic in its foundational texts, immersed myself in Shīʿī thought, and investigated the thought of the Muslim Brotherhood and other activist movements. There was no scholar within my reach at whose door I did not knock, searching for the essential thread that had been lost amid the noise of the sects. My aim was always to confront the guardians of inherited tradition with the reality of what they carried, and to dismantle the structure of inherited certainty that had confined the Creator within narrow linguistic and human moulds. This was nowhere clearer than in one decisive conversation with Dr Zaghloul El-Naggar, may God have mercy on him. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved