Talk Islam

thabet

• 04:39:20 am on April 23, 2008 | # | |
  Tags: ideas, philosophy, religion

  Contentions:
  1. Individualism can be traced to the Abrahamic commitment to monotheism, judgement and humanity’s distinction from the world.

  2. Christianity is ideologically unable to accept the existence of other religions. Islam, however, is able to do this.

   

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Comments

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  aziz 6:24 am on April 23, 2008 | #

  re: 1, I would invert it, and say that Abrahamic religion is intensely individualistic, by way of contrast with eastern religion. I don’t think individualism as a general concept originated with Abrahamic thought, though. Depending on how you define individualism, you can find it in any religion, or in none.

  For example, if individualism is holding the self up as the supreme, to the exclusion of the society, then I don’t think Abrahamic religions qualify. If indivdualism is an emphasis on the self to pursue a greater good for the whole, then all religions can be characterized as such.

  Personally I define individualism as the sense that an individual matters as an actor on destiny. In other words, I equate it with free will. This definition has fault lines within Abrahamic faiths as well as beyond them; calvinists vs Unitarians, Mu’tazili vs those who argue the gates of ijtihad are closed, etc.

  2. I agree that the Qur’an explicitly treats other religions’ existence as a fact, and I am ignorant of what the Bible says about it. But admitting their existence and accepting their existence may be two separate things.

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  baraka 12:13 am on April 24, 2008 | #

  2. The Qur’an admits it, but many Muslims have difficulty accepting it.

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