"Seek knowledge, even unto China" - Prophet Muhammad
As-salamu alaykum, chapos!
After consulting with the cyber Ulama we have decided to create an open thread where curious posters can take a break from the great posting jihad and ask questions on the nature of Islam or the Muslim experience. So long as they are asked in good faith, from a position of truly wanting to learn, these questions will be answered without judgement.
As for Muslims, all of us are free to answer any of the questions, even ones that have already been answered. This is an open thread, and the input of different Islamic perspectives is valuable to getting a big picture.
To all those reading this, remember: No one person is an authority on Islam. This is why it traditionally the din never had its own clergy. Always have this in mind when researching on Islam.
Alright, now GET TO ASKING!
Are there any novel strains or schools of thought within Islam that people may not be familiar with? I'm thinking of something like Liberation Theology in Catholicism.
Yes and no. The problem with Islamic schools of thought is that attempts to develop political Islam in the modern day will automatically be demonized as terroristic, so people tend to avoid doing such. There is Qutbianism - Qutb is the father of political Islam in the modern day. Qutb believed in what one observer has called "a kind of anarcho-Islam", an Islamic polity with no hierarchy, classes, or State, under the Islamic principles of there being no legitimate human authority on earth and all people being equal. Qutb also advocated for jihad against all the current states in the middle east today as being state powers, imperialist colonies, and monarchies, as he believed monarchism was anti-Islamic. However, Qutb had a lot of reactionary opinions, and he also denounced socialism as Western despite he himself advocating a lot of socialistic policies such as public ownership of wealth. Qutb should be viewed with heavy skepticism - I mean, every modern Sunni Islamist terrorist traces their thought back to him, so he's an imperfect strain.
There are some older strains of Islam that could be good comparison. There are the Khawarij, who broke off from the party of Ali after he agreed to arbitration with Muawiyah during the civil war over the caliphate. This is because the Khawarij maintained a very interesting and radical political theory that any kind of arbitration, written succession laws, or consensus committee on choosing one's leader, was unislamic, because this was investing the power of leadership onto fallible humans, and that was against the will of God. Instead, the Khawarij believed that true leaders will arise through material conditions and through people naturally following them, as that is how God chooses destined leaders - arbitration through battle, as they saw it. They also believed that it was the absolute duty of Muslims to rise up against tyrants and corrupt leaders, and that anyone can be a Caliph.
Actually, I think the issue with trying to answer this question is that Islam is already deeply political. Unlike Christianity traditionally has been, Muslims were divested from the beginning with the duty to make the world just by any means necessary, and had concepts like Sunni consensus of the community, ijma and reasoning by analogy, qiyas, to form it. I think the honest answer to this question is that Islam already had liberation theology-like logic within it, but that the Islam we see today had much of that stripped from it during the colonial era.
Sorry, I think I may not have been clear. I was using Liberation Theology as an example of a novel strain of thought within a religion, not asking if there was an equivalent to Liberation Theology within Islam
Ah, in that case, there are a lot, we have a pretty long history. I could probably spend ages listing all the different little strains, theological schools, legal schools, Sufi orders (and Sufism as a whole!), all the different manifestations of Islamism, Quranism, Mahdi movements throughout history, the many divergent sects. Instead I will just talk about one I got into a research binge about recently, because I find them the pretty interesting and they're extremely relevant.
The Alawites/Nusayris are the current ruling class in Syria and they're not exactly Shi'i, though they developed from Shia Gnosticism. The Alawaites have a very secretive structure and belief system. Many of the secrets they hold are known only to a select few within the community, and in general Alawites tend not to share their beliefs with those outside the community.
From what we can tell, they have a very syncretic interpretation of Islam, with elements of Christianity, Gnosticism, and neo-Platonism in their din. The gnoscticism aspect, and the secretiveness, is vital - they believe that the material world is an illusion and that the Truths of the world are successively harder and harder to understand, with only a small cadre of trusted secret-keepers being the ones who can handle the truths. They hold discretion and secrecy as extremely high, core values of Islam. Some of their unique beliefs (ones that were secret but leaked to outsiders) include a belief that souls will reincarnate until judgement day, the fact that they celebrate Christmas and have mass, and they even believe in a trinity consisting of the Prophet Muhammad, Ali, and Salman the Persian (one of Muhammad's important sahaba, the companions of the Prophet), and that God reincarnated into humanity on two different occasions - through the Prophet Joshua and through Ali. To an average Muslim this seems downright un-Islamic, but the Alawites take their beliefs seriously, and their concealment protocols is part of a greater cosmological and praxial belief in keeping secrets, being hidden, and remaining insular, in order to survive and avoid genocide. Indeed, being a minority in Syria at the moment, those who identify with this unique divergent culture constitute a diehard core of the current Assad regime's forces, and it's part of the reason why they are continuing to this day - they believe that they are fighting an existential threat to their community, and to their secrets.
Wow, that is incredibly interesting
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