Reforming religious awareness

Author's name: Abdel Basset Salama Heikal

Religious thought, like other branches of general human thought, can be a factor of advancement and progress, or regression and backwardness. Religion itself does not bear responsibility, but rather religious thought—the way in which followers of religion understand their religion—is in dire need of a precise, reformative treatment. The book is an attempt to reread some of the problematic concepts and issues facing the resigned mind, a mind that takes its positions based on tumultuous emotional biases, not rational convictions founded on calm critical thinking. Throughout our history, emotional stances have never ceased to produce the fiercest currents of destructiveness, which have chosen to destroy the present moment with all its civilizational achievements, with the aim of purifying the present by returning it to the past according to what they imagine to be the correct understanding of Islam, which distinguishes them from other Muslims. Many ideas in the history of our Arab-Islamic culture have been produced by Human minds, but thanks to repetition and reiteration, they have been transformed into untouchable beliefs, some of which were exposed as false when we approached them, and some of which we failed to provide a scientific reading that would reveal the contexts that produced them. Thus, many issues of Islamic thought returned to the shadows, far from cognitive review. The recovery of man in order to build his civilization is dependent on completing those cognitive reviews and strengthening the rational and humane side in our faith experience and our general behavior... The book is an attempt at free thinking, far from ready-made traditional answers, in a reality in which the question that knows no red lines has become the means for creative thinking.