I just keep keeping on: Islamic law is seen not as a product of human intelligence, nor as something that can be adapted to changing social needs and ideals. Rather, it is direct from God. In theory, it is immutable. As I have pointed out, there have been various ways in which Muslim jurists have been able to adapt the shariah to changing circumstances. But there is no doubt that this adaptation is quite difficult and can... Read more
I received the following from Erin Gazdik, at BYU’s Religious Studies Center: The 2018 Church History Symposium will explore the intersection of finance and religion in the LDS Church between 1830 and 1930. In doing so, we hope that scholars will take a fresh look at Mormon history from the vantage point of economics and finance. We hope that this symposium will add to, complicate, or even revise portions of the standard economic history narratives, while also... Read more
Still going . . . Of course, there was always the danger that an irresponsible, ignorant, or incompetent judge might misapply a Qur’anic rule or see an analogy where in fact none existed. So a new principle, “consensus” (ijma), came into play. This principle represented an effective insurance against the whims and odd ideas of isolated individuals. But when we talk about the “consensus” of the community, we are not talking about a democratic process in which... Read more
You may have heard the popular story about the turtles. It’s said that somebody — I’ve heard that it was a woman, or a man from India; most probably, it was either Elvis or Solomon Spalding — explained that the universe rests on the back of a giant turtle. “But,” one skeptic objects, “what does the turtle rest on?” “Oh,” responds the turtle-theorist, “you can’t trick me! It’s turtles all the way down!” This is often taken... Read more
Continuing with my manuscript on Islam for Latter-day Saints: Al-Bukhari’s Sahih, which holds undisputed pride of place among Sunnis, is worth describing here in a bit of detail. It is composed of ninety-seven books divided into a total of 3,450 chapters. Each book is devoted to a general subject, such as prayer, fasting, alms, testimony, buying and selling, marriage, and the like. About 2,762 separate hadith reports occur in Bukhari’s volumes, but they are often repeated under... Read more
From an unpublished manuscript with which I occasionally tinker: It is virtually impossible to imagine a hallucination that continued over weeks, months, and years, involving numerous people whose hallucinatory illusions were so coherent and congruent with one another—people who, apart from their religious views (unacceptable in principle to certain critics), supply no other reason to think them psychologically maladapted. Moreover, many of the events that seem to support Joseph Smith’s story occurred under wholly matter-of-fact conditions: David... Read more
Having completed undergraduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley and earned his doctorate in molecular biology at Caltech (the California Institute of Technology), Douglas Axe next did post-doctoral work at Cambridge University, where he was eventually appointed to a position as a research scientist. Here are some additional notes from his book Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed (New York: HarperCollins, 2016): Now, if you’re wondering whether it’s legitimate for scientists... Read more
Curiously, as someone who hates and fears science and who neither knows nor wants to know anything of the subject, I enjoy reading about it. I typically have about fifteen to twenty books going at a time — by no means all of them about science, of course — and I often fail to finish one book because it becomes buried under new books. (I’m trying to reform myself on that score.) Lately, every few days, I’ve been... Read more
It’s a big book, so I’m going to be working through John W . Welch, et al., eds., Knowing Why: 137 Evidences That the Book of Mormon Is True (American Fork: Covenant Communications, 2017), for several more weeks. “Did Interactions with ‘Others’ Influence Nephi’s Selections of Isaiah?” (119-120) Were there people in the New World other than, and prior to, the Lehites, Mulekites, and Jaredites? Or were the Americas essentially vacant when Nephi arrived? The archaeological and genetic evidence is decisively clear... Read more
Day after day after plodding day, we move forward: Over the course of many years, students of the traditions about Muhammad and his companions worked out a complex and sophisticated system for testing and classifying hadith. Some hadith reports were ranked as sahih, or “sound,” which is to say that all of the links in their isnads, their chains of transmission, were good ones going back directly to the purported source of the tradition, who was usually... Read more
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