To help, or critique, please use Facebook Messenger m.me/BioIslam99. Our goal is to complete this by 2023, inshallah.

What?

BioIslam is Islam for pro-science people.¹

It is a proactive path where, if we leverage science to help those who suffer, our reward is afterlife bliss.² How can 7th century wisdom help us in the 21st?³

The key tenet of BioIslam is that God/Allah ﷻ is veiled and reveals through science, not just Prophets.⁴ And He/She/It⁵ does so through a perennial⁶ self-disclosure. Although this idea of self-disclosure is borrowed from the Sufi philosopher ibn Arabi (d. 638/1240)⁷, we are not Sufi but are post-Sufi.⁸ Key Quranic verses, such as 42:51, 45.23, and 50:22, suggest we must proactively unveil our Creator through science.⁹ I am a hidden treasure, come find Me.¹⁰ The cosmic light, noor as samawati, shines equally through Prophets and scientists.¹¹ By tapping into it, the microscope and telescope unveiled more truths than most ancient texts. What can we unveil next?

Truth matters… but it died in the second fitna, a crucial civil war, shortly after the Prophetﷺ.¹² That leaves us deeply skeptical about the historical claims of the ulama, the Traditional (aka Orthodox) scholars.¹³ Although the earliest ulama excelled in ritual piety, many of their claims were noble lies.¹⁴ Over generations, a mythology took root and Traditional Islam, aka mythical Islam, obscured the truth. Ditto for all ancient religions. Thus, we live in an ahl al fatra, an age between Prophets – we won’t know the ultimate truth until the return of Isa/Jesus ﷺ, which the Quran prophesizes. Until then, we must rely on the parity of truth, an idea we borrow from the rationalist philosopher ibn Rushd, d. 595/1198.¹⁵ When the ulama contradict science, it is our duty to doubt them, and reinterpret Islam through the lens of settled-science.¹⁶ Doubt deepens faith, contrary to common fears; it is indifference we must fear.

Is BioIslam scientistic, relying on science alone? No, since it accepts supernatural ideas, such as an afterlife and the second coming of Isa/Jesus ﷺ. It even accepts ideas that embarrass modernists – such as the major mystery of the jinn – whose deeper meaning is that we cannot access a single ‘truth’. Hence, we must accept conflicting cosmic narratives, even while pursuing the parity of truth, which leads to hayba, the joy of bewilderment. It is the antithesis of yaqeen, the ulama’s myopic cult of certitude. If you are not bewildered, are you sincerely seeking the truth?

Why?

Why is our ummah, the Muslim world, drowning in Poverty? Since Islam’s highest value is compassion, this is where we must begin. It is the first of the Big Five problems.¹⁷ We can alleviate them if we interpret Islam with a pro-science filter and post-Sufi proactivity – eventually resulting in an advanced ‘Threshold 9’ civilization.¹⁸ BioMuslims believe the righteous path to afterlife bliss, the sirat al-mustaqim, is to help those who suffer,¹⁹ by advancing science.²⁰

To escape our pressing poverty trap, we must urgently solve the Brain Drain problem, which is a consequence of failing to appreciate God/Allah’s self-disclosure via science. It is aggravated by the dark triad of power – Authoritarianism, Patriarchy, and Politicization. The root cause is authoritarianism – it promotes patriarchy, resulting in dreadful misogyny.²¹ The authoritarian elite politicize faith, resulting in sectarianism. This includes a surly Sunni supremacy, a spurious Shia theocracy, and a strident Salafi counterforce. As a result of these problems, many Muslims are ‘unmosquing’, and the exodus is accelerating.

A pro-science approach helps solve poverty, but the skeptical spirit that is critical to scientific progress also challenges faith – it exposes the flaws in the ‘construction’ of mainstream Traditional Islam (or any other religion).²² That crucial cognitive dissonance, between spiritual submission and scientific skepticism, drives the brain drain. If we stay on a science-only path, we will self-destruct, because we are morally unfit for the future.²³ To solve the Big Five – but with neither the ‘tyranny of science’ nor dubious dogma – we must urgently blend the best of both science and post-Sufi spirituality.²⁴ How? We must go beyond timid reform or renewal, and attempt a radical reconstruction led by Quranic first principles.

Common Ground

BioIslam shares with mainstream Traditional Islam many key elements:

Afterlife – a life of faith and good deeds results in afterlife bliss.
Quran + some Hadith – the Quran, plus a minute fraction of Hadith-as-literature.
Prophets – reverence for all Prophets ﷺ, ending in Muhammad, and awaiting Isa/Jesus’ return.
Pillars – the Five Pillars are reinterpreted with science and expanded into Ten Pillars.
Aural Joy – rejoice in rites and recitation, to taste the divine, and link back to our lineage.

Aural joy deserves emphasis. Quranic recitation, qiraat, is an art form, a rapture, that raises us up to a transcendent realm, a higher consciousness. It offers truth on an aesthetic level, bypassing both reason and dogma.²⁵ Since truth died in fitna, the joy of qiraat can connect us to our Creator. That surreal beauty enchants; it is a ‘thrilling audio-spiritual universe.’²⁶ BioIslam fuses this cosy enchantment of faith with the cold empiricism of science. Therefore, BioMuslims rejoice in the rites and recitations of the Traditional Muslims, including azaan, salat, duaa, zikr and qiraat, to connect with our Creator.

Differ on Dogma

BioIslam differs from mainstream Traditional Islam in many ways, notably:

End-goal – Reduce poverty (by interpreting religion through the lens of science).
Guidance – We live in an ahl al fatra, an era between Prophets ﷺ, without clear divine guidance.
Revelation – The last Prophet was Muhammad ﷺ, but revelation continues via science.
Endgame – The next Prophet will be Isa/Jesus ﷺ, who will clarify conundrums and cleanse corruption.
Ten Pillars – Five more Inner Pillars: Intentions, Compassion, Justice, Harmony and Potentiality.
Quran – Quran-led. Not Quran-only. Quran was always singular. The ahruf are deviant variants.
Hadith – Only accept those Hadith-as-literature reports that illustrate Latent Principles.
Sunnah – Original-Sunnah is unknowable. Textual-Sunnah (Sirah and sahih Hadith) is corrupted.
Meaning – Quran is aurally-pure, but the meaning of many pivotal words is ambiguous.
Slavery – All Prophet-rulers eliminated slavery in their vicinity, but successor-rulers reinstated it.
Science – Equal faith in Islam and Science (including Evolutionary Biology and Transhuman Biology).
Reason – Open Reason and broad learning, not the myopic Fiqhi Reason of Traditionalists.

Which Future?

We are at a historical juncture of great conflict between the material and spiritual worlds. The first century of Islam ushered in a great transformation of the Arabian Peninsula. The upcoming century will be comparably impactful on a global scale. Most of those who will see it through have already been born. About seventy generations have lived since the time of the Prophet ﷺ – a few of them accomplished a lot, and a lot of them accomplished little. This generation and the next hold the key, just as the first two generations did. How will we smartly combine science and spirituality to address the Big Five or, say, the UN’s top ten global issues?

Optimistically, we are at the cusp of explosive growth in science-led welfare, prompting the daring transhuman dream of ending physical suffering, within a half century, and a sustainable ‘Threshold 9’ civilization, within a century. In BioIslam’s vision, such a civilization harmonizes piety, peace and prosperity. That is the highest common good, the al–maslaha al-ulya. To curb hubris and overreach, which afflict even the well-intentioned, we can mindfully guide that dream with BioIslam’s five Inner Pillars – Intentions, Compassion, Justice, Harmony and Potentiality. These pillars are primary objectives, the maqasid al Quran, and supplement the five outer pillars of mainstream Traditional Islam.

Pessimistically, we are living out our final century, a sixth mass extinction, with at best a fifty percent chance of surviving this century.²⁷ Of course, only our creator, the al-Khaliq, knows whether that is so, since He is also our preserver, the al-Hafiz, and our destroyer, the al-Mumit. We should beware the folly of pessimists. The sahaba, the companions of the Prophet ﷺ, were direly pessimistic and believed the end of the world was imminent, and were surprised the Prophet passed before that apocalyptic event. They then conquered Jerusalem which had long been a pivotal city for apocalyptic pessimists.²⁸ Yet, if that dire hypothesis of our final century is valid, it is due to our own folly of unprincipled science-led growth. Ironically, only a scientific explosion, albeit one that is morally-enhanced by the five Inner Pillars, can rescue the future.

Who is more correct – the optimist or the pessimist? Will this be our final century or the most instrumental? As pro-science people, we side with the optimists.²⁹

Which Islam?

BioIslam relies on a simple linear system, in contrast to the complex system of the mainstream ‘Traditional’ Islam. This Simple Solution attempts to salvage true Islam from this Complexity Problem. To resolve it, the authoritarian elite of the 3rd Islamic century (9th c. CE) imposed a convoluted mythology – a narrow imaginary narrative of the 1st Islamic century (7th c. CE). This resulted in yaqeen, a cult of certitude, which thrives by projecting glorious visions of an imagined past. It results in three types of Pitfalls: Tragic Errors, Messy Role Model and Inconvenient Implications.

The root cause of the problem was a ruler-scholar nexus in the chaotic game-of-thrones era of the first three Islamic centuries. This resulted in a state-sanctioned ‘correct’ (i.e. orthodox) interpretation of imperial Islam, in service of an extensive empire. To cement the new orthodoxy, post-Quranic books of Sirah and sahih hadith were canonized, in the 3rd Islamic century or 9th c. CE (similar to imperial Christianity in the Roman empire in 4th c. CE). Later, they were cemented by dubious derivative works, as discussed in Historical Truth?.

For example, the first Tragic Error of Traditional Islam was rampant riq-slavery, and its reluctant abolition only after the West did. This was humanity’s greatest crime; for centuries, the ulama failed to speak out against it (ditto for non-Muslims). Further, the ulama canonized contested books that variously malign the sublime Prophet ﷺ, including his impious involvement in riq-slavery, as discussed in Messy Role Model. Although they may be well-intentioned, the ulama had, and still have, big blind spots, resulting in egregious errors. They were wrong for long on pivotal issues. On riq-slavery for 12 centuries. On geocentrism for 9. On prohibiting the printing press for 5 centuries. The last of these underlies our present intellectual and material poverty.

Litmus Test

Since the good God surely abhors slavery, the issue of Prophetic abolition is a litmus test of whether any interpretation, of any religion, is good. Although many Quranic verses allude to slaves inherited from the pre-Islamic era, no verse expressly licenses enslaving, and many promote manumission. Thus, the highest probability narrative is that the Prophet ﷺ, at some late date in his two long decades of prophecy, ended slavery in his vicinity, by massive manumission and an end to slave-producing conquests. That assertion is not incompatible with early Traditionalist sources, iffy and incomplete as they are. For example, if chattel slavery had not been ended by the Prophet, he would have referenced it in his sahih Farewell Sermon, one that Traditionalists often cite. Next, the crucial Chronology Hurdle, a key contributor to the larger Complexity Problem. If the Quran and Hadith could be rearranged chronologically, and cross-linked intertextually (which is now sadly impossible) – the sunsetting of slavery might be easily inferred by Traditionalists, too. Taken together, these three considerations provide a strong argument from silence. Most importantly, the burden of proof lies with the one who disparages the Prophet ﷺ.

BioMuslims believe all Prophet-rulers censured slavery, to the point of elimination in their vicinity, but retrograde successor-rulers reinstated it. Why should that surprise? The depredations of history would not augur a better outcome – it is no different from the rollback of the moral horizon of prior Prophets ﷺ that the Quran chastises. Further, in the case of Muhammad ﷺ, they retrojected fake facts to justify it and, two chaotic centuries later, canonized certain books to cement it. Unlike Traditional Islam, BioIslam retroactively and categorically condemns riq-slavery throughout the post-Prophetic period, and indicts the historical ulama for not loudly and unequivocally speaking out against such abomination.

Ahl al Fatra

Which scholar or Imam should we follow? It is hard to know. We live in an ahl al fatra, an era between Prophets, one without clear guidance, and where the moral horizon advanced by prior Prophets has been gravely compromised. Due to the twin problems of canonization and complexity, much of what the ulama tell us is questionable. Clarity will emerge only when the next Prophet arrives, which will be the earthly return of Isa/Jesus ﷺ, a miraculous event called nuzul Isa, as discussed below. It could be weeks or centuries until he returns, we just don’t know, as described in Hoping for Isa/Jesus. Until then, BioMuslims rely on God/Allah’s ﷻ self-disclosure through science, and use ‘open reason’ to interpret the Quran and other sources of knowledge, versus the ‘fiqhi reason’ of the ulama; the latter is closed-form and boxed in by the Sirah and Hadith. Exemplars include the ulama at Yaqeen, alMaghrib, Bayyinah, Kalamullah and others – they are profoundly pious, struggling to defend the faith from the excesses of scientism, hedonism and the dehumanizing downside of the materialist machine. However, they too are victims of the canonization and complexity problems, since they fail to rail against the tragic errors and inconvenient implications. In the absence of clarity on the Prophetic message, BioIslam’s desire to rely on science to interpret the faith is consistent with the Quran’s call for empirical observation, contemplation and reflection (tawassum, tafakkur, tadabbur).

Dual-Axis Debate

There is a pivotal debate on which Quranic verses are literal v. figurative, and temporal v. timeless. In this dual-axis debate, the Traditionalist’s bias is to interpret verses as literal and timeless, whereas the BioMuslim leans toward the figurative or temporal. Being mere mortals, both parties to the debate are fallible. However, the temporal tilt is most consistent with the grand plan of God/Allah ﷻ to gradually self-disclose through both Prophets and science. Hence, what makes literal sense to one generation might be better interpreted as figurative by a later generation, if science has advanced sufficiently to render the literal interpretation obsolete.

BioIslam rejects the narrow historical consensus of the ulama on many crucial issues, starting with the meaning of key Quranic words, as discussed in the Dictionary-Grammar Problem, extending to the integrity of the Sirah and sahih Hadith canonical books, and finally the (dis)utility of derivative commentaries, as discussed in Historical Truth?. Traditionalists wrongly believe the Quranic verses can only be understood in the light of the context, or the occasions of revelation (asbab al-nuzool), as narrated by the post-Quranic books, in effect claiming fallible books supervise Quranic interpretation. The ulama rely on unreliable Sirah and sahih Hadith books to infer the Quran’s context, a confused and complex mode of interleaved deduction. This is our radical point of departure from Traditionalists.

The surface-level meaning of the Quranic text, as best as we can know it given the Dictionary-Grammar Problem, addresses the specific challenges faced by 7th century Arab society, whereas the Quranic Latent Principles, as best as we can extract them from the Quran, guide the current generation.³⁰ The future generations will re-extract LPs in the light of their cumulative knowledge, reasoning capacities and state-of-art in science.³¹ We should be mindful of the fallibilism of each generation of Islam’s interpreters, whether Traditionalist or BioIslamic, and beware the cumulative fallibilism of taqlid, which is the pious and deferential acceptance of prior scholars. The grand dual-axis debate will never be fully resolved given the limits of human knowledge and the fallibility of the debaters.³²

Since BioIslam privileges figurative and interiorized interpretation, it might be mistaken for mystical Sufism. But it is not, given its pro-science, problem-solving orientation. If you must label BioIslam, it is amystical ‘theohumanism‘, that combines science and post-Sufi spirituality to help solve the Big Five problems, with a daring transhuman dream of ending physical suffering.

Why ‘Bio’?

The big moral dilemmas of the next century will be in bioethics, given our rapid progress in transhuman technologies, especially if that leads to a singularity, a state where humans transcend biology and machine intelligence exceeds human capacities.³³ How will we resolve these dilemmas? Since God/Allah ﷻ continues to guide us through science, we must use a pro-science filter to extract wisdom from all timeless texts, including from the ancient ‘ABC’ camp of Aristotle, Buddha and Confucius. With this open mindset, BioMuslims can bond with BioJews and BioChristians to imagine a better world, and await the return of Isa/Jesus ﷺ who will clarify misunderstandings.

Bio also signifies ‘built inside out’. The inside-out orientation is theohumanistic – it melds inner spirituality with outer scientific materialism to try improve the human condition. To achieve that lofty goal, BioIslam relies on ten pillars. In addition to the five outer pillars of Traditional Islam — Testimony, Prayer, Fasting, Charity, Pilgrimage — to which a pro-science tilt is applied, BioIslam emphasizes five inner pillars, which are of equal, if not greater, importance — Intentions, Compassion, Justice, Harmony and Potentiality – as discussed later in Inner Pillars. This important inside-out inversion results in many second-order differences, as summarized in the Comparison Chart.

Bio prioritizes a pro-science tilt. But what does that really mean for the Traditional outer pillars? For example, science confirms prayer has prosocial benefits and charity boosts your psychology. But on waterless fasting, science shows intermittent fasting has many benefits, but only if hydrated. While the ulama will cry foul, they must acknowledge that the sahih Hadith cite a radical change to the fasting protocol during the Prophet’s lifetime, for less compelling reasons.³⁴ Such a radical revision follows the principle of the higher common good, al maslaha al mursala, i.e. to preserve the health of a billion laborers in tropical climes; they suffer unimaginably, in contrast to the sedentary ulama. On the same principle, the traditional hajj pilgrimage has outlived its original purpose and must be radically reinterpreted.

A pro-science tilt suggests we should only accept those parts of Islamic history that are based on evidence deemed reliable by the best of unbiased scholars, including the secular ones. This excludes much of the claims of the Traditional ulama, since their apologist claims rely on self-validating books published two centuries after the Prophet ﷺ, as discussed in Historical Truth?. Even so, the Traditional sources lack internal consistency. For example, sirah books routinely cite Khadija, the first wife of the Prophet ﷺ, was aged 40, which is 15 years his senior. They play up his matronly choice to downplay his scandalous third marriage at age 52 to a 9-year old Aisha. However, good revisionist scholarship, based on Traditional sources, claims Khadija was aged 28, only 3 years older than him; most major ulama now accept this, making fools of their predecessors, as discussed in Pitfalls – Messy Role Model.

Bio is a nod to biocosmology, a speculative yet sensible story of our cosmic origin – it posits a super intelligence created us, and operates across the astonishingly-large multiverse, with evolutionary principles of self-organization and creative destruction.³⁵ The entirety of life on earth is but a small part of the big picture, a ‘biocosm’. “The immense saga of biological evolution on Earth is a minor subroutine in the inconceivably lengthy process” of the evolution of the cosmos.³⁶ These plausibilities violate neither the key claims of modern physics nor the revealed wisdom of the ancient Quran. To what do we owe this process of cosmic self-organization? To the believer, that magical mystery agent is none other than God/Allah ﷻ.

To conclude, Bio underlines the bioscientific spirit latent in the Quran. BioIslam accepts many, but not all, of the findings of evolutionary biology as an explanation of our deep past, and ‘transhuman’ biology as a plausible path to our distant future. BioIslam’s theohumanistic guardrails can guide the daring dream of the transhuman project. Also, ‘Bio’ appreciates BioPhilia, a love of exploring all life in all of its immense complexity, and that our “existence depends on this propensity, our spirit is woven from it, hope rises from its currents”, as noted by a leading sociobiologist.³⁷ Finally, bio acknowledges biocomplexity, where we struggle to balance the known, unknown and unknowable realms of our existence.

How?

BioIslam decodes the vast treasure of Islam with a sequence of induction and illustration:

First, mine Latent Principles (LPs) from inside the Quran using inductive logic (as opposed to the Traditional method of interpreting the Quran via the Hadith, in a complex mode of interleaved deduction).
Roll-up the low-level LPs into high-level LPs and then aggregate up to top-level Inner Pillars.
Identify Ten Pillars
- five Inner Pillars plus five ‘outer’ Traditional pillars, equals a Ten Pillars framework.
Next, scour post-Quranic sources — filter the Hadith-as-literature corpus to narrowly select Good Hadith, i.e. Hadith that illustrate the LPs.
The role of the post-Quranic sources is not to aid with induction ex ante, but to illustrate ex post. Those fallible sources do contain a few valuable nuggets, and should not be totally trashed, in contrast to the approach of the Quranists, aka the Quran-only believers.
Finally, dismiss Dark Hadith and all Dark Matter. BioIslam shuns a large share of Hadith-as-literature that do not illustrate the LPs, even though they might be classified by Traditional Muslims as sahih or mutawatir. It also excludes the non-sahih Sirah and maghazi books. This is a highly consequential choice, since Traditionalists rely on these books extensively to decipher the meaning (ma’na) of the Quran.

Dual Sunnah

What about the Sunnah, the anchor of the Traditionalists? The holy Prophet’s ﷺ perfect example to his companions, the Sunnah, is greatly respected in BioIslam. However, much of that specific Sunnah is unknowable due to difficult historical circumstances discussed later, and hence must be qualified as the true-Sunnah or the original-Sunnah. All that is available to us today is 1) an aural-Sunnah that echoes the rites and recitations of the Prophetic era, and 2) a textual-Sunnah (i.e., Sirah and sahih Hadith) that was unreliably written into books about two centuries after the passing of the Prophet ﷺ, and canonized by authoritarians in a chaotic ‘game of thrones’ imperial milieu.

A dual Sunnah framework delivers clarity. BioIslam celebrates the aural-Sunnah but is deeply skeptical of the textual-Sunnah, since it is based on fallible post-Quranic books. In the first century of Islam, both the aural and textual components of the Sunnah were transmitted primarily through an ‘oral tradition’ of memorization. In the third century, the Sunnah was written into books. The portion that was recited and enacted in ritual form is the reliable aural-Sunnah. The reports of what the Prophet and his companions did or said, beyond the rituals, is only available through textual transmission, hence the term textual-Sunnah.³⁸ Some of the textual-Sunnah books were hastily canonized in the final decades of the third Islamic century; some of their content is likely true, and some of it not. As a counterfactual thought experiment, what would Traditional Islam look like today if the losing side had won the first two fitna or civil wars that occurred in the first half century of Islam? Or if the revolutionary Persian Abbasid movement had not viciously overthrown the Arab Umayyad dynasty in the pivotal third Islamic century? We will never know since all the surviving canonical books date from the prolific but polemical Abbasid era.

How do we decide which elements might reflect the true or original Sunnah? That portion which is highly consistent with the Quranic Latent Principles is likely true. When Traditional Muslims refer to the Sunnah (outside of the rites and recitation), they only have access to this textual version, which is likely to have mutated substantially from the original, as discussed in Historical Truth. In other words, BioIslam only assumes infallibility of the holy Quran, whereas Traditionalists assume the joint infallibility of both Quran and the mutawatir elements of the textual-Sunnah.³⁹ The Traditionalist’s method of isnad validation, i.e. verifying chains of transmission, is deeply flawed. The purported certainties of the textual-Sunnah are really just pseudo-certainties. The consequence — Traditional Islam has a dark downside, as explained in three Tragic Errors and six Inconvenient Implications.

True Sunnah

Thankfully, we do know the true Sunnah, which is the aural-Sunnah, consisting of the enchanting rites and recitation of the Prophet’s companions (sahaba) and their first descendants (tabiun).⁴⁰ The cosmic beauty, at times a surreal haunting beauty, of this aural-Sunnah is superlative. When executed enthusiastically, its celestial charm eclipses its facticity. It offers a soulful connection to our spiritual lineage. It aids our ascent, up the secret staircase, to the better half of our homo duplex selves.⁴¹ It initiates a divine phase shift, from the ephemeral to the eternal, from the profane to the profound. It offers a therapeutic escape to a metaphysical realm. Its sublime syncopations, and stylized synchronicity, unite us across class and race. Its communal performance extracts us from our egocentric cave, and imbues a sense of altruism. It salves our anomie, since it uplifts us from the meaningless mechanics of the modern materialistic machine. This is the embodied Sunnah we can trust and treasure, and is worth celebrating.

Alone or Group-ish?

Are we better off living alone, or tightly bound to nuclear family, or with extended group identity, or gingerly balance all of the above? In the last century, many have suddenly shifted toward individualism, reversing many millennia of group living in extended families, tribes, sects and other conglomerations.

At a practical level, BioMuslims partake in Traditionalist rituals with extended family, since solidarity (asabiyya) offers prosocial benefits, especially for childrearing. In particular, Traditionalists have excelled at preserving family structure – in part due to living in an enchanted commune of transcendent rites, rituals and recitations – in contrast to the loneliness or family breakdowns that accompany unconstrained individualism. Although it is challenging, we must balance the progressive ethos of BioIslam with the inertia of extended family, without subscribing to sectarian, patriarchal or other downsides of that tradeoff.

BioIslam is proudly post-sectarian – it rejects sects such as Shia, Sunni, Salafi, etc., since the ummah suffers much from sectarianism. The Quranists (ahl e Quran or Quraniyoon) are admirably non-sectarian too; they have done Islamdom a great service with their crisp critique of the Sunnah-Sira-Hadith complex. However, BioMuslims differ greatly, as discussed further in the FAQ. On the hot topic of cultural identity, BioMuslims are cosmopolitan, which the Quran encourages. As such, they often, but not necessarily, forsake identity markers. This contrasts the ulama’s consensus, that a beard is highly recommended for men (mustahabb), and the hair-cover is required of women (wajib).⁴² Yet, BioMuslim respect such markers, since they signify a certain cosmic celebration of the enchanted pre-modern world, and a visible line of renunciation from the over-sexualized and hyper-materialistic world.

The Downside?

There is a downside to every interpretation of every religion, if we are to be intellectually honest. In that spirit, BioIslam’s downside is this – ambiguity. Beyond the rites and recitations of the aural-Sunnah, there is no certainty about how Islam was practiced in its first century. BioMuslims regretfully accept that many details of the original Islam are uncertain and unfortunately unknowable – given the challenges of historicity across the mists of time. Of course, that is also true for all ancient religions, whether or not their followers are brave enough to admit. Unanswerable questions are better than unquestionable answers.⁴³

To accept this inherent structural limitation is no different from acknowledging that the Chronology Hurdle limits our comprehension of the Quran.⁴⁴ A simple illustration of this substantial hurdle is that the ulama disagree strongly on which was the last verse to be revealed, which is mighty strange since the salience of the Quran progressively increased over twenty three years of revelation.⁴⁵ This hurdle reflects a most unfortunate and irreparable loss of valuable contextual information, and compounds the challenge of extracting precise earthly guidance from the Quran. Given these constraints, all we can make is a good-faith attempt to extract broad underlying Latent Principles, and pray for forgiveness if we have erred in our sincere efforts. In BioIslam, the Quran is about much more than earthly guidance, it is also an awe-inducing divine art-form, which when properly recited, in the Traditional manner, can ineffably elevate and exhilarate.

A lesser downside: BioIslam relies on mainstream English translations of the Quran, most of which were prepared by Traditionalist translators, and as such may not accurately capture the original meaning intended by God/Allah ﷻ. This is due to the Dictionary-Grammar Problem which results in imperfect translations, limiting the effectiveness of any interpretation. Once again, BioIslam’s Latent Principles approach minimizes the impact of this problem far better than Traditional Islam does.

A sincere BioMuslim works hard to cultivate the cognitive capacity for ambiguity, rather than blindly accept the certitude of Traditionalism, a position of fallibilism. The inverse challenge is to ignore the siren song of neo-atheism, which is yet another pseudo-certainty.⁴⁶ To negotiate the middle path between these ideological extremes, i.e. old dogma v. new atheism, is both an intellectual and spiritual struggle, the highest form of jihad, that will be rewarded in the afterlife. Such analytic ambiguity is a hallmark of many scientific disciplines, from quantum physics on a nano scale, to evolutionary biology on a middle scale, and evolutionary cosmology on a grand scale.⁴⁷ In contrast, those without a scientific mindset seek a simple cosmic story rooted in a glorious past, even if that imagined past is mythical and mostly untrue. The mythology of Traditional Islam offers cognitive closure, it helps people cope with the complexity of our chaotic world.⁴⁸ For such people the nuanced ambiguity of BioIslam might be too rich. It might well limit the appeal of BioIslam, perhaps only to WEIRD-ish people, but that is a worthwhile limiting factor.⁴⁹

In the absence of consensus on what really transpired in the first century of BioIslam (or any other ancient religion), our piously-skeptical stance offers greater value – in particular, to those strong enough to cope with the cold climes of uncertainty – than the warm bath of faux-certainty. This is especially true when coupled with BioIslam’s strong belief in rahma, the mercy of God/Allah ﷻ. BioIslam’s niyya, or intention, is to alleviate the Big Five problems and promote piety, peace and prosperity. It aspires to the daring transhuman dream of ending physical suffering in a ‘Threshold 9’ civilization, and guiding it with theohumanistic Inner Pillars.

The Dark Side?

In stark contrast to BioIslam’s tolerance of uncertainty, the ulama foster a cult of certitude. They propagate a hand-me-down Traditional Islam across generations, one that was minimally reinterpreted after the formation of madhabs, the canonical schools of thought in the 9th century CE (3rd Islamic century). The ulama do so based on their strong assumption of authenticity of the Sunnah, as documented by the key post-Quranic works of sahih Hadith and Sirah. That combines into a powerful but misleading authenticated-certainty, i.e. a cult of certitude. To reconcile difficult interpretive conflicts, they invented naskh wa al mansukh, a flawed doctrine of abrogration. Later, some extended naskh to include cross-genre abrogation, claiming the Hadith can sometimes override the Quran. This dicey concept is confounded by the aforementioned Chronology Hurdle. When the narration chain (isnad) method of validating a Hadith as sahih produced undesirable results, the ulama resorted to back-door content (matn) analysis. BioIslam accepts the matn method only when the matn illustrates the Quran-dervied LPs.

Before the ulama imposed canonization, the best of scholars added to their opinions a genuine disclaimer, acknowledging they could be wrong on complex issues – as most issues inevitably are, if interrogated fully. Post-canonization, many still did, but perfunctorily. It is time to bring back that analytic ambiguity, since it carries a spirit of critical thinking that is more valuable than pseudo-certainty. It has disappeared from Traditionalist discourse, due to the fact the ulama struggle with the rapid changes ushered in by modernity, especially on visceral issues of gender, consent and speciesism. To cope, the ulama have responded in three ways. First, some double down defensively on pseudo-certainties. Second, some timidly play catch-up with half-measures of reform and renewal. Third, as detailed later, at least three eminent ulama extend the cult of certitude to its shocking, albeit logical, end – they defend a hypothetical reversal of abolition and a return of riq-slavery.

Endgame: Nuzul Isa

When will this era of analytic ambiguity end? BioIslam strongly believes in the return of Isa/Jesus ﷺ as the next Prophet, the al Masih, also known as Meshiha by Jews or Messiah by Christians.⁵⁰ This miraculous event is called nuzul Isa or Jesus’ Descent (Christians call it the Second Coming, perhaps in 2060).⁵¹ The scholars of Traditional Islam (both Sunni and Shia) firmly believe this too, but have defensively downplayed it in recent centuries, due to many reasons: the psycho-political traumas of prewar European colonialism, postwar American neo-colonialism, and the attendant missionizing.

As such, we are living in an ahl al fatra, an era without a clear divine message, and where the moral horizon of the Prophets has been obscured. Further, downshifting from metaphysics to secular physics, there are deep unresolved issues, including those we take for granted, such as the non-linearity of time, a mysterious topic that the Quran appears to touch upon. It is unlikely we will ever fully unveil reality, since our comprehension is constrained by our primitive senses, limited methods of measurement, the observer effect, and the limitations inherent to our locus of observation. Beyond these bounds is the unseen ghayb. Only a future Prophet can square that circle.

Optimistic View – This is an era between Prophets, after Muhammad ﷺ but before the return of Isa/Jesus ﷺ. In his Second Coming, he will clarify all conundrums, and cleanse earthly corruption. As such, BioIslam takes an optimistic and convex view of history, in contrast to the declinist view of Muslims and Christians, and the tragic cyclical view of the Greeks and Asians. After his descent, the world could well continue for an unspecified extended period of piety, peace and prosperity – against the dire unfounded view of Traditional Islam, that the descent signals an imminent apocalypse.

Fake Alert – How will we know whether the future Isa/Jesus ﷺ is real? The ulama cite many ‘signs’ and a specific event sequence, such as, he will descend on the wings of two angels at the southeast minaret of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, etc. BioMuslims don’t specifically accept or deny those prophecies, but instead apply a crucial litmus test – regardless of how and where he descends, can he perform miracles? If not, he is a fake. What is a miracle? A Prophet descending on angels in full public view is a miracle, unless the physics of that era can demystify it. We must be mindful that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’.⁵² The more advanced our science is, the less likely we will be fooled by fake prophets.

Awaiting Clarity – The fog of reality is real. Until Isa/Jesus ﷺ descends to provide a crystal clear interpretation of the Quranic (and Biblical) messages, and clarifies what really transpired in the first century of Islam (and other religions), we have no choice but to struggle with ambiguity. That is a joint jihad, on spiritual and intellectual fronts. As such, any attempt to construct a concrete utopia prior to the Second Coming of Isa/Jesus ﷺ will fail, as history has amply demonstrated. Also, given the gloomy history of inter-faith conflict – and the simple fact that traditional Jews, Christians and Muslims will never agree on the specifics of their shared Abrahamic story – it is better to look ahead to the leadership of Jesus ﷺ upon his return. Some Muslims, such as the Quranists, the Ahmadiyya, and some modernist Muslim scholars, do not believe in the physical Descent, citing Quran’s ambiguity on this. However, BioMuslims believe that a latent message of Descent can be inferred with adequate clarity from Quranic verses, and further illustrated by sahih Hadith. Will this widely prophesied event actually occur? We blindly hope. Until then, we must learn to navigate this transhistorical liminal space – the ahl al fatra – with the clarity of the Ten Pillars, and the empirical strength of the pro-science path. This is the most effective solution to the urgent Big Five problems.

Tackle Taboos

We must tackle taboos, since truth hides in them. We must also acknowledge that unpopular or uncomfortable conclusions might emerge from each generation’s attempt to extract updated Quranic Latent Principles. Two divergent examples illustrate this point – consumption of pork, and circumcision of both males and females. Although the latter is a very taboo topic, it aptly illustrates the blind spots of the ulama.

In the case of pork, the Quran expressly forbids it, and most Muslims respect this restriction, even those that are minimally practicing. The ulama have no sound explanation for why pork was banned, but credible anthropologists attribute it to a complex array of tribal, ethnocentric, political and economic factors in the Judaic ancient Near East around 3,000 years ago.⁵³

As thoughtful Muslims, we must interrogate this verse on dual axes, literal v. figurative and temporal v. timeless. The ulama view it as literal-timeless, i.e. pork is expressly forbidden for eternity. However, as a thought experiment, if it were literal-temporal or figurative-timeless, we could reinterpret pork as symbolic of a dirty and dangerous food, which it often was back then. The implication? In the current era, where cows and chickens are brutally factory-farmed, should Muslims turn semi-vegan? Such a choice would help alleviate the pressing problem of climate change, which should be a priority for every good Muslim. Or we could switch to meat-like alternatives that are gaining ground in affluent societies. The point is not to promote pork, but to prioritize the Prophet’s most probable diet, semi-veganism.⁵⁴ Although the myopic ulama have not spoken out, would it not be good for them to counsel against meat consumption for the common good, especially for those can afford alternatives?

In the case of circumcision, there is clearly no Quranic support for it, and it is easy to argue against it on the basis that the Quran disfavors bodily mutilation (often cited to disallow tattoos). Yet males are compulsorily circumcised, with strong support of the ulama. Amongst females, millions in Africa and SouthEast Asia are routinely circumcised without consent, on the basis of many classical works of scholarship, and on a hadith deemed weak or daif (yet strong enough to merit inclusion in the Sahih collection), and on the indirect implications of other strong hadith. Female circumcision is obligatory in the Shafi’i madhab (wajib), and is deemed noble (makruma) by the other three Sunni schools.⁵⁵ Thankfully, the movement to ban female circumcision has gained traction, despite residual resistance from the ulama, who are reluctant to abolish it, just as they were late to the abolition of slavery.⁵⁶ BioIslam’s science-led approach goes further – it challenges the Traditionalist requirement of male circumcision, a blind spot of the ulama. The science on male circumcision is clear – there is no evidence that it has sufficient benefits to offset its costs; the latter are underreported, not to mention poorly understood.

Is Truth Parallel?

A BioMuslim has a spirit of critical inquiry and interrogates everything, except for the axiom of an afterlife, which is accepted on faith alone. Even monotheism, and the shahadah, concepts that all Muslims agree on, must be interrogated for alternate meanings. For example, as a daring thought experiment, if the shahadah were to be interpreted as, “there is no Creator-God except the Creator, and Muhammad is his Prophet”, it would surely be faithful to Traditional Islam. However, it could open the door to henotheism, where the omnipotent Creator-God creates lesser helper-Gods, but, let’s say, grants them no intercessory powers. Surely an all-powerful Creator can do anything, including that, just like God created an anti-God, iblis, the Satan. This hypothetical scenario is no stranger than the actual Satanic Verses scandal, which involved intercession by three lesser godesses, yet is difficult for a Traditional Muslim to dismiss since it was validated by the famous scholar Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328). Although such a thought experiment is anathema to Muslims, is it really any stranger than the approximately thirty references to jinn in the Quran? In fact the prominence of jinn in Quranic cosmology, one that is often downplayed in the modern era, can only be taken as a clear indication of the parallel nature of truth and an invitation to experience hayba, the joy of bewilderment.

Is questioning the contours of monotheism a bridge too far? A brave Traditional scholar, al Biruni (d. 440/1048) visited India and argued the polytheist Hindus were really monotheists if you dig deep enough, since they believed in a single Creator-God, the Brahman.⁵⁷ Hence it would be more accurate to view Hindus as henotheist, and far more sophisticated than the Arabian polytheists. Although BioMuslims do not actively profess henotheism, we are open to the possibility of parallel truths, similar to the parallel universe of the jinn. If truth is parallel – as it surely must be if we live in a multiverse, a likely scenario according to many physicists⁵⁸ – you can be a committed monotheist while wholeheartedly accepting the validity of henotheism in other communities – consistent with BioIslam’s position of perennialism.⁵⁹

The ulama also reject monism, which we discuss later in Science of Sufism, since they mistakenly view it as a threat to monotheism. To achieve global harmony, which is the goal of our Creator, we must ask why did He/She/It advocate a strict monotheism to people who live in harsh desert environments?⁶⁰ One logical possibility, heretical as it is, is that God/Allah ﷻ is henotheistic, but chose to self-disclose as a singularity to assist the seventh-century Arabs overthrow their corrupt priests. More gods results in more parochial priests and consequent social schisms, including ruinous tribal rivalries, which endangered survival in harsh lands, as noted in the Traditional sources. The priests arrogantly denied the Creator-God of their neighbors, the Jews and Christians, the folly of shirk. On that view, the real problem of polytheism was abuse of priestly power.

This phenomenon of God self-disclosing His/Her unicity has a precedent: the brief appearance of monotheism in ancient Egypt. Pharaoh Akhen-aten, aka Amenhotep IV (d. 1336 BCE) was a radical proponent of monotheism and opponent of the polytheistic priests. His reign seems to be strangely coincident with the appearance of Prophet Moosa/Moses ﷺ, about two millennia before Islam. After the Pharaoh’s early demise, the priests regained power and swiftly reintroduced polytheism.⁶¹ With this analytic lens, it would seem that the purpose of the Creator-God projecting a monotheistic face is not so much to deny the possibility of helper-Gods but to liberate society from parochial priests, a sorry state which again pervades Islamdom. Why does the Quran not mention this episode of non-Abrahamic monotheism, when it has so much to say about the abuse of Pharaonic power? Perhaps it is to suggest that we seek wisdom broadly, outside the Abrahamic tradition.

Finally, there is one additional reason to interrogate a strict monotheism, although not necessarily deny it since that would invoke an intolerant certitude. If we are willing to go beyond scientific positivism, as all believers do, why arbitrarily stop at a strict monotheism, especially when humanity’s most important problem – the profound problem of natural suffering – is poorly addressed by monotheism? That big problem is somewhat better addressed by pre-Islamic religions. For example, natural suffering is better explained by a dual-God hypothesis in Zoroastrianism, or the non-theistic approach of Buddhism, religions that emerged a millennium before Islam. Which theological explanation wins the day often depends on the debater’s rhetorical skill, since there is no evidence available from beyond the natural world to arbitrate between our choices. In a purely rational framework, the nagging problem of natural suffering is best explained by the cold, cruel and atheistic logic of Darwinian evolution. However, all answers to these big questions contain contradictions. If truth and God/Allah ﷻ are the same, as they must be, we only comprehend a tiny fraction of reality. Faced with this bewilderment, what should we believe? We believe the hypothesis of a single Creator – one who continues to self-disclose via both natural and supernatural channels, both gradually and perennially – best resolves the bewildering range of truth claims: atheistic Darwinian evolution vs. the varied forms of theism (mono, poly and heno).

The Upside?

Now that we have boldly interrogated the premises of Traditional Islam, honestly acknowledged the downsides, and bravely tackled taboos… is there any upside vs. the yaqeen nature of Traditional Islam? For BioIslam, the uncertain meaning of pivotal Quranic phrases, or the dark matter that pollutes post-Quranic books, is ultimately a blessing. It motivates a reinterpretation of the Quran by every generation, empowered by the scientific consensus du jour, mindful of the timeless wisdom of the ancient ABC camp, and heeding the hard lessons from the haunted laboratory of human history.

As a daring thought experiment, imagine if two provocative hypotheses of secular Islamic scholars are greeted by some significant new evidence in the future – validating that that the 1) current form of Quranic text did not stabilize until perhaps 700 CE, some 70 years after the Prophet ﷺ, and 2) the scene of Quranic revelation was the lost city of Bakkah (Becca), not the current Makkah (Mecca). Even in those wrenching scenarios, which we bravely examine in Quranic Integrity Debate and Historical Truth, the central conclusions of BioIslam remain valid.

Although we don’t know the future, it is likely that with each generation, cumulative knowledge will rise and science will progress; the powers of reason will grow, due to the preceding factors, and possibly the Flynn Effect too.⁶² In the future, these factors could stack up to deliver even better interpretations of Islam (and hopefully all ancient faiths); it would be arrogant and myopic to assert otherwise. In the future, we might also get to welcome Prophet Isa/Jesus ﷺ to clarify conundrums and bring peace and prosperity f0r all those who suffer. Until that time, a BioMuslim aspires to be a true seeker of truth, a talib al haqq, and welcomes the process of updating his/her convictions with new knowledge, especially when the God/Allah ﷻ self-discloses through science.

While BioIslam might not be perfect – no interpretation of any religion is, and the buyer should beware of such claims – it is better than the pseudo-certainty of ‘Traditional’ Islam. This is especially true when judged by the crucial litmus test of riq-slavery – the former passes, the latter sadly did not.

Footnotes

Definition of pro-science: those ‘believers’ who view science as key to God’s continual self-disclosure, especially in an age of no new Prophets (i.e. the last 1,400 or so years).
We use the term science broadly, for evidence-based systematic study of natural and social phenomena. For example, GiveWell, ranks charities by operating efficiency and is a laudable social-scientific attempt to reduce suffering.
The 7th century remains relevant since it showcased stunningly swift progress. Inspired by a charismatic leader, and a compact book of ‘revealed’ wisdom, the Arabian peninsula, hijaz, advanced from a primitive tribal society, jahilliyah, to a progressive polity, within a generation.
BioIslam’s belief in God’s self-disclosure via science is central to its worldview, in contrast to the cooption of modern science by Traditional Muslims in a laggard or catch-up mode.
There is no gender assigned to God/Allah ﷻ in the original Arabic, so why should we in English, even if it makes for a tad more cumbersome reading?
For a ‘perennial’ believer, there is a core universal Truth veiled behind the external shell of all major religions. We concur but go beyond religion. The core equations of science, such as the undisputed laws of gravity, are a type of revelation, since they unveil Truth.
Although we don’t subscribe to much of the speculative cosmology of ibn Arabi, we build upon his idea of God’s self-disclosure. See William Chittick, The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn Al-‘Arabi’s Cosmology.
Definition of post-Sufi: those who pursue a proactive path to alleviate others’ suffering, going beyond the passive Sufi search for personal truth. Post-Sufis are amystical. They reject the self-effacing ideas of mystical Sufism, such as fana, baqa and silsila. Instead, they rely on Sufi concepts that are validated by modern science, such as zikr, fikr, hayra and hayba.
God/Allah ﷻ cannot be known except through revelation or unveiling or Prophethood (Q 42:51). We interpret the term unveiling as referring to science. Those who do not unveil (through science) will not benefit from divine guidance (Q 45.23). Yet there are limits to our comprehension, and objective truth will not be unveiled until during our lifetime (Q 50:22).
This is the famous ‘hadith of the hidden treasure’. Some Traditional Muslims believe it is a hadith qudsi, where God/Allah ﷻ speaks to the Prophet ﷺ. The popular Sufi version incorrectly employs past tense, due to the difficulty of translating an ancient language – ‘I was a treasure unknown, then I desired to be known. So I created creation to make Myself known; they then knew Me.’ The ulama, both Sunni and Shia, regard this as fabricated and outside canonized texts, but their criticism stands on the shaky ground of canonization. This widely transmitted hadith is valid since it is consistent with the deep cosmic mysteries that the Quran cites cryptically.
The exact nature of cosmic light is undefined in Islam, but it is more than mere photons. It likely includes the set of fundamental meta-laws that generate the laws of physics and mathematics. When physicists discover the theory of everything, which might be constructor theory and its subsidiary of string theory, we might better understand noor as samawati.
Truth is the first casualty of war, as is often said. The first fitna, a nasty civil war, occurred about 25 years after the Prophet (656-661 CE), with rival armies led by his widow and son-in-law, according to Traditional sources. The second fitna occurred about 50 years after the Prophet (680-692 CE) between the rivaling Northern/Syrian/Umayyad and Southern/Meccan/Zubayrid caliphates, led by Abd al-Malik and Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr, respectively. It began with the death of the Muawiya and the ensuing Battle of Karbala, both in 61/680, the burning of the Ka’aba in 64/683 and the eventual killing of the Meccan ruler in 73/692 (Fred Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, p. 177-188). In total, out of the first 60 years after the Prophet’s death (632-692 CE), nineteen, or almost one-third, experienced civil war. The Umayyad victors (and their Abbasid successors), defined the Islam that we inherited. Were they unbiased? How would Islam have evolved if the Meccans had won? We will never know, since almost all of what we know was written a century or two later.
We prefer the label Traditional over Orthodox since the Islamic Tradition relies heavily on detailed reports, i.e. traditions, about the life of its founding Prophet.
The noble lie is as old as human society. In Plato’s Republic, the elite advance a noble lie to guide and control the masses. The ulama did the same, especially during 700-900 CE, to remedy the corruption of truth that followed the breakneck expansion of empire in the three decades after the Prophet, and the subsequent second fitna.
Ibn Rushd believed that “truth does not contradict truth” and distinguished between “demonstrative truth” and “rhetorical truth”. This parity implies a duty to investigate, using philosophy in ibn Rushd’s view, and the scientific method in our view. Modern science can offer more clarity than philosophy alone, since the latter can be biased by speculative metaphysics, such as the Neoplatonism of ibn Sina (d. 428/1037), a prominent philosopher. Hence, we reinterpret the first of ibn Rushd’s truths as that obtained by the scientific method, inspired by Quranic verses such as 59:2 and 88:17-18. See Majid Fakhry, Islamic Philosophy, p. 117 and Peter Adamson Philosophy in the Islamic World, p. 184.
Which science? Some science is work-in-progress, while some is ‘settled’ by abundant evidence, and undergirded by formal mathematical proofs and academic consensus. For example, the theory of gravity is clearly settled science, while the theory of biological evolution has rapidly transitioned from work-in-progress to settled, as evidence of common descent from a Tree of Life mounts, in the wake of the genomic revolution. Even with settled science, it is provisional until contradicted by future observations. Traditional Muslims might mock the idea of science being ‘settled’, but that cynicism cuts both ways; just as there is an ‘observer’ effect inherent to any scientific project, there is a ‘interpreter’ bias on any human attempt to comprehend revelation.
BioIslam’s priority on poverty concurs with the spirit, but not the specifics, of Christian ‘social gospel’ or ‘liberation theology’. The latter rests on a ‘preferential option for the poor’ that is often advanced through Marxist methods. In contrast, BioIslam views material poverty as the historical default state of humanity, rooted in adverse ‘biogeographic’ luck until around say 1700 CE, and a poverty of ideas thereafter. Looking ahead, it relies on science and human potential enhancement to deliver material relief from suffering.
‘Threshold 9’ refers to an advanced sustainable civilization, as envisioned by David Christian in Origin Story: A Big History of Everything. An alternate vision is a Type 1 civilization, as proposed by the physicist Nikolai Kardashev. Futurists believe we could get there in the next century, if we make good choices. In doing so, we would likely solve many of our current problems of physical suffering. However, in the absence of spiritual guardrails, we are likely to self- destruct before we get there. BioIslam proposes a prudent path, inspired by the revolutionary achievements of Islam in its first century (7th c. CE).
The problem of natural suffering is at the core of most religions. The East Asian religions (especially Buddhism) address it very differently than the West Asian ones (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). Buddhism prescribes a ‘noble path’ to escape suffering in this world. Christianity places great emphasis on an afterlife. Judaism started off without a concept of an extra-planetary afterlife, but added it in centuries later. Traditional Islam goes much further; it amplifies the allures of the afterlife with beautiful metaphors, especially in the lyrical heights of Sura ar Rahman.
BioIslam accepts the axiom of afterlife, but goes a step further. By viewing life through a pro-science filter, it highlights the awe-inspiring complexity of the cosmos and biosphere. It expands our sense-perception, beyond the brevity of our lifetime, and the minuteness of our location. It reminds us of our minuscule position, relative to our 14-billion-years universe and the billion-trillion stars within. It appreciates the evolutionary processes of creative destruction, at both the cosmic and microscopic scales. BioIslam shifts our egocentric sense of self, and our sense of parochial certitude, to an infinite and inclusive horizon.
Some argue the Quran is ‘androcentric’ but not ‘misogynist’. That appears to have been the view of Kecia Ali in the 2006 edition of her landmark work, Sexual Ethics and Islam (p. 100), but she uses both terms abundantly in the revised 2016 edition. We use the latter term alone since the historical reality aligns with the definition of misogyny advanced by Kate Manne in Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny – “a system that operates within a patriarchal social order to police and enforce women’s subordination and to uphold male dominance.” So even if Islam was merely androcentric, the ensuing Tradition manifested misogyny.
This ‘skeptical spirit’ is viewed by Traditional Islam (and Christianity) as an obstacle to faith in the divine. But it is essential for scientific progress. A leading physicist says, “What was needed for sustained, rapid growth of knowledge was a tradition of criticism. Before the Enlightenment, that was a very rare sort of tradition: usually the whole point of a tradition was to keep things the same” (David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity, p. 13). The first Islamic century erased pagan irrationality and represented such a short-lived Enlightenment, but was later snuffed out by the canonization project in the third Islamic century. Canonization led to the ‘construction’ of an Traditional Islam
Our spiritual progress has greatly lagged the rapid advances in science, a mismatch that could cause the sixth mass extinction of life. Some bravely suggest biomedical enhancement through psychoactive medicine and other methods, as a possible way out (Unfit for the Future, Persson and Savulescu). While this will be necessary for those on the margins of society, BioIslam offers a way forward for the mainstream.
Scientists have a ‘house philosophy’ of materialism, in which the world is without purpose, a frozen universe of solitude. Yet science is successful due to its ‘prodigious power of performance’, so we subscribe to its ideology, despite materialism’s failure to make people kinder, more loving and less selfish (Paul Feyerabend, Tyranny of Science, pp. 34-35). This is where BioIslam can moderate between science and spirituality.
Does objective truth exist? This is much debated by secularists. To a Traditional Muslim, it is all too simple – the Quran is the uncreated and co-eternal speech of Allah, hence nothing less than the Truth. But the rub lies in how to interpret it, on which there is far less consensus than Traditional Muslims admit. To a BioMuslim, the universe is infinitely complex yet awesome; glimpses of its partial Truth can be accessed via both science and the Quran. While the meaning of the Quran can be endlessly debated, hence limiting us to a partial truth, its aural aesthetics transport us closer to the Truth. “There are objective truths in aesthetics”, says a leading physicist (David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity, pp. 358-68). He notes how there is universal agreement that flowers are beautiful. They are attractive to insects, due to biological co-evolution with them, and also pleasing to humans due to a shared genetic heritage with insects.
At the advent of Islam in 610 CE, the Arabs had an awesome oral tradition (in contrast to an underdeveloped writing system that lagged the Greek or Chinese system by centuries). We use aural, to underscore the enchanting melodies of the azaan, salat, duaa, zikr and qiraat the pervasive components of frequent prayer. They belong to the ‘thrilling audio-spiritual universe of the Quran’, says a leading Arabist (Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Arabs, p. 8).
“I think the odds are no better than fifty-fifty that our present civilization on Earth will survive to the end of the present century… What happens here on Earth, in this century, could conceivably make the difference between a near eternity filled with ever more complex and subtle forms of life and one filled with nothing but base matter.” (Martin Rees, Our Final Hour, p. 8)
Fred Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, p. 80-1 and p. 97.
“It is our duty to remain optimists… The future is open… we are all responsible for what the future holds in store.” (Karl Popper, The Myth of the Framework, p. xiii)
Specifically, we mean extract from Quran primarily rather than ‘Quran only’ since any reading of the Quran, or any other ancient text, assumes social constructs of language and culture that are unavoidably embedded in the mind of both lay readers and scholars.
Importantly, the last of these factors depends on how much God/Allah has chosen to self-disclose to us.
Fallibilists acknowledge there are no crystal clear sources of knowledge, and that even our best explanations, whether rooted in science or religion, are likely to contain both misconceptions and truth. The blind spot of both scientists and ulama on the issue of geocentrism vs. heliocentrism, which persisted for centuries, is the most telling example. Which begs the question: which blind spots do we continue to suffer from?
The singularity could occur before the end of this century. See Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.
Fasting was initially prescribed for a 24-hour period, a night of prayer without food, drink and sex, until the next night. But due to people violating the no-sex rule, God/Allah ﷻ offered a concession and shortened the fast to its current day-long format. See Dark Matter for the relevant sahih Hadith. Ulama classify this hadith as weak, yet it was strong enough to make it to the very selective sahih sittah collection.
A physicist hypothesizes that the universe may not be governed by a fixed and eternal natural law, as conventional science suggests. Instead, it may be a result of the processes of self-organization. “A great deal of the order and regularity we find in the physical world may have arisen just as the beauty of the living world came to be… the world has evolved over time to become intricately structured”. See Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos, p. 15.
James Gardner, The Intelligent Universe, p. 161)
E.O. Wilson, BioPhilia, p. 1
Some, but not all, of the aural-Sunnah is additionally documented in the textual-Sunnah: for example, the basic mechanics of prayer. An example of aural transmission that is not available textually is the tajweed (pronunciation of Arabic words), and qirat (recitation of Quranic verses).
mutawatir refers to Traditional reports of the Sunnah that are so massively transmitted that an error is assumed impossible due to multiple chains of verification.
Debates on rituals, such as how often to pray, remain open. For example, the Sunni practice of five obligatory (fard) prayers, or the Shi’i practice of five prayers offered at three timings, is likely to have been constructed many centuries later. For example, Shaykh al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111), refers to three ‘formal prayers – two rak’ahs in the morning, four at midday and three at sunset’, in al-Munqidh min ad-Dalal, or Deliverance from Error, translated by W. Montgomery Watt in The Faith and Practice of Al-Ghazali, p. 86. This is significant because al-Ghazali writes five centuries after Islam’s origin and was lauded with an unprecedented high honorific of Hujjat al-Islam, or Proof of Islam. Some scholars clarify that the process started with two prayers, then three, and eventually five. “The number of such prayers prescribed daily seems to have been two initially, one at or just after dawn, and the other (asr) shortly before sunset, later followed by a middle prayer. Thereafter, two more were added, at least for settled populations, making up what eventually became the five binding daily prayers, but this cannot be securely dated to Muhammad’s lifetime”, writes Aziz al-Azmeh, The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity, p. 417. Since many Traditionalist scholars accept that the early Muslims of the pre-Hijra era practiced two daily prayers not five, BioIslam suggests that quality should precede quantity in prayers – i.e., achieving high quality with two prayers is pre-requisite to expanding to the ultimate ideal of three or five, as shown in the Comparison Chart.
Homo duplex is a term coined by the sociologist Emile Durkheim (d. 1917) to suggest that humans make efforts to transcend our lower animalistic and individualistic tendencies, which are driven by raw instincts and passions. The result is social solidarity, which in turn generates a shared morality, and in turn the notion of the sacred. With a revealed religion like Islam, the sequence is reversed, starting with a sacred revelation that unveils a moral framework. The ‘secret staircase’ refers to transcendence triggered by various experiences, including but not limited to acts of mindful worship, according to Jonathan Haidt, a leading social scientist.
On beards, there is consensus it is Sunnah and strongly preferred, on the basis of many hadith in Sahih Bukhari, but scholars debate whether it should remain uncut, as was the practice of the Prophet ﷺ, versus cut down to a manageable fist-length, as was the practice of many sahaba.
“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”, said the prominent physicist Richard Feynman.
BioIslam rejects the skepticism of those secular scholars who question whether the Quran is aurally-pure. The concerns they have on variant readings of the Quran – based on multiple ahrufs and qiraat, and concern about the deviances between the current Quranic codex and the lower-text (palimpest) of the Sanaa fragments – do not invalidate BioIslam’s assumption of aural-purity, since the Quran was memorized by reciters (qurra) and the written texts were catching up to the oral tradition, as parchment and paper became more widely available and affordable, after 650CE and 750 CE, respectively. If we discover a Quranic manuscript that differs from the oral tradition, it could well be the fault lies in the text, possibly due to scribal error.
The ulama slightly disagree on whether the last chapter revealed was Sura 5/al-Maidah, or Sura 48/al-Fath or Sura 110/an-Nasr, with the majority leaning toward Sura 110/an-Nasr. However, the last one in the mushaf, the standard Quran compilation, is Sura 114/an-Nas. Strangely, the ulama strongly disagree on which was the last verse revealed, and none of the candidates are from Sura 110. The ulama’s leading candidates for the last verse are 2:281 (on judgement day), 2:282 (on loans), 2:278 (on usury), 4:93 (on murder), 4.176 (on inheritance), 9:129 (on trusting God), and 18:110 (on strict monotheism). Surprisingly, the most cited choice for the last revealed verse is 5:3 (on perfection of the religion), but it has no validation in the sahih Hadith books. See Fatoohi, L., The First and Last Revelations of the Quran.
Neo-atheism is not so new. Auguste Comte (d. 1857), a French philosopher, pushed atheism in a pseudo-religious garb. His book, Cathechisme Positiviste, prescribed mythology, creedal dogma, hierarchy, rituals, sacraments and a dress code (John Gray, The Seven Types of Atheism, p. 10).
Richard Dawkins, the notable scientist turned notorious atheist, offers great insights when not raging against religion. He calls our position in the universe ‘Middle World’, since we live in a middle state far above the tinyness of atoms but far below the vastness of galaxies, and we traverse distances far greater than the microscopic increments of Brownian Motion, and far smaller than that of interstellar objects. See ‘Why the universe seems so strange’, TED talk, Jan 2007.
Cognitive closure is the desire to remove ambiguity and arrive at definite conclusions even if they are incorrect or irrational.
WEIRD refers to Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. While less than 20% of the world’s population falls into this category today, a large fraction of the remaining 80% aspire to the WEIRD lifestyle, often without acknowledging the ideological transition that might accompany that transition.
Some critics believe that Isa and Jesus are not the same figures; the former a Quranic Prophet who brought the Injil, a holy book that is now entirely lost, whereas Jesus is the anglicized form of Yeshua, a Jewish rebel and ‘zealot’ who was executed for agitating against the brutality of the Roman Empire. These critics believe that Saul (later renamed Paul), a fellow nationalist and zealot Jew, conflates the historical Isa with Jesus/Yeshua to advance the nationalist cause. Yet other critics believe Jesus was nothing more than a moral teacher and zealot Jew, who was not of virgin birth, performed no miracles, etc. (for the latter view, read the respected philosopher, David Skrbina, The Jesus Hoax). BioMuslims assume Isa and Jesus are the same person, which is the interpretation of both Traditional Muslims and orthodox Christians; but even if Isa ﷺ is not the same as Jesus/Yeshua, our error would only be to conflate them with Isa/Jesus, and the nuzul Isa, or Second Coming of Isa (but not Jesus), would be a valid expectation.
Issac Newton, one of the greatest scientists ever, spent untold hours analyzing biblical prophesies and predicted in 1704 the Second Coming would occur in 2060, but also posited other dates like 2090 and 2374. See Statement on the Date 2060 on Isaac-Newton.org
Arthur C. Clarke, a science fiction writer.
Anthropologist believe pigs started to become taboo in early Judaism around 1300 BCE, which is the timeframe during which Prophet Moses likely emerged (although the estimate of Moses’ lifetime varies widely, and we believe around 1300 BCE is the most likely). By the end of the Iron Age, i.e. around 600 BCE in the ancient Near East, the “written Jewish Law forbade the consumption of pork”. A millennium later “Islam adopted an even handed approach toward Christian and Jewish theologies, taking what its founders perceived to be the middle way between them. While most of the taboos outlined in the Torah were abandoned, the Quran kept what its writers saw was the most significant – including the taboo on pork.” See pp. 8-9 Evolution of a Taboo, Max D. Price, Oxford Univ. Press.
The paucity of meat, and its notable presence at celebrations, is cited in many classical Traditionalist tracts. It is also consistent with the norms of ancient humans. See “Human Ancestors Were Nearly All Vegetarians“, Rob Dunn (a biologist), Scientific American, July 2012.
Kecia Ali, Sexual Ethics and Islam, pp. 126-41
The concept of honor code explains best why the mainstream ulama have reluctantly withdrawn their longstanding support for practices like slavery and female circumcision. See Kwame Appiah, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.
Sachau, E.C., Alberuni’s India. Also see Gavin Flood, Hindu Monotheism, Cambridge Univ Press; depsite vast surface differences, he sees a deep similiarity between Hindu and Abrahamic monotheisms since “God in essence is unknowable because transcendent and so beyond human powers of understanding”.
There likely exist universes that are more friendly to life than our own, that were born of Big Bangs other than the one we know of. See Martin Rees, The multiverse, The Conversation, March 2023.
As an aside, those modernist Muslims who dismiss jinn as merely allegorical are obliged to explain why other supernatural entities, such as the angels or devil or the afterlife itself, are not allegorical. And if all of the aforementioned are allegorical, why not take the final step to declare God as allegorical too, thus reducing Islam to a naturalistic socio-psycho-cultural phenomenon? A BioMuslim passively accepts the possibility that all of these supernatural constructs might be real in some physical sense, although we cannot prove or disprove.
Any strict interpretation of monotheism, whether Jewish, Christian or Islamic, is antagonistic in that it has an emphatic concept of truth. It rests on a ‘distinction between true and false religion, proclaiming a truth that does not stand in complementary relationship to other truths, but consigns all traditional or rival truths to the realm of falsehood.’ Such revealed faiths are ‘counterreligion’ to the native religion of the land that has been ‘ineradicably inscribed in the institutional, linguistic and cultural conditions of a society’. ‘For these religions, and these religions alone, the truth to be proclaimed comes with an enemy to be fought.’ See Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, p. 2-4.
Could Moses have been the head priest of the new monotheistic religion of the Sun God, the ‘Aten’? The Great Hymn to the Aten has surprising parallels to the Hebrew Bible’s Psalm 104 (and the Muslim Sura Fatiha). After Pharaoh Akhen-aten died, his son Tutankhamun, aka ‘King Tut’, reverts Egypt to its traditional polytheism, and the monotheistic followers of Aten are persecuted and disappear from Egyptian history. Could the Exodus involve Moses fleeing Egypt with these monotheists? Dating the Exodus is a challenging and contested area of scholarship, and many credible scholars believe the Exodus, as defined in the Hebrew Bible, is a mythical not historical event. However, it is plausible that followed the end of Akhen-aten’s reign. See Sigmund Freud’s daring book, Moses and Monotheism.
Flynn Effect refers to an observed increase in population IQ of about 3 points per decade in the 20th century. It is debated whether this has been true of prior centuries, and whether it will sustain in the future