Abdul Rahman (TAP)
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The Islamic dilemma had a good run, but it finally lost the title of dumbest apologetics argument ever made.
Abdul Rahman (TAP)21,004 просмотров • 3 дней назад
The Cosmological Argument Without the Kalami Baggage The reason I know Hijab hasn't carefully read Ibn Taymiyya on these questions is that he says something like this without seeming to notice what it actually does to the route he's taking. If he really sat with those discussions, the point he's making in this clip would not look like support for his strategy at all. He says he does not know anyone who accepts an infinite regress of causes, and that's true. But once that much is already out the way, this whole shift to an Avicennan framework with all the baggage it comes with should already start looking a lot less appealing. Let me explain why. If an infinite regress of causes is impossible, then all you need in order to reach the conclusion Hijab wants to reach is just one thing that came into being after not existing at all. All you need is one instance of temporal origination. Your own coming into existence and the things happening right in front of you give you exactly that. And unless you're now going to retreat from even this to satisfy the skeptic, you already have all you need. Not just from what's all around you, but from within your very self. You have, in your very own existence, something that came into being after not existing, and therefore requires a cause that brought it into being, a self-sufficient cause whose existence is not itself from something else. And regardless of whether the sequence of temporally originated things extends infinitely into the past or not, it still follows that the whole series cannot sufficiently explain the temporally originated thing in question, because if an infinite regress of causes is impossible, then the series cannot just hang there without terminating in a self-sufficient cause. So once he's already granted that much, the conclusion he's after is already right there in substance. But if that's the case, why abandon this clearly more straightforward route in favor of Ibn Sina's? Why leave behind the immediate and obvious reality of temporal origination and retreat into a highly abstract metaphysical framework with all the theological baggage it comes with? Part of the answer is that there's a significant amount of kalami pressure still doing work in the background, whether he sees it clearly or not. He's still being pulled by a picture in which that one temporally originated thing right in front of him somehow does not yet feel enough, and in which there's still a need to rule out a beginningless past of any kind at all before the argument is secure. And since fighting through this kalami route comes with its own heavy costs, Ibn Sina's more abstract starting point becomes appealing precisely because it seems to float above that whole battlefield entirely. That whole picture doesn't just come from nowhere. It belongs to a framework shaped by Mu'tazili-Ash'ari atomist commitments and by the Avicennan alternative that presents itself as the way out. But that's precisely the false dichotomy that Ibn Taymiyya's engagement with these schools exposes. And that's why I said at the start that Hijab clearly has not absorbed those discussions. I say this because nobody exposes how this whole dilemma gets manufactured in the first place more clearly than Ibn Taymiyya. Once you follow both of these approaches through to where they actually lead, the picture roughly looks like this: On the kalami side, the world is temporally originated, but there's no temporal cause and no temporally specifying reason for why it began when it did rather than before or after. On the Avicennan side, the idea of a temporally originated world without a temporally specifying reason for why it began at one moment rather than another is rejected, and what that drives them to is an eternal world flowing necessarily from a timeless source. The first side is left saying that the world did not exist and then suddenly came into being, when absolutely nothing changed in the first "non-existence" state to bring the "existence" state about. No new act, no new cause, no new specification of any kind. Just non-existence, and then existence, with nothing in between that accounts for the difference. And this isn't just the ordinary sense of "why this moment rather than another" as if time was already flowing in the background and there was succession of some sort. The issue is that there's no succession there at all, and yet somehow a first occurrence appears without anything new accounting for it. The second side, on the other hand, tries to avoid that mess by denying the beginning altogether. But then it runs into a worse problem, because if the world flows necessarily from an eternally sufficient cause, then by right, there shouldn't be temporally originated things happening right in front of us at all. If the sufficient cause is eternally what it is and its effect follows necessarily, then nothing genuinely new should ever come to be. And yet things do come to be and events do occur right before our eyes. So that picture ends up in something far worse than the kalami one, because it leaves the very occurrences we're constantly witnessing impossible to account for in the first place. This choice between denying any kind of beginningless past on one side, or accepting an eternal emanation of the world from a timeless source on the other, only starts looking meaningful once certain premises about God have already been quietly accepted in the background. Brother Hijab is either knowingly or unknowingly operating within a system that traps you between these two options. Part of what Ibn Taymiyya's critiques are meant to show is that this whole "menu" is already the product of framework-level concessions that didn't need to be made in the first place. The whole force of Ibn Sina's move depends on those prior concessions. If you deny real volitional attributes and deny that God's willing and acting are themselves genuinely real and successive (as opposed to being reduced to mere effects within creation), then of course you're going to be left staring at the world's coming into existence and finding nothing in God that accounts for it. And that's exactly the pressure Ibn Sina exploits. He isn't exposing some universal difficulty that falls equally on every conception of God. He's taking advantage of a problem that only becomes a problem once those earlier denials are already in place. From our side, that whole pressure is manufactured by a prior departure from what revelation teaches plainly and what a sound fitrah and uncorrupted reason recognize naturally about God. He acts when He wills. He does what He wills. One thing genuinely follows another by His act and decisive will. He truly answers when called upon. He creates, commands, speaks, loves, is pleased, is angered, and does what He wills when He wills. This is not some later philosophical patchwork brought in to rescue a weak position. It's the direct meaning of what was revealed to the prophets (peace be upon them) and the most natural and intelligible understanding of the Creator in the first place. The whole metaphysical mess we've been walking through only begins after that is set aside and people start trying to reconstruct coherence in its absence. The dilemma that pushes Hijab toward Ibn Sina simply does not arise for those who never made that initial concession. But even if all of that is set aside and Ibn Sina is taken on his own terms, his approach doesn't solve this manufactured problem anyway. It makes it worse. If the world proceeds from an eternally complete cause that necessarily produces its effect without interval or delay, the very occurrence of events within the world becomes unintelligible. If the sufficient cause is eternally what it is and its effect follows necessarily from it, then why are new things happening at all? Why is anything coming to be? Why is there succession? Either everything that proceeds from that cause should always have been exactly as it is, in which case the occurrence of new events becomes impossible to make sense of, or events are somehow happening without anything genuinely bringing them into being, which is even worse. Hijab's own position sits uncomfortably between both of these frameworks without actually being grounded in either of them. On the kalami side, the denial of real volitional attributes is driven by the famous dalil al-a'rad that Ash'aris inherited from the Mu'tazila. A flawed argument whose anti-past-infinitude burden Hijab himself seems uneasy about defending, and one that even scholars within the kalami tradition have never fully settled among themselves. On the Avicennan side, the denial of volitional attributes is tied to the composition argument, which is even more obviously flawed than the first, and which Hijab himself effectively rejects the moment he wants to affirm real attributes of God elsewhere. So he's neither willing to fully own the kalami grounds nor willing to accept the Avicennan ones, and yet he remains caught between both frameworks in a way that has him selectively borrowing loaded conclusions from each while rejecting the very premises that would at least give either position a fighting chance at internal coherence. As for the position that actually makes sense, the one that does not require any of this maneuvering and doesn't come loaded with any of these burdens, that's the one he keeps stepping around. He already has temporal origination staring him right in the face, not just in the world around him but in his very own existence. And once he grants the impossibility of an infinite regress of causes, that's already all he needs to arrive at the conclusion he's after. And yet instead of taking the direct route that's right there in front of him, he moves into inherited frameworks with all the speculative premises and theological costs that come with them, and then has to spend his time patching around the problems those frameworks generate. That's what happens when you reach for the most sophisticated-looking formulation without a sufficiently clear view of what drove people into those frameworks to begin with, and without a clear understanding of what they had to give up along the way to stay in them.
Abdul Rahman (TAP)20,397 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
The most commonly spoken language in Somalia is Arabic 😂
Abdul Rahman (TAP)50,239 просмотров • 5 месяцев назад
People who are saying: 1) “This Ibn Arabi criticism is just a Salafi talking point today that others have moved on from.” 2) “Non-Salafi scholars only differed on him in the distant past.” 3) “Anyone who made takfir/tabdi of Ibn Arabi just misunderstood him.” Here is Dr. Saeed Foudah, one of the leading, world-renowned Ashari scholars of today. He gives you a non-exhaustive list of scholars who either did Takfir or tabdi' of Ibn Arabi (or of his views) and asks how in the world you can call these people ignorant or misinformed. Scholars he mentions as having made takfir of Ibn Arabi: Ala al-Din al-Bukhari Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani Burhan al-Din Ibrahim ibn 'Umar al-Biqa'i Ibn al-Muqri Abdullah Bin Ahmed Bamakhramah Scholars he mentions as having strongly critiqued, made tabdi' of, or implicitly hinted at the takfir of Ibn Arabi and/or his views: Sa’d al-Din al-Taftazani Ala al-Dawla al-Simnani Imam Ahmad al-Sirhindi Ahmad Zarruq Zakariyya al-Ansari He also mentions that Ibn Arabi himself speaks dismissively about al-Ghazali and says that he’s "veiled" (mahjub) from this level of knowledge (this is found in al-Futuhat according to Foudah). He also points people to Imam al-Sakhawi’s work: “al-Qawl al-Munbi” (on Ibn Arabi), which lists hundreds of scholars across madhhabs and regions who either made takfir or tabdi' of Ibn Arabi and/or his views. He even mentions that some of Ibn Arabi’s defenders, like al-Sha‘rani, couldn't accept his views as they appear in his books, so they felt forced to claim the text wasn’t fully reliable and had been tampered with. So no, this isn’t “just a modern Salafi trend,” and it isn’t as simple as “they misunderstood him.”
Abdul Rahman (TAP)43,748 просмотров • 5 месяцев назад
As usual, Daniel’s up to his old tricks. He pulls a quote from Ibn Hajar and demands a yes-or-no ruling on the sentence in isolation — not because he’s interested in a general discussion on the criteria for shirk, but because, as always, he wants to muddy the waters and confuse the general ruling on a statement or belief with the application of that ruling to the individual who said it. He just wants to say: “Aha! So you think Ibn Hajar is a mushrik?!” What a child. He does this even though he himself constantly bends over backwards to excuse what he regards as explicitly Kufri statements made by Shia scholars, on the grounds of ta’wil or specious arguments (see video below). Then he makes this hypocritical switch and parades as an anti-‘udhr crusader when arguing with Salafis. Why? Because he wants to claim their only consistent position is mass takfir and act outraged when they don’t follow through. Unlike the guys Daniel defends, Ibn Hajar clearly states that calling upon others for what only Allah can do is kufr by consensus. He firmly condemns grave-centered innovations, called for tearing down domes over tombs, and strongly warned against exaggerated veneration. The quote Daniel cherry-picked was from a section on visiting the Prophet’s ﷺ grave where Ibn Hajar ties the language to visitation-specific adab and divine mercy. The fact that the statement implies shirk in isolation doesn’t place it anywhere near the framework of grave-centred theology and blanket metaphysical authority Daniel constantly excuses.
Abdul Rahman (TAP)52,397 просмотров • 1 год назад
Watching these debate-review clips by InspiringPhilosophy - Michael Jones, Than Christopoulos - Inspiring Philosophy and GodLogic_GL is actually insane. Like how can people who do this for a living be this incapable of following a basic argument? They played a clip of Jake saying, “I never said abrogation means corruption,” and completely lost it: “YES YOU DID! WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? AHHHHH!” How in God’s name could that be what he meant when his own argument literally uses the Qur’an ABROGATING ITSELF as evidence??? 😂 Watch the clip below. He’s basically saying that if you believe the Qur’an can’t tell people to refer back to earlier law while also being the final authority that qualifies and supersedes parts of it, then the implication is that the Qur’an contradicts itself when it tells MUSLIMS to follow the ENTIRE QUR’AN while also abrogating certain rulings within it! Unless Jake secretly believes the Qur’an is “corrupted” every time it abrogates a previous ruling, their reaction makes zero sense. How these guys can be this loud when they can’t even track a simple line of reasoning is beyond me lol.
Abdul Rahman (TAP)11,512 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад
Their arguments are getting dumber by the day 🤣 By that logic: P1. Whatever has something more perfect than it is not God. P2. (Assumed for reductio) A plurality of persons is more perfect than a single person. P3. The Trinity is a plurality of persons, and the Father is a single person. P4. Therefore, the Trinity is more perfect than the Father. (from P2 and P3) P5. If the Trinity is more perfect than the Father, then the Father is not God. (from P1) Conclusion: The Father is not God. (from P4 and P5)
Abdul Rahman (TAP)11,754 просмотров • 10 месяцев назад
If you donate $1 today, you probably won’t even remember it tomorrow. But that $1 could earn you rewards every single day — long after you’re gone. Every footstep into the mosque. Every prostration. Every child learning Quran. All on your scale, insha’Allah. My brother-in-law is helping lead this project in Helsingborg, Sweden. They’re trying to open by June — they just need that last push. Be part of something that outlives you.
Abdul Rahman (TAP)12,875 просмотров • 1 год назад
In case you missed it yesterday: Exposing Haroun Kanj as-Salafi’s Confusion on Meaning and Tashbih
Abdul Rahman (TAP)10,995 просмотров • 1 год назад
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