Part Three: Restoring the Caliphate and Sharia rule are calls often heard today. Is the intent, as the American right suggests, global…

Historically, Muslim jurists checked state power by protecting the weak and refusing political office. Instead of Sharī‛a rule, then, what needs…

Feb 20 • Reem Elghonimi

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Part Two: From the beginning, human rights consciousness informed Islam's religious law

When we say Islamic Law has lost its dynamism, we miss the point: the standard was caring for the underprivileged by holding the corrupt to account, not…

Feb 9 • Reem Elghonimi

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January 2026

Part One: The story told about Islamic Law claims it needs reform

Most of Islam's history has been defined by the separation of State and Law, which prevented Sharī‛a criminal penalties from monopolizing the rule of…

Jan 31 • Reem Elghonimi

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December 2025

The Lady and the Law: The right to an exclusive gift the Sharī‛a gave to women wasn't just about economics. It recalibrated social norms.

It was not the realm of politics that reaped social, moral, and legal remedies for Muslim women, but the intellectual legal tradition inaugurated by the…

Dec 20, 2025 • Reem Elghonimi

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Mired in Error: Descartes' Unquestioning Acceptance of dogma and What It Means for Islam and Evolution Theory

The 17th-century thinker fell into a trap that, ironically, shows us the nuances between literal readings of the Qur'an and the Bible.

Dec 4, 2025 • Reem Elghonimi

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November 2025

The Orientalists' Extreme Skepticism of Hadith Wrought Disastrous Consequences for Islamic Law. It has stolen our intangible cultural…

This is the insidiousness of epistemic attacks on Islam’s intellectual heritage. Shafi’i's al-Risala is the text whose longform use of reason was the…

Nov 28, 2025 • Reem Elghonimi

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A Valedictorian Nothing

I was a model straight A student, but as a brown Muslim girl, my effort didn't save me from being pulled out of class and publicly beaten by school…

Nov 5, 2025 • Reem Elghonimi

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October 2025

'As If' Reasoning: Using Maqasid al-Sharia inappropriately, As If Islamic Civilization was the force that gave religious law tyrannical…

In the Western imagination, Islam and its Muslim populations have been projected as the face of what was actually Europe’s historical religious…

Oct 20, 2025 • Reem Elghonimi

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Tolkien's The Hobbit: An Antidote to the Contemporary Surge of Supremacy

In the literary classic beloved to Christian audiences around the world—The Hobbit—the protagonist Bilbo is short, stodgy, complacent, and labeled a…

Oct 2, 2025 • Reem Elghonimi

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September 2025

Liberal Secularism and the Logic of Comparing Religions, Part 4: Ernest Renan's The Soul of Society and the 1883 Sorbonne Lecture

"Science is the soul of a society, because science is reason. It creates military superiority and industrial superiority. It will one day create social…

Sep 17, 2025 • Reem Elghonimi

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Liberal Secularism and the Logic of Comparing Religions, Part 3: Shifting Civilizational Power and the Discourse on Science in the Colonial…

“Today, no city has a more abundant civilization than Cairo. It is the mother of the world, the center of Islam (īwān al-Islām), and the mainspring of…

Sep 10, 2025 • Reem Elghonimi

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August 2025

Liberal Secularism and the Logic of Comparing Religions, Part 2: Bernard Lewis' appropriation of Muhammad Abduh's 1902 Egyptian debate

Abduh showed colonial-era Egypt continued Islam's tradition of prioritizing reason in disputes with revelation. Ironically, Lewis erased Islam's…

Aug 27, 2025 • Reem Elghonimi

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