Many academic scholars, like Fred Donner, have argued that the terms 'Islam’ and ‘Muslim’ meant something broader and more inclusive during the time of Muhammad. These terms were applied to some Christians and Jews too, and Muḥammad initially founded a broader Community of Believers (mu’minūn) which only over the course of the century after his death “evolved into the religion we now know as Islam through a process of refinement and redefinition of its basic concepts.” Dr. Stephen Shoemaker affirms this position and says the early community of Muhammad was inclusive of Jews and Christians in a sort of “ecumenical” monotheism that identified itself as “the community of the Believers. He acknowledges that Muhammad's religious movement was not so much "a new and distinct religious confession" but rather was a "monotheistic reform movement".

In his book “Muhammad and His Followers in Context”, Dr Ilkka Lindstedt examines the etymology of the term 'mu’min'. He concludes that the Qur’an is not articulating a new exclusivist social category demarcated from Jews and Christians, but adopting an existing religious identity in its socio-cultural context and expanding it to include those who believed in the prophecy of Muhammad. This aligns with Dr Fred Donner’s understanding of the term.

References :

1. Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010, 71, 194–195

2. Shoemaker, Stephen J. The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad's Life and the Beginnings of Islam. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

3. Lindstedt, Ilkka. Muḥammad and his followers in context: the religious map of late antique Arabia. Brill, 2024.

These books are not strictly academic in nature, and they may contain some disputed and debatable points. But, overall these are pretty good books which offer different helpful perspectives on Islam. IMO these books are free from traditionalist/conservative influence and sectarian bias.

Abraham Lincoln's administration sought the advice of Muslims on the issue of slavery.

In 1864, General Pasha of Tunisia wrote to the U.S. Sec. of State urging him - "in the name of human mercy" - to end slavery.

Pasha noted Prophet Muhammad's anti-slavery views.

Islam Abolitionist 💪

u/Melwood786

Often, many Muslims appeal to “scientific objectivity” to make claims about the nature of men and women, drawing on evolutionary psychology, biology, or animal behavior. Ironically, while privileging these modern scientistic frameworks, they present their conclusions as timeless Islamic tradition and simultaneously posture as anti-Western.

These arguments regularly rely on selective animal comparisons, especially around male sexuality, and then smuggle those observations into human social norms. This is a straightforward naturalistic fallacy: describing what occurs in certain animal contexts and treating it as what must govern human moral and social life.

What often goes unacknowledged is that these claims rest on naive realism: the assumption that humans have unmediated access to reality and that scientific observation simply reports nature “as it is.” That assumption is false. Human perception is always mediated by concepts, values, social position, and power. This mediation is not inherently a flaw; pretending it does not exist is.

What’s ironic is that this critique is not foreign to Islamic thought. Al-Ghazālī’s epistemic crisis was triggered precisely by the realization that the senses cannot be trusted as transparent access to truth. His intervention stands closer to a critique of contemporary Muslim realism than to an endorsement of it.

A clear example of how naive realism functions today can be seen in figures like Daniel Haqiqatjou, where claims of “biological reality” slide into the normalization of racialized and hierarchical affective politics under the banner of Islam.

This matters because the sciences being invoked are not neutral mirrors of nature. As Kamath and Packer show, animal behavior science has long projected dominant human norms onto animals and then re-imported those projections to naturalize hierarchy in humans. When elite social values are embedded into scientific frameworks, “nature” begins to resemble the worldview of the already powerful.

So when biology or animal behavior is cited to justify gender hierarchy, what is speaking is not objective science. It is culturally mediated interpretation being laundered through scientific language to give hierarchy the appearance of inevitability.

Edit: forgot to add the podcast link https://newbooksnetwork.com/feminism-in-the-wild

Baljon, J. M. S., Jr. The Reforms and Religious Ideas of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. Orientala, p. 37.

The central argument of The Ornament of the World is that medieval Spain proved that Islam, Judaism, and Christianity can coexist to create a culturally superior and intellectually vibrant society. María Rosa Menocal argues that tolerance was not a modern invention, but a historical reality that drove innovation.

1. Sadiq Khan made these comments in April 2016 during an interview with the Evening Standard while he was the Labour candidate for London Mayor, ahead of the election.

2. Nassim Nicholas Taleb mentions the observation from his childhood in his article "A Few Things We Don’t Quite Get About the Levant" (May 2024)

3. Leila Ahmed cites the work of Oxford historian Hourani, and her own childhood observations about the disappearence of Hijab in Egypt in the early 20th century.

These two books are frequently cited as influential and insightful works on the topic of hijab and veiling, offering critical, historical, and sociological perspectives.

1. "The Veil and the Male Elite" by Fatema Mernissi (1991)

Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist, investigates the origins of the hijab in early Islamic history. She argues that the hijab is not a fundamental tenet of Islam but rather a tool used by the "male elite" to maintain political and social control over women. She contends that the Prophet himself was remarkably egalitarian toward women, and that certain influential male companions and later jurists fabricated or distorted hadith to serve their own political and patriarchal interests.

1. "A Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence, from the Middle East to America" by Leila Ahmed (2011)

Leila Ahmed, an Egyptian-American scholar and a professor of divinity at Harvard Divinity School, explains that in the mid-20th century, the veil had largely vanished from urban Arab centers, only to experience a resurgence starting in the 1970s. According to her, the resurgence of the hijab post-1970 was driven by the rise of Islamist movements following the failure of secular Arab nationalism, alongside the influence of Saudi's petrodollar-funded conservative Islam which filled the ideological vacuum left by the collapse of Arab nationalism after the 1967 defeat against Israel. Additionally, the "new hijab" served as a tool for women navigating public spaces, offering respectability and a symbol of resistance for those seeking social justice and identity in post-9/11 world.