Exploring Islam in a New Light

This is the second revised edition of the author's original book Exploring Islam in a New Light: An Understanding from the Quranic Perspective, iUniverse, 2008. It is a comprehensive and in-depth description of Islam in light of the Quran alone. Its main focus is the essence of the central message of the Quran, which is essentially a call for a moral, spiritual, and intellectual practice. The book shows that Islam, seen from the perspective of the Quran alone, is a tolerant, humane, and progressive religion that meets the social and economic challenges of modern time. It is a religion of peaceful co-existence, justice, equality, compassion, and service to humanity - far removed from a fanatic, misogynistic, and militant image in which it is most often portrayed in the West. The Hadith, though widely revered by Muslims as a second authoritative source of religious law and guidance in Islam, is found by this book to be untenable and unreliable on theological, historical, and objective grounds. The book lays out a bold yet well-argued case for a reform of Islam as it is practiced today, which is beset with numerous problematic features and misconceptions borrowed from the Hadith. Also, it provides more meaningful, deeper interpretations of various tenets of the Quran such as prayer (salat), fasting (siam), spending in God's way (zakat, sadaqa), pilgrimage (hajj), marriage (nikah), divorce (talaq) and remarriage of divorced wives, and so on than are generally being understood by Muslims.