Islamic intellectual history is diverse, contested, and humanistic

Evidence

Ibn Warraq’s demonization of his ancestral faith has, of course, nothing to do with an intellectual history wrought by schisms and sectarian divisions, moral defiance and political contestation— cutting deeply into the very core of Quranic revelation and Muhammadan charismatic mission. Muslims, like the adherents of any other world religion, have agreed and disagreed, celebrated their faith and contested its doctrines, challenged the metaphysical veracity of their culture and enriched its ethical dexterity; they have narrated their faith in juridical terms, then turned around and speculated about their religion theologically, before opposing both proclivities mystically, thus exploring the boundaries of reason and revelation. Muslims have produced a record of literary humanism in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Turkish unparalleled in medieval history. In art and architecture, science and technology, literature and poetry, Muslims have generated and sustained a world civilization. They have also systematically dismantled their own intellectual history to transform their faith into the site of ideological resistance to colonialism. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 477

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘Muslims have yet to take this first step’ claim rebutted in the same chapter — Dabashi counters Islamophobic erasure with actual intellectual history. — connects to: Pre-Islamic Arab women held substantial autonomy contested by later historians.
• ADDENDUM: Supports a counterpoint to ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ by showing internal Muslim contestation of their own tradition.

Related

• Islamic civilization sustained vibrant internal doctrinal contestation and humanism. (similarity 0.89)
• Pre-Islamic Arab women held substantial autonomy contested by later historians. (similarity 0.86)
• Every anti-Islamic charge already has a long indigenous Islamic intellectual history. (similarity 0.85)
• Islamic doctrine has always been internally contested and reinterpreted (similarity 0.85)
• Muslim intellectual critique long predates and exceeds Islamophobic polemic. (similarity 0.85)
• Islamic intellectual history already contains every claim native informers recycle as new (similarity 0.84)
• Muslims have long practiced self-criticism within their own languages under their own names (similarity 0.83)
• Radical and subversive thought has always been integral to Islamic history (similarity 0.81)
• Islamic history resists any single coherent characterization (similarity 0.80)
• Western discourse reduces all Muslim societies to a single malevolent essence (similarity 0.79)
• Ibn Warraq’s catalogue of critics contradicts his claim no Muslim challenged doctrine (similarity 0.79)
• Ibn Warraq marketed himself as the first secular Muslim doubter of Islam (similarity 0.79)
• Medieval chivalric culture dehumanized Islam partly to evade its theological claims (similarity 0.78)