Saluting the Final Prophet
Summary: The article argues that salāt on the Prophet is fundamentally a covenantal salute — an expression of support, allegiance, and attachment to the Prophet's mission — rather than a ritual phrase. Drawing on Quranic usage (particularly 2:154-157 and 33:56), the author shows that salāt with the preposition ʿalā denotes active solidarity, not simply a verbal blessing.
The Abrahamic Salute (Ṣalawāt Ibrāhīmiyyah) is highlighted as especially significant: asking God to honor Muhammad as He honored Abraham connects the Prophet's legacy directly to the broader Abrahamic covenantal order, rather than treating the practice as a devotional formula isolated from that context.
From this, the author draws several practical conclusions: verbalising salawāt after every mention of the Prophet's name is not scripturally mandated; referring to the Prophet by his name is entirely legitimate; and the merit of salāt lies in genuine affiliation with his mission — not phonemic repetition. Hadith on the virtues of salawāt are reread through this lens, so that "saluting the Prophet most" means following and advancing his legacy, not just reciting litanies.
The overall thrust is a critique of empty ritualism and a call to ground the practice in its Quranic and Abrahamic meaning.
Football is polytheism?
Summary: The article dismisses the claim that football — or human-made rules generally — constitutes polytheism as illiterate and absurd. Game rules and constitutional law are categorically different things, and conflating them reflects a fundamental ignorance of covenantal legal philosophy. The deeper concern, however, is not the absurdity itself but its social consequences. The author traces how such simplistic reasoning, taken seriously by a small number of people, can escalate step by step into declarations of apostasy and justifications for violence — a pattern that has recurred across British Muslim communities for decades and contributed to real harm. Similar distortions around concepts like the caliphate and ḥākimiyyah have historically fed extremist movements and damaged civic life in the UK. The author's call is to break the cycle: educate young people — particularly those from deprived backgrounds who are most vulnerable to such recruitment — and create an environment where ignorant and corruptive ideas find no foothold.
Three current approaches to religion
Observing how people actually live their religion: in daily life, in public discourse, and in society at large reveals three broad approaches that shape everything from personal practice to political outlook. What I'm presenting here aren't rigid categories with clean boundaries but I think they're distinct enough to name:
- Revelation-based reasoning
- Ritualism (often, though not always, expressed as reductive literalism)
- Cultural reasoning
What each approach assumes
The first approach proceeds from the conviction that God has communicated things for a reason, and therefore tries to locate the meaning and purpose behind acts that uphold God's order. It uses that understanding to determine how they should be practiced, particularly in a way that produces the best outcomes and remains internally coherent with the broader framework of God's covenantal code.
The second approach is content with doing for the sake of doing. It rarely assumes that acts carry deeper meaning or serve a larger purpose, so the primary question becomes one of correct form rather than underlying intent. Since the bigger picture is either unknown, irrelevant, or assumed not to exist, interpretation tends to reduce to linguistic analysis of Arabic texts in isolation.
The third approach engages very little with revelation directly. It treats an interaction with "religion" as a cultural phenomenon that's viewed through a secular lens and evaluated against the standards of contemporary life with shifting moral trends, popular opinion, and the benchmarks of modernity.
Where authority comes from
These three assumptions produce three fundamentally different sources of authority.
For the first group, authority is always rooted in God's own discourse. Working through various statements and principles, the aim is to discern God's actual attitude toward a given matter and arrive at nuanced conclusions. This approach views the deliberations of past scholars through the lens of heuristics, so not because they have the authoritative final word but because they were genuinely attempting the same exercise. They serve as a valuable resource but not in any way an unchallengeable verdict.
For the second group, authority resides in particular men. The validity of any religious conclusion is measured by whether the right figures endorsed it. Direct engagement with divine discourse is treated as largely inaccessible to ordinary reasoning, since it's held that only the earliest generations truly understood its meaning. The consequence is that religious practice becomes fixed in the form it took during the early or late medieval period, unable to account for new circumstances and variables that would naturally shape how the covenantal order looks today. Since this approach doesn't apply reason, challenges to it tend to be met with moral panic and fallacious analogies.
For the third group, authority is diffused and often subjective. Faith is ontology, and it becomes a personal matter informed by humanistic philosophy and assumptions about what God wants, which track closely with whatever social or cultural norms happen to prevail at a given moment.
An important irony
It is common to assume that only the third group (the culturally-driven one) is really secular in its orientation but this misses something significant. Many of those who display the outward markers of religious conservatism actually fall into the same category because for them faith has become a political identity rather than a living engagement with revelation. Driven by the groupthink of their particular sect or movement, they too end up conforming to social norms, but just different ones. The form looks "traditional" but the underlying logic is not so different from the group they would most loudly oppose.
The purpose of this overview is simply to offer a framework for critical thinking.
Convert or Revert?
Summary: The article argues that calling new Muslims "reverts" is both linguistically and theologically indefensible. The hadith "every child is born on fiṭrah" is the usual justification, but the author contends it means humanity is predisposed toward godly subservience — not that every person was once in a state of active submission and then abandoned it. Medieval scholars like al-Nawawī and Ibn al-Qayyim are cited in support. To call someone a "revert" would logically imply they were previously believers who apostatised — an obvious absurdity. The Arabic term for submitting to God is aslama, which carries no sense of returning. Jews and Christians who accept the final message are a special case: they are better understood as progressing to an update of the same Abrahamic covenant, having always been muslimīn in disposition as 28:52-54 explicitly states. The author also criticises the English usage itself: "revert" as a noun is a linguistic invention, and its connotation of regression sits poorly with how believers ought to present themselves publicly. Finally, in the British context specifically, the label "convert" functions less as theology and more as an ethnic marker — which the author treats as a further reason to abandon it.