Lecture: Liberalising Islam? What Liberal Islam stands for and our Response

This is an overdue post on our part. However we decided to release it so that more are aware of the situation with Liberal Islam. ----------------------------------- My thoughts on the "Lecture: Liberalising Islam? What Liberal Islam stands for and our Response" By Siswand AlhamdulilLah, I was fortunate to have ample free time recently to be able to attend a rather one of a kind talk dealing with a pertinent issue, Liberal Islam. The talk entiled "Liberalising Islam? What Liberal Islam stands for and our Response" by Shaykh Abdul Halim was at Pergas on 27th Oct 2009. I was interested in this talk because I have heard of Liberal Islam being promoted, especially on the Internet. The truth is, I was already apprehensive about such ideas especially knowing that the proponents were not exactly established classical scholars of Islam. But I reckoned that this issue really needs to be looked at and a lecture to explain what it's all about would be a good opportunity to find out more. One of the first things I learnt at the talk is that the phenomenon of liberal Islam is a rather recent one, the term having been first coined by Ali Asghar Engineer. The lecture began by directing our awareness to the two kinds of enemies of Islam; the enemy from "Outside" and the enemy from "Within". It also mentioned one of the reminders from the Prophet s.a.w. in his final sermon; that Syaitan has lost all hopes in leading Muslims astray over big issues, so beware of following Syaitan in small things. With these two pieces of information in mind, it bids helpful to note that concepts such as Liberal Islam ought to be scrutinized, especially when already established teachings in Islam are being modified to suit the flippant whims of some people. Shaykh Abdul Halim also briefly explained the origins of Liberalism having roots in the discontentment among the Christians in the face of the poor's suffering, in view of [...]

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