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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Reason, Physicalism, and Islam DEFORMIST THINKING The reason for this dilemma is that a strong trend rejecting critical methods of analysis, contextual thinking, and rational modes of discourse has spread within many Muslim societies today. This trend promotes an anti-intellectual minimalism , and is now often referred to by the label “Salafi” or “Salifist”—yet it may fairly be described as the ‘ Deformist ’ trend.

[The venerable term Salafi> [^3] should properly be reserved to refer to Muslims advocating social and intellectual reform and renewal, not intellectual stagnation and reactionary imitation.] The Deformers’ response to the plight of modern Muslims is reactive and politicized, rather than rational and critical, and receives financial and ideological backing from several Muslim regimes.

They privilege doctrinal conformity and uniformity of thought, for their worldview and way of speaking and thinking is rooted in a very narrowly defined traditionalist past. They are uncompromising in condemning the diversity of views, broad range of thinking and differing levels of rational discourse found in the wide variety of intellectual Islamic disciplines cultivated in the past.

The intent of the Deformists is to monopolize and control the thinking of Muslims through a dogmatic tyranny that is in reality a serious abuse of authority. The single most distinctive feature of this mindset is their ignorance of the essential Islamic insight taught by the Qur’a>n concerning the hierarchical scale of knowledge that varies in degree of certainty and grasp of truth.

Corresponding with this vertical scale of knowledge is the hierarchy of human knowers differentiated by their increasing capacity of attainment and intensity of understanding.[^4] Instead, the Deformists actively work to undermine the legitimate authority of Islam’s intellectual heritage and to trivialize its potential to provide guidance for thoughtful Muslims.

They impoverish thinking Muslims by stripping them of a powerful weapon for combating the inverted values of secular materialism and pervasive effects of globalizing culture. It is as if these intellectual minimalists were telling us: The Muslim mind has no need of critical rationalism!