Adnan Ibrahim: An Islamic Thinker’s Struggle for Reformation

Adnan Ibrahim was born to a poor family in the Nuseirat Camp in Gaza, and received his primary and secondary education in the schools of UNRWA ( the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East). He thereafter traveled to Yugoslavia where he studied medicine to later continue his studies Vienna after the outbreak of the Yugoslav Wars.

His passion with Islamic studies emerged since the early days of his childhood. As he grew up, his range of subjects exceeded to reach philosophy, which he later taught, psychology, history and comparative theology. He now lives in Vienna with his Palestinian wife and his seven daughters and two sons.

Besides his studies in human medicine, he holds a baccalaureate in Sharia studies from the faculty of Imam Al-Awza’i for Islamic studies in Beirut with an honor status. He later continued his Islamic studies in Austria where he received his Master’s degree and PhD from the University of Vienna. His thesis for his PhD was titled “Freedom of Religion and the Quran”. In 1995, he participated in a Quran Intonation contest and won the first prize in the whole Europian continent.

Atheism

Adnan considers himself to be one of the few Muslims who are aware of the fact that Islam has entered a dark phase in its history in which it is losing its adherents by the thousands on a daily basis, something it never witnessed before in all the course of its history. This loss, he describes, has been brought upon Islam by a hideous version of religious fundamentalism accompanied by widespread ignorance within the ranks of contemporary Muslims of the very basic historical, philosophical and scientific facts that are inherently needed to cope with the intellectual advancement the world has seen.

And he declares new atheism to be the main winner in this internal war that Islam is enduring, claiming that atheism is on an exponential rise within the Muslim world and that the level to which it has propagated has reached an unbelievable level, giving, among others, the example of an active mosque Imam who has been secretly an atheist for years now.

This migration towards atheism will have devastating effects on society, he claims, attacking his usual “we can’t be good without God” debate. He strictly claims that there is no atheistic moral philosophy that managed, even remotely, to answer the question of morality in a worldview that doesn’t include God. “You will hear atheists say that they are moral”, he says in one of his recent lectures in the Schura Mosque, “but they are only moral to a certain limit.” He claims that, out of all atheist philosophers, only Nietzsche is an honest atheist, given his cruel and inhumane philosophy which, according to him, is the only possible outcome of the atheist worldview. The other philosophers, he adds, are trying to give people a wrong and dishonest image of what the atheistic ethical promise really is.

Regarding this issue, he commented on a famous and controversial debate that has taken place in the University of Notre Dame between Evangelist Christian apologist and philosopher William Craig and atheist neuroscientist Sam Harris titled the God Debate II, telling his audience to “watch the debate and see the size of this and the size of that”. In a step that has resulted in considerable criticism from his audience, he attacked atheism for the “horrifying” answers, as he described them, given by leading atheists to the question “what do you think of incest and of a parent who has sex with his own son or daughter?”

Besides the moral failure of atheism, he also justifies his fear over the propagation of atheism to potential spiritual and social outcomes caused by the abandonment of religion which he describes to be the only foundation of social stability (marriage) and spiritual prosperity (worship), the last one being intrinsically an essential irreplaceable component of human well-being.

Evolutionary theory

Although having had produced long series of objective criticism of Darwin’s theory of evolution and going through many of its best criticisms along the two last centuries, Adnan’s opinion on the subject is in fact quite simple: he accepts the evidence proving that all living creatures have a common ancestor but rejects the idea that evolution is blind (not guided by a creator). This denial of his is, of course, based on religious scripture.

The return of Jesus

While most Muslim scholars view the return of Jesus as a basic teaching of Islam backed by many Hadiths, he denies it arguing that it clearly contradicts with the sayings of the Quran.

The marriage of Aisha

It was a wide historical research that Ibrahim had done within the last year of his Islamic studies in Vienna that led him to believe that the age of Aisha, when she got married to Muhammed, was not 9 -as many scholars suggest- but rather, most likely, 21.

Sectarianism

Adnan is a strong advocate for peace and respect between the Sunnis and the Shia sects. He is the only reputable Sunni Islamic thinker to praise Shia public thinkers, philosophers and intellectuals in front of Sunni audiences who are used to being taught that all Shias are worse than the Jews themselves, who, needless to say, aren’t very welcome within Muslim-majority societies. He’s also the only known Sunni scholar to invite a Shia public figure and deliver a lecture with him side by side on the same table. He is notably famous for his anticipation and warnings of the current sectarian wars within Syria and Iraq.