Introduction to This Blog

Welcome readers!

After being repeatedly pressed by a number of friends and mulling over the idea, I have decided to set up a personal, informal blog sharing some of my thoughts or some interesting tidbits from my studies.

A little about me and this blog:

My name is Sharif Randhawa.  I am a graduate of Bayyinah Institute in Irving, Texas, where I have decided to reside for an additional year to continue my Arabic studies and do research on the naẓm (literary coherence) of the Qur’an.  My main passions are:

Qur’anic studies—especially with a literary (structural, thematic, and rhetorical) approach.

Near Eastern and Biblical studies—I am interested in the study of ancient Israelite/Jewish and Christian religious writings (canonical, apocryphal, pseudepigraphic, rabbinic, etc.) up to the time of Islam, as well as their ancient Near Eastern historical context.  Aside from being extremely interesting in and of themselves, I have consistently found that these fields bring a lot of value and insight into the study and appreciation of the stories, religious motifs, and literary tropes of the Qur'an.

Analytic philosophy of religion—This field deals with issues like evidence and arguments concerning the existence of God, religious epistemology (how religious truths might be known, what qualifies as justified belief), and the philosophical interaction of religious ideas with science and other branches of philosophy such as logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics.  As I hope to explain later, there is also a lot here that can complement and expand on the logic of the Qur’an and aspects of classical Islamic tradition, particularly with regards to thinkers like Ghazali, Ibn Rushd, and Ibn Taymiyyah.

  

My intention is to touch on each of these subjects, but in an informal and unsystematic way, depending on what I might happen to be studying or feel like sharing at a specific time.  My aim is to post something at least once a week.  I love writing and in the future, after completing my education, I hope to contribute more extensive works in each of these fields, both on academic and popular levels.  But for now, here is at least a small platform for sharing some things that I think are of interest to a lot of people.

If you have any questions or comments, please let me know, and I will be glad to get to them as soon as I can!

Sharif