Alqemny ... his books and pize!

I read the last chapter of Al Qemny's book "Alostorah wa altorath" (The legend and the herritage) ... the chapter was called "Alnaskh fe alwa7y, mo7awalat fahm" .... according to Al Qemny, one should see quran and sunna in the light of the accompanying circumstances and events ... he has however a fault-finding attitude, so that he's picking the contradictions and magnifying them. His theory explaining the leniency of quranic verses in Mecca against non muslims, vs. its stronger stance against them in Madina pictures quran and the prophet as opportunistic, showing a humble face in case of weakness, but an aggressive one in strength. The feeling that one gets after his thesis about alnasekh wal mansokh is that there is some inconsistency, and that there were mistakes carried out by Othman and alsa7aba that put quran, and the activities associated with collecting and writing it, in question.

One point which I sometimes think is true, is that religion in many cases is not about logic! ... for instance, in the fight between David and Guliath (Talot and dawood vs. Galoot), the believers were ordered not to drink form the river despite the fact that they were thirsty to death and they were about to fight a stronger army ... The prophet Ibrahim was ordered to slaughter his son .... Noah was ordered to build a ship in a land far away from any source of water .... the famous story of the (yellow) cow that the jews were asked to slaughter to resurrect a murdered guy so that he would say who killed him .... Moses' mother throughing her son in the river ... the story of Moses and Alkhedr ... all these and many other stories in Quran simply say that prophets (and normal persons like ahl el kahf and the stories mentioned with Alkhedr) sometimes receive orders which simply don't make sense ... they are just illogical, but the aim (or among the aims) is to test the fidelity and piousness of the believers (perhaps this is indeed one way to test fidelity, that we have to do something that we might think doesn't make sense ... I mean if everything just makes sense, then doing it might be simply a "logical" consequence ... doing something which doesn't make sense at a first sight might be a better test!) ... anyway, the point is religion is not always about logic .... this makes it difficult to scrutinize and say this point is logical so I'll accept it, and this is not, so I'll abondon it.

As someone who adopts and believes in the scientific method and in analysing everything, I do believe that there are many things that we can't take as is from our islamic herritage, simply because they don't make sense anymore (they might have been logical 1400 years ago, but not anymore) ... the problem is how to draw the line between what we can change because it doesn't make sense any more (for instance Omar ibn alkhattab did stop working with some verses of quran like giving zakat to almo2allafato klobehem), and what we cannot change (even if it doesn't make sense), simply because it is meant to be a test ... I believe drawing this line would be crucial to the future of Islam.

Back to alqemny .... In humanitarian (or soft sciences), it's really difficult to judge the validity of a theory or a thesis, simply because you can not test it in an experiment ... one can test the premis, references and line of thinking, but this might be deceptive, and the sophistry were an old and well known example for that .... But in order to say whether he really deserves to get the prize or not, I'm testing the output of his writings, (the influence on the readers) to see the value of the theories he comes up with ... he leaves his reader skeptical and inconclusive ... putting everything in question is not a feat, everyone can do it ... finding answers is more important ... if there were nobody in Egypt better than him (which I doubt), the prize could have been withheld.