SAUDI SCHOLAR ATTACKS ‘MODERNISTS’

SAUDI SCHOLAR ATTACKS ‘MODERNISTS’

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August 13, 2022

A Saudi Islamic scholar has described Saudi intellectuals with modern views as heretics and followers of the West. Ahmad bin Abdullah Al-Ammari, former dean of the faculty of the Holy Qur’ān at the Madinah Islamic University, said in a lecture on “We and the Others…Our Islam is Our Identity” at the Baha Literary Club last week that a lot of people were seduced by Western ideals. Al-Ammari did not spare “the modernists” in his sweeping attack, describing them as “the tails of the intellectuals in the Arab world.” He claimed the two groups could never come together as they were incompatible. The differences between them did not oly include a divergence of views, but the gulf between them was as wide as the difference between thesis and antithesis, he said. He also cited several verses from the Holy Qur’an and the Hadith to support his arguments. “Our identity is based on the religion of Islam that has been chosen for us by Almighty Allah. It is also steeped in our history,” he said.