Love is complex and complicates things. However, contrary to the old adage love is not blind. Who knows the beloved so well as the lover? To know the beloved’s true nature is to see and accept the whole gamut of their beauties and strengths as well as fallibilities and foibles.

The madrasa system evolved over the centuries in the early Islamic period. During the Fatimid and Abbasid reigns Muslims felt an earnest demand to seek out critical answers to several new and old questions emerging from philosophy, theology, mysticism and philology.

Epimenidis opened one eye. In the flickering light of the oil lamp, a giant hand holding a needle as long as a sword crossed and recrossed the wall. Diamanda was sewing something into her mattress. The shadow grew smaller and disappeared as he drifted back to sleep.

Some years ago, a young Muslim cleric walked into my office at the Islamic World Academy of Sciences (IAS) in Amman, Jordan. He objected to what he had read in some of our books about the status of science and technology in the Muslim world. He insisted that Muslims had made great discoveries in science, and the Muslim world had enormous wealth, agricultural and minerals resources, land mass and human capital, and that it was doing much better than the West in all domains

I have probably dedicated more time and energy to researching and teaching the topic of Islamophobia than any other academic in Norway, yet I cannot quite recall where and when I first encountered the term

The Other occupies a dominant place in modern Islamic educational reform. Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi in the nineteenth-century urged Muslim educators to look at European developments, and questioned if the current approach followed in Muslim societies was beneficial.

There are many different kinds of institutions which claim to be universities and to award degrees. But before we look at them, it may be worth trying to identify the idea or the ideal against which claims to be universities might be measured.