‘that certainty in nothingness, that those of us who have been atheist have had the misfortune to experience in full.’

As an ex-atheist, that sums things up better then anything else I have read on the matter.

“All Arabic root-words are verbs, not nouns — the root would be fatana, meaning both ‘he tested’ and ‘to test’.

A small point (just for benefit): The stronger view of the morphologists is that Arabic roots derive from nouns [asma'] and not verbs. That is because [1], Allah says that He taught Adam the names [asma'] of everything, and [2] nouns are simpler because they do not denote a “doer” or particular time [past, present, or future].

Nice post.

Perhaps you are talking about a different group of people, Yusuf.

My Qur’an teacher taught his class one day that the word fitna is of the Arabic root alfatn.

All Arabic root-words are verbs, not nouns — the root would be fatana, meaning both “he tested” and “to test”.

I’m not really sure what this recent fitna (of 2 or 3 years ago) you are talking about refers to, but the “Salafi inquisition” affected only “salafis” who were mostly a different demographic from those who got involved in the traditionalist movement, particularly in America. Traditionalism was a bottom-up movement among young English-speaking Muslims who wanted an authentic traditional Islam that wasn’t affected by the Indo-Pak Bareilawi-Deobandi schism (i.e. you no longer had to keep some of your friends secret from the others) and which it wasn’t necessary to learn Urdu to be part of. It was also about providing comprehensive rebuttals to the “salafi” claims to keep young people from falling for them.

The “inquisition” wasn’t just about requiring “that the enthusiastic new faithful declare exactly which type of Salafi they were” – it was aimed at everyone in the western “salafi” communities, and tore apart long-standing friendships and even marriages and resulted in businesses going bust because of boycotts. I’m not sure how many of the victims ended up as traditionalists.

This latest bout of fitna has less to do with doctrine as with class, with perhaps a culture clash between some of the converts and the lifestyle in the Middle East where they spent time or settled, with some genuine abuses, and with a breakdown in tolerance, and this may have something to do with the end of the Bush administration which required Muslims to have at least some solidarity with each other.