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- Superstition is an excessively credulous belief in supernatural causality: the belief that one event is the cause of another without any physical process linking the two, such as astrology, omens, witchcraft, and apotropaic magic. According to Rashid Shaz the whole Muslim world is permeated with pre-Islamic superstitions, which he relates to "clinging to false hope" and even shirk. According to Travis Zadeh, while various elite Islamic religious factions in various geographical and historical context did contest and probed into beliefs and practices that were assumed to be superstitious, still, Quranic charms, belief in jinn, and visiting tombs of prophets and saints have had a historical hold on general religious people standard in Islamic point of views of salvation. Zadeh says that the belief in jinn and other Muslim occult culture is rooted in the Quran and the culture of early Islamic cosmography. In the same way shrine veneration and acceptance and promotion of saintly miracles has intimate connections to structures of Islamic religious authority and piety in Islamic history. Origins of the deployment of the Quran for protective and curative purposes can be found back to the earliest history of Islamic devotion. According to Michael Muhammad Knight, one community's divinely revealed or empirically observed knowledge would be mere superstition to another community. Knight says, most times religionists interested in demonstrating their rationalism and compatibility with science attempt to dissociate their religions from anything magical, at the same time most pro-science atheist thinkers believe that any attempt at differentiation between religion and magic can be flimsy at best. Knight says that the study of superstitions in Muslim societies raises difficult but important questions for any Islamic revivalist projects, and not only deconstructs between sectarian categories and within themselves too but also challenges the historical stability, coherence and distinctness of Islam as a religion. (en)
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