[First installment of continuous topic -- the modern muslim.]
Nero denied the fire even at the end of his fiddling. Adolf Hitler kept planning to take back oil fields in the East even while Mrs. Magda Goebbels was contemplating poisoning her six children. Chief Engineer Joseph Bell was steadfast about Titanic's perfect design even when the bow began to sink. Begum Khaleda Zia condemned newspapers for coining 'Bangla Bhai' story even after the ambassadors spoke out.
History suggests that true victors never claim victory until it is absolute. True losers don't admit to their failure until absolution, either.
Similar is the case with the muslims of today. We are stuck in the first millenium. We can feel the pain of breathing the thinner, cleaner, smoother air of the 21st century. We stumble upon this reality everyday. We deny it everyday, too.
We claim honesty, yet we shift from opinion to opinion when it comes to real matters. We claim tolerance, yet we crave for fanatic glory. We claim fairness, yet fail to discern between a just cause and a nuisance. We claim freedom, yet fail to stand up for what we know as wrong.
Honesty, tolerance, and fairness would be topics of future installments in this series. We start with liberation today. A modern muslim should understand the following to be able to liberate his mind and practise indepent thinking.
a) Liberation is a state of mind, not a strategic poise. Occupying certain pieces of land or topping a certain number of casualties don't determine liberation. It is in being able to stretch your mind vertically as well as horizontally. It is in mobilizing your mind as well as motivating it.
b) You are the religion. Allah and His Prophet (sm) have left the door open for individual revelations of Islam. You own your religion as much as it owns you. Your explanation of Islam is probably just as good as (if not better than) that of a cleric.
c) Instruction is not the purpose of religion. Rather, purpose is the instruction of religion. Religious instructions are meant to lead us to discover our own purposes.
d) Fear is a means, not an end. Fear of hell-fire is supposed to teach you to speak the truth, to love all creation, to prohibit from bad company, to be courteous and gentle, to abstain from addiction and wastage, etc. Fear of punishment is there to help you stay the course until your mind is ready to take care of itself. Do something good only because it is good, not because doing otherwise would earn you some extra hours with Lucifer.
e) Crusades are unique in the sense that these are wars where most of the casualties are self-inflicted. Every blow intended is a blow at your own soul. Every life taken is a death for the soul.
f) Religion is both honored and rejected by the soul. Nothing physical about it. Ever.
Finding these too hard to grasp? Afraid of your mind getting corrupt? If so, please stop to ponder if you're actually thinking your thoughts or those of someone else's.
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1 comment:
Your article reminds me of some pretty interesting quotes regarding the latest Afghan Apostacy case:
1. "Almost all of Muslim’s geniuses by whom we glorify our history were labeled Murtads by Sharia-ists, you name it ..... all four jurist Imams, Hadis-Imams, Darwish Jilani, Imam Taymiah and who not."
2. "How can we punish a Murtad when we cannot even define a Murtad? To define a Murtad we need to define what makes a Muslim. Our Maolanas miserably failed even to define what makes a Muslim. Seven top Pakistani Maolanas including Maolana Mawdudi struggled for long two years with Court of Inquiry in Pakistan, constituted under the Punjab Act II of 1954 to define Muslim. The report of the Commission ended with “No two Ulema have ever agreed before us on the correct definition of a Muslim. Indeed, if all their definitions are taken in total, the grounds on which someone may be indicted for apostasy would be too numerous to count”."
3. "Political Islamists interpret a verse to claim that everybody is born as Muslim; non-Muslims deviate later. That means world’s all non-Muslims are essentially apostates and must be killed."
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