Is Islam compatible with the West ? : Prof T. J Winter

Someone in the audience asked TJ as to why he become a Muslim and his answer was astoundingly wise,
" God was generous with me."


And make mention of Mary in the Scripture, when she had withdrawn from her people to a chamber looking East, (16) And had chosen seclusion from them. Then We sent unto her Our Spirit and it assumed for her the likeness of a perfect man. (17) She said: Lo! I seek refuge in the Beneficent One from thee, if thou art God-fearing. (18) He said: I am only a messenger of thy Lord, that I may bestow on thee a faultless son. (19) She said: How can I have a son when no mortal hath touched me, neither have I been unchaste? (20) He said: So (it will be). Thy Lord saith: It is easy for Me. And (it will be) that We may make of him a Revelation for mankind and a mercy from Us, and it is a thing ordained. (21) And she conceived him, and she withdrew with him to a far place. (22) And the pangs of childbirth drove her unto the trunk of the palm-tree. She said: Oh, would that I had died ere this and had become a thing of naught, forgotten! (23) Then (one) cried unto her from below her, saying: Grieve not! Thy Lord hath placed a rivulet beneath thee, (24) And shake the trunk of the palm-tree toward thee, thou wilt cause ripe dates to fall upon thee. (25) So eat and drink and be consoled. And if thou meetest any mortal, say: Lo! I have vowed a fast unto the Beneficent, and may not speak this day to any mortal. (26) Then she brought him to her own folk, carrying him. They said: O Mary! Thou hast come with an amazing thing. (27) O sister of Aaron! Thy father was not a wicked man nor was thy mother a harlot. (28) Then she pointed to him. They said: How can we talk to one who is in the cradle, a young boy? (29) He spake: Lo! I am the slave of Allah. He hath given me the Scripture and hath appointed me a Prophet, (30) And hath made me blessed wheresoever I may be, and hath enjoined upon me prayer and almsgiving so long as I remain alive, (31) And (hath made me) dutiful toward her who bore me, and hath not made me arrogant, unblest. (32) Peace on me the day I was born, and the day I die, and the day I shall be raised alive! (33) Such was Jesus, son of Mary: (this is) a statement of the truth concerning which they doubt. (34) It befitteth not (the Majesty of) Allah that He should take unto Himself a son. Glory be to Him! When He decreeth a thing, He saith unto it only: Be! and it is. (35) And lo! Allah is my Lord and your Lord. So serve Him. That is the right path. (36) The sects among them differ: but woe unto the disbelievers from the meeting of an awful Day. (37)
Surah Maryam , 19 : 16-37


Related Articles:

A Common Word Between Us And You

RUMI : Only Breath

Lost and Found !

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf in Conversation...

Hamza Yusuf, an American, converted to Islam at age 17. Currently a high profile Muslim scholar in the US. Co-signatory to the now famous letter " A Common Word between us and you ", addressed to the Pope and people of the Christian faith.

This interview by BBC in HARDTALK was in 2001 but I find the subject discussed still has it's relevance since unfortunately lessons had obviously being ignored and not yet being learned by the West.











The lesson that has not been learned as pointed out by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf was that The West had, and still is perceived, as having wantonly disregarded the long, collective Muslims's pain, deep hurt and suffering over the collective Western injustice and self imposed paralysis in Bosnia, Somalia, Sudan, Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya,and Afghanistan.Until they realize and do so this world would remained as polarized as ever. The Crusade goes on....

Shaykh Hamza had in 2001 vocalised correctly the collective 'Muslim psyche' but obviously this had fallen on deaf ears. Not surprisingly, as most of us in the Muslim world did not think highly of Bush and his poodle Blair. But Obama is too paralysed and weak to change the status quo.

Taking on 1.5 billion Muslims is certainly not a positive option, Mr President!
America cannot win a war with Islam. I repeat again, Sir, that America cannot possibly win a war with Islam! History has proved that.

Despite the superficial and glaringly skewed world media blitz that you guys are doing us a favour....who are you guys kidding? Who are you kidding

Yet the script for 2011 can be read off-hand by all and sundry:

There will be no semblance of peace in Somalia. If any that look promising crops up, Ethiopia will be there with CIA covert funding to spoil it.

Iran looked most likely to be bombed, if not invaded.My God, that would be 'mother of all mistakes'. A prelude to permanent mayhem.

Sudan will be definitely be divided for OIL.How would you guys like if say Saudi for that matter support and finance a covert 'Black' revolution in your country for decades and then get UN to declare and organise a partition in 2015?

These are the perceptions on the ground....Realities may be different.But how can the rest of the world have a 'greener' perception of America when we all know it is fuelled and remote-controlled by the Great Military Industrial Complex.


Dr Nik Howk




"Already have We urged unto hell many of the jinn and humankind, having hearts wherewith they understand not, and having eyes wherewith they see not, and having ears wherewith they hear not. These are as the cattle - nay, but they are worse! These are the neglectful."
Surah Al Araf , 7 : 179

Conversation on Islam : Shaykh Muhammad S. Adly.....Going back to the Blueprint

INNOVATIONS IN RELIGION [ Bidaah ]....



Shaykh Muhammad S. Adly

Born in Egypt 1949.
Holds two Ijazah Degrees from Egypt & Saudi Arabia.
Taught in the Holy Mosque in Macca, SA
Migrated to the United States in 1975.
Held the position of Imam at the following Places:
Islamic Mission Of America , Brooklyn , NY. 1975
Masjid Al-Muslimiin , Brooklyn, NY. 1976 - 1977
Principal for Madrastul Ikhuah , Brooklyn, NY. 1978
Dar Al-Arqum , Brooklyn , NY. 1979
Representative of Muslim World League NY. 1977 - 1980
Chaplain & Consultant at SCDC Columbia, SC 1982
Director of the Islamic Center Of Columbia. (1981 - Present)
Guide For Hajj group 1995 - Present

Author of Twenty (20) Books On Islaam
Member of AMJA (American Muslim Jurists Association)
Executive Member of NAIF (North American Imam's Federation
Manager of AdlyOnline.com






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Conversations on Islam: Omid Safi

Conversations on Islam...Karen Armstrong [ Part 2 ]

This building had cost too much Jewish blood. It was the Messiah would do this. The Messiah would build a temple when he returned and gave victory and liberation and redemption to the Jewish people. It was not something that human beings would do.

But there were Jews of the seventh century who hailed the Muslims as the precursors of the Messiah, the heralds of the Messiah because in clearing this holy site they had prepared the way for the Messiah.

And then the Caliph -- in Christian Jerusalem, Jews had not been allowed permanent residence in the city. They’d been allowed to visit the city once a year on the 9th of Av and mourn over the ruins and mourn around the gates, but they were not allowed to be permanent residents. And Omar eventually brought -- decided that this must stop and he brought back from Tiberius 70 Jewish families and settled them alongside the Temple Mount, now known as the Haram al-Sharif, the third holiest site in the Muslim world.

And so the Islamic conquest of Jerusalem, sadly, in the light of today’s conquest, was good for the Jewish people. Now this is the spirit of Islam, and this is the spirit we should be hearing today from our mosques, from our religious leaders, not the militant horror that we get from people like Osama bin Laden.

And I want to just talk briefly, as we’re on the subject of Jerusalem, about the story, the great story of the Prophet’s night journey to Jerusalem and his assent into heaven from the Temple Mount because I think it is a story of pluralism. This is an account of a great spiritual experience of the Prophet, a private spiritual experience for himself and it’s very similar in many ways to the visions of the Jewish throne mystics that people -- at this time, who also imagined an assent through the seven heavens to the divine throne.

The story is that one night Mohammed was miraculously conveyed from Mecca, from where he was sleeping beside the Kabbah, to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and there he was greeted by all the great prophets of the past, all of whom welcomed him into their midst and invited him to preach to them. And on the haram (ph) you will see the pulpit from which the Prophet delivered this sermon. And then he ascended through the seven heavens and at each of the seven heavens, we’re told, he encountered some of the great prophets of the past, Moses and Aaron , Jesus and John the Baptist, Enoch and finally at the threshold of the divine sphere, Abraham, the father of Jews, Christians and Muslims, the father of those who believes, St. Paul said.

And at one point -- in one of the stories the Prophet asked Moses for advice about how many times Muslims should pray and he has a rather high figure. He is thinking about eight times a day and Moses says, “Don’t think about it, go for five,” go for the happy mean, be realistic. So and then the story passes into reverent obscurity where Mohammed then enters the divine presence.

Now this is a story of pluralism. (A), I think, it symbolizes the Prophet’s yearning to bring the Arabs who’d been left off the divine map of spiritual history right into the heart of the monotheistic family into Jerusalem. So that long flight symbolizes what he was reaching out, yearning to do, yearning to achieve. And then the fact the prophets all listened to one another, welcome one another, accept one another’s insights, acknowledge one another, is a matter -- is a spirit of great pluralism, this is the real vision of Islam. And this is what we want to have today, not the narrow chauvinism.

There’s one verse of the Koran that I love. I come back to it again and again. It was after -- it was uttered -- Mohammed quoted it after he had conquered Mecca -- peacefully -- without shedding a single drop of blood. And standing beside the Kabbah he invited the people of Mecca, his own tribe the Quraysh, to enter Islam but there was to be no compulsion in this. The Koran is very, very definite in highly strong Arabic. It says, “There must be no compulsion in religion.” It is as strongly worded as the shahada, “No God but Allah,” so that the force against religious coercion is as strong as the statement for the unity of God.

And then -- but so that no one was to be forced to enter Islam against their will, but he issued an invitation to the Quraysh (ph) to become Muslims. And he said, “Oh, Quraysh, God is calling you from the haughtiness of paganism with its pride in ancestors.” We’re often a bit like this. We all like thinking of our prophets as the best, or our tradition is the best. “God is calling you from the haughtiness of paganism with its pride in ancestors, but remember all men come from Adam and Adam came from dust.”

And then he quoted these words from the Koran. “Oh, people, says God.” This is the word of God. Oh, people we have formed you into tribes and nations so that you may know one another, not so that you may dominate or coerce or convert, or bomb, or kill, or maim, or commit terrorist acts against, but so that you may know one another. The experience of living in community teaches you about living with others and it’s a springboard to the knowledge of still, other more distant people.

So what’s happened? What has happened? Why, given this pluralism, this benevolence, a benevolence shared by every single major tradition, what has happened to cause the hideous and amoral, disgusting, obscene violence that we saw on September 11th and which we’ve been seeing in other acts of Islamic -- so-called Islamic terror.

During the course of the twentieth century a militant form of religiosity has surfaced in every single major world religion. It’s often given the highly unsatisfactory name of “fundamentalism.” This is a term that was coined by Christians in the United States to describe their protestant reform movement at about the time of World War I and Muslims and Jews and Buddhists rather resent the use of this Christian term to describe their similar reform movements, too. But the first fundamentalist movement developed here in the United States during World War I and it developed in the monotheistic faith last of all. Islam was the last of all to produce a full-blown fundamentalism in the 1960s.

Now what is it? What is this militant party?

We have fundamentalist Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, even fundamentalist Confucianism in China. It represents a widespread dissatisfaction and revolt from modernity, from secular modernity. Fundamentalists feel that religion has been sidelined. They want to drag religion from the side lines to which it’s been relegated in a secular country, culture and put it back to center stage. And they’ve achieved some success in this, even though in many ways, I think, fundamentalism can mean a religious failure. It represents a rebellion, as I say, a desire to get history back on track. Bring God back.

Fundamentalists typically tend to go through a very similar scenario. First, they tend to withdraw from main stream society and create enclaves of pure faith in a godless world. I mean, examples are Bob Jones University, I think it’s in Indiana, and/or the ultra-orthodox Jewish communities in New York or indeed the training camps of bin Laden. And there they -- from this some of them will, from these enclaves of faith, some of them initiate a counter offensive against the secular mainstream society. As we saw in the 1970s when you had the Iranian revolution, you had the rise of the moral majority and the rise of fundamentalism in the Middle East.

Now, so fundamentalists are -- every fundamentalist movement that I have studied is rooted in fear. Every fundamentalist movement that I have studied, in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which is where I’ve confined my studies, is convinced that modern secular society wants to wipe out religion. Even here in the United States. It is gripped by a feeling of fear and people -- they feel that they are fighting for survival. And when people feel that their backs are to the wall they can lash out violently.

But having said that, it’s important to say that of the people who we might call fundamentalists only a small minority take part in acts of terror and violence. Some are not violence at all. The ultra-orthodox Jews are not violent at all, generally. And they -- many are simply struggling to live what they regard as a religious life in a world that seems increasingly hostile to faith.

Now, the trouble with this is that once that you are sort of engaged in this militant form of piety, struggling, struggling to survive, very often people start to distort the religion that they are trying to defend. And one of the first things that tends to go out of the window is compassion.

Now, history shows that it’s very difficult to deal with these movements. Attempts to suppress them usually result in them becoming more extreme. The Times say of the Scopes Trial in 1925 when Muslims, when Christian fundamentalists tried to ban the teaching of evolution in the public schools and were ridiculed in the secular press. Fundamentalists after that experience of humiliation swung from the left of the political spectrum to the extreme right, which is where they’ve remained ever since.

This fear of annihilation is not always just paranoid. Jewish fundamentalism, for example, is haunted by the Nazi holocaust when Hitler tried to eliminate European Jewry. The fear of annihilation is strong there. And in some parts of the Muslim world secularization has been so rapid and accelerated. It didn’t take part in a gentle way. It wasn’t very gentle with us but it did take centuries. And it’s been so rapid in some of these countries that it has seemed like an assault. If you think of Ataturk, for example, when he was creating modern, secular Turkey, abolishing the madrasses, closing down the madrasses, abolishing the sufi orders and pushing the sufis underground. This felt like an attack on religion. The Shah in 1935 gave his soldiers orders to shoot at hundreds of unarmed demonstrators who were peacefully protesting against obligatory western dress in one of the holiest shrines in Iran. And hundreds of Iranians died that day.

And in this kind of setting you can see that a secular policy experienced as great fear. But none of this fear excuses violence or killing. And what seems to be the case right now is that, as far as I can see, in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, fundamentalism is becoming more extreme. And far more extreme than what we saw in the 1970s. Certainly so in the United States there are Christians who are expecting, confidently expecting, the destruction by God of the federal democratic government of the United States and are preparing themselves to take over.

This is far more extreme than anything dreamed up by Jerry Falwell. And similarly, what we saw on September the 11th was something else. I mean, bin Laden doesn’t seem gripped by fear to me, he seems more gripped by rage and confidence. The thing has entered another phase. And there are things going on with these hijackers that I don’t understand, so we should be alert to this.

But I just want to make that point that Islam is not alone in developing a fundamentalist movement. What tends to happen when a region is divided by conflict is that religion and fundamentalist movements get sucked into that conflict. The Arab-Israeli conflict, for example, began on both sides as secular, a clash of secular ideals and programs. But since 1967 it has become increasingly religionized, “sacrelized” on both sides as the fundamentalist movements which originally began by sort of reform as internal religious movements got sucked into the struggle. And I can see that this is time for me to draw my -- yes, very nicely put. Do I want to take questions now? Very kindly put instead of, “This is enough from you.”

(Laughter.)

And so I’ll just close. I’ll just draw to a close. I called this a revelation, September the 11th a revelation. The word apocalypse too, means revelation, unveiling. It revealed to us a reality that we hadn’t seen before. And one of those realities was that we are now living in one world. Before September the 11th, the big news story in the United Kingdom had been our asylum seekers, who had -- every night refugees from various parts of the country try to get into the United Kingdom. And they cling to the underbelly of trains, they try to -- 80 or 90 a night try to walk through the channel tunnel. Truck drivers will open their trucks and find them filled with people. Our ports suddenly seemed full of sniffer dogs and arc lights and police cars. And England suddenly seemed to be becoming like a rich, privileged, gated community in a dangerous city that tried to keep the hoards out.

Similarly, September the 11th showed us that we cannot ignore the plight of the rest of the world, we cannot walk away from the problems of the rest of the world and think that they don’t concern us, or imagine that we are protected by our great might or our oceans or our military or economic strength. If we turn our backs upon the world, the world will come to us, either in disturbing ways, like our asylum seekers, or in terrible ways, in violent, horrible, dreadful ways.

And so as we develop a new one world reality, one thing we must all do is look to those elements of our faith -- they’re in all our faiths -- that reach out towards unity. And those are the voices of religion that we need desperately to hear at this time, not the voices of hatred and contempt and suspicion.

Thank you.

(Applause.)

MIN. ABDERAHMAN: Ms. Armstrong has agreed to take some questions. And actually, upon the advice of politicians present among us here, we have devised the idea of writing your questions on the cards that are placed on each table and they will be collected. Abby and Gail (ph) will go around and collect them and we will pose them to Ms. Armstrong in the sake of saving time. But I would like to start by sharing with you some of the questions that were asked to her on our table about the status of women in Islam, and I think this is very good in the mind of everyone here.

MS. ARMSTRONG: Yes, indeed. And here I am, a woman standing before you, and I’ve often said, how can you defend Islam, which is such a misogynistic religion and is so oppressive to women? Well, let me say first of all that in my view no major world religion has been good for women, not one. Even my friend the Buddha, who I love, even he had a major wobble when it came to the question of admitting women to the Buddhist monastic order. But some religions begin well. Christianity was a religion that began well for women. Jesus had women disciples, it’s the women who had the first news of the resurrection, who dared to brave the -- go to the tomb when the men were still skulking and hiding. But after a few generations the men hijacked the faith and brought it back to the old patriarchy.

Islam too began well for women. Very well. Prophet Mohammed was, as I said at my table, one of those rare men who really enjoyed the company of women and needed and loved being with them. And the Koran gives women rights of inheritance and divorce, which are not as good -- equal to those of a man, but nevertheless, we in the West would have to wait until the 19th century before we got anything comparable. Women were not confined in harems to a special part of their house in the Prophet’s lifetime. You see the women in Medina taking a full part in the political life, and even after the Prophet’s death the wives of the Prophet were important religious authorities and even political leaders.

But what happened was the same old story, that gradually the religion got brought back into the old patriarchal line. The idea of covering up women and secluding them in various parts of the house really came in from the example of Greek Byzantium. The Greeks had long veiled and secluded their women in this way. There was no democracy for the women of Athens, and if you’d walked round classical Athens you wouldn’t have seen many women there. And so -- what happens too in fundamentalist movements, and this happens right across the board, that because fundamentalism is essentially a revolt against modernity, very -- one of the characteristics of hallmarks of modernity has been the emancipation of women. And thus many fundamentalist movements have overstressed the traditional role of women, and that’s happening very much.

There’s the whole question of the veil. Do we have -- or shall I -- the veil is a complicated issue. I’m against anyone being forced to wear a veil if they don’t wish to, I don’t like coercion. But a lot of women are voluntarily wearing the veil because they feel that this -- that you -- they want to show you don’t have to look Western to be modern. You can come to modernity on your own terms, want to get back in touch with the roots of the pre-colonial tradition. And there are very many complicated issues about the veil and the history of the veil.

So Islam, like the other world religions, must struggle now with the question of women. Christian churches are wrestling with the idea of women, rabbis, women rabbis are being, in some forms of Judaism, being ordained, but they still have trouble, and there are feminists in the Islamic world who are quoting the example of the Prophet and the early years just to reform Islam in this direction too. So that is going ahead. So initially it was good for women, things have deteriorated. The Shari’a was, like most pre-modern law codes, put women in a second place, and it’s only relatively recently that we’ve had -- and we’re not finished yet in our quest for full equality.

MIN. ABDERAHMAN: We have a group of questions that basically goes around the same concept of what went wrong with Islam beyond the era that you have described. And there are three questions that deal with that. Let me just very quickly go through them. One of them is, is it political Islam that has done this? And the second question is, what is wrong with Islamic countries in the modern world and whether they departed from the original.

MS. ARMSTRONG: Look, all religions depart from the origins. No religion can remain the same, otherwise they fossilize and die. Religions have to respond to events and change. Jesus would be astonished, I always think, if he attended the Lambeth (ph) Conference, or I have a secret fantasy that one die I might show him around the Vatican.

(Laughter.)

So things develop and change and Islam also went through a major course of change. What went -- what was the first of these questions?

MIN. ABDERAHMAN: One of them is about political Islam.

MS. ARMSTRONG: Political Islam. This is something I’ve glad you’ve raised, because it’s something that we don’t always understand well in the West. We have made, for excellent reasons, a clear distinction between church and state. And we did so because when in Europe we mixed the two up. The results were often horrific. If you think at our record of crusades and inquisitions and persecutions and holy wars of religion, Protestant against Catholic, et cetera. And here in America you have the first secular republic, and people are very proud of this and keep on saying, why can’t Islam separate religion and politics?

Now, in Islam it’s -- this is one of the themes of my book, is that politics has always been very, very important in the Islamic vision. Because the Muslims are commanded, the bedrock message of the Koran is that it is wrong to build up a private fortune, as I said. Good to share your wealth as fairly as possible and build up a just and decent society. And Muslims have taken this mandate very seriously indeed. And politics, you could almost say, in Christian terms has been what we might call it in the Christian world as sacrament. Something where you, in the effort to create the society, you experience the divine and you also make the divine accessible and more an immediate presence in the world.

But of course things can go wrong, because, as I’m sure you know, politics is -- who better -- often a very messy untidy business. And it’s not easy to mingle these high ideals with the pragmatic business of running a state. And so even though the ideal was endlessly to create a just and decent society, and even though, as I show in my book, political questions, political discussions, political anguish about the awful state of Muslim society, anguish meditations by Muslims, played a key role in the development of nearly all the major Islamic movements. It led to the development of Sufi mysticism, for example. It contributed to the development of the Shari’a, to Islamic historiography, to the effort of the -- the contemplation of history which is so often appalling, was not taken lightly by the Muslims and they continued to struggle with how -- what -- how do we create this just and decent society. What kind of person should lead the Muslim community?

These kind of debates were as about as formative as the great debates in the 3rd and 4th -- 4th and 5th centuries, about the nature and person of Jesus which formed Christianity and shaped it in an irrevocable way and the discussion -- these political discussions were equally formative in the development of Islam. But, as I say, politics is a difficult business. And when -- so Muslims found that in fact whatever the theory was, there was a de facto separation between church and state. Under the Abbasids the court was ruled by a very different ethos from the rest of the people. They were not living necessarily according to Islam. They had more wives than the four allowed them by the Koran, for example, and the Shari’a began rather as a counter-cultural movement against this aristocratic ethos of the court. And for many centuries the Ulama (ph) were in opposition and they had never -- in Iran they never lost their oppositional role as standing up to rulers, to unjust rulers and protesting against unjust rule.

So religion and in the Shi’a, in Shi’ite Islam religion and politics were, for centuries, separation on -- as a matter of sacred principle. When Khomeini became head of state, a cleric became head of state, he was overturning centuries of most sacred Shi’ite tradition and because it was thought that politics, all states, all government, was corrupt until the coming of the Shi’ite Imam, the Shi’ite Messiah, but that has changed. So political Islam is a political faith. It contemplates politics, it takes politics very seriously. So to call -- there’s a sort of -- a Muslim cannot be indifferent to the plight of his society and very often where Christian fundamentalists respond to the threat of modernity by evolving a doctrine such as a theory of creation, a denunciation of evolution, or the infallibility the literal infallibility of scripture. These are new fundamentalist doctrines. Muslims will often respond with a social policy, with a political vision, with a desire to create some -- to make -- put Islamic society back on track.

So it’s not political Islam itself that has done this. What’s done it is once you lose a sense of that overriding desire for compassion and justice for all, and respect for the sacred rights of others, then you’ve lost the plot religiously. And what happens when people use Islam for purely political growth, it’s also a complete misunderstanding of the nature of God. We often -- Muslims alone are not guilty of this -- are not the only ones guilty of this. We often think about God in such a limited way that we imagine God as a personality rather like ourselves, writ large with likes and dislikes similar to our own, whereas Allah-hu Akbar (God is always greater than we can conceive). But if you try and cut God down to size it’s all too easy to make God into our own image and likeness and get Him, in itself a bad pronoun, get Him to endorse our limit prejudices, our hatreds, our limited programs and give them a sacred seal of absolute approval. And this is one of the constant dangers of religion and it is I think -- I think it is a misunderstanding of the nature of God and a loss of the sense of compassion that must, above all, dominate all religious political life.

MIN. ABDERAHMAN: There is another set of questions and they all, I think, focus on the -- what you described as the peaceful nature of Islam and one of them at least suggests that the Prophet was not faithful to that peaceful nature. He broke some peace. The other is suggesting that maybe later on generations have abandoned this peaceful spirit and lastly someone is asking you, which is more peaceful, Islam or Judaism?

MS. ARMSTRONG: Oh hell, well, I’m glad you’re asking such little, limited questions. Now, okay, the Prophet. The Prophet certainly was a warrior not because he particularly wished to but because there he was. But, at the end of his life, at the end of his life he did, I think, abjure violence and conquered and overcame by a daring policy of non-violence. What he did was in the midst of the hostilities he announced that he was going to go on the Hajj and invited 1,000 Muslims to come with him. On the Hajj you may not carry arms, you may not even kill an insect or speak a cross word. There must be no violence on the Hajj. So he was going unarmed, right into Meccan territory and there -- and it was this extraordinary daring and frightening experience that the Meccans were shocked and rather put in the position where they had to come and negotiate. And he signed a truce which is the -- no, which is what I was talking about at table. He signed a truce, a peace treaty which was so -- seemed to be caving in on so many fronts that there was nearly a mutiny in the Army. They were dying to dash in and finish the job. But he said, “No, we sign at every point and make peace.” And it was this, the historian said, which changed the tide and that more people came into -- so I think, he himself, was feeling his way forward and he did finally work through to an ethos of peace, yes.

MIN. ABDERAHMAN: Two more questions actually about Bernard Lewis’ latest article in the New York Review books and one of them is asking whether you agree with him about the decline of Islam in the last century or so. And the other is asking what does Islam really have to say about purity?

MS. ARMSTRONG: Purity?

MIN. ABDERAHMAN: Purity, because --

MS. ARMSTRONG: What do they mean?

MIN. ABDERAHMAN: -- it seems that Lewis spoke about the obsession of all ideologies and religion during the 20th century with the idea of purity and the question relates to that whether Islam has a comparative concept?

MS. ARMSTRONG: Oh alright. Now, has Islam -- Bernard Lewis, I know, is a great historian and I’ve learnt a tremendous amount from Bernard Lewis’ books and works especially about the historical period, The Golden Age of Islam. It was he who taught me about Jihad in the days when I was working for television and was writing something about the Crusades and it was he who explained that by the time of the Crusades, Jihad was entirely dead letter. And there was no Muslim plan to take over the world or convert people -- or anything of that sort. Now he seems to have -- unfortunately he doesn’t seem to think that Islam has any valiancy in the modern world.

At the beginning -- I see in the sense what he means -- at the beginning of the 20th century it’s important to note that nearly every single leading Muslim intellectual, except one that I can think of, was in love with the West. There was no instinctive recoil from modern western society.

Muslims, and I’m thinking of Mohammed Abdul for example, the grand Mufti of Egypt, very important thinker, was very much at home with Europeans. He hated the British occupation of his country, hated that, but he knew an immense amount about European culture and philosophy and these people like him, they wanted their countries to look like Britain and France. They didn’t know about America at this point. And some even went so far as to say that the Europeans were better Muslims than the Muslims themselves because they, in their modern societies, they had been able to establish a more just distribution of wealth that was closer to the spirit of the Koran. And some advocated that Mullahs in training in the madrasses must study science and languages alongside their traditional Islamic and legal studies of Islamic law.

Now that’s all gone. Now I think -- I don’t think -- what I disagree, I think with Bernard Lewis, is to say well there’s nothing we can do. They are completely now -- Muslims have now lost -- a lost cause as it were. We need do nothing. This, I think, is quite wrong. There’s an awful lot of thinking in the Muslim world right now, but we don’t ever hear about much. All we hear about is Osama bin Laden. We don’t hear much from people like Kanadarwee (ph), or Sarush (ph), or other people who are doing some really serious thinking about Islam, about the nature of the Shari’a, bringing it up to date. It’s as though all we heard about -- as though Pat Robertson were the only representative of American Christianity. And we weren’t looking at all the other currents.

So there is vitality going on. Having said that however, the twentieth century has been one of great difficulty and suffering for Muslims. They had the colonial experience, which was very debilitating. Now I know Bernard Lewis has said, well it wasn’t so bad, after all. But I don’t think we can dismiss other peoples’ pain in that way. You know, we can’t say it wasn’t so bad if we weren’t -- I mean I can’t say it, I’m a Brit. We were doing the colonizing. And this was debilitating and it has impeded the Muslim approach to modernity.

The modern spirit as it developed in the West over a period of centuries had two essential characteristics that are essential to modernity. One is independence. The modernization in Europe and the United States developed with declarations of independence on all fronts. Religious, social, political, intellectual, as scientists demanded that they not be overseen by a coercive church. Independence -- your own declaration of independence here. Classic modernizing statement -- document.

The second thing -- so independence is one. The other was innovation. We were constantly doing new things. Inventing something new. There was a dynamic about it. Reaching out for unprecedented solutions, dealing with -- bringing something entirely fresh into the world. Now in the Muslim world modernity came not with independence but with dependence. And with political subjugation. And not innovation but imitation, because they were just trying to catch us up. And so there was something skewed and difficult about the whole thing. If you compare Japan which was not colonized and not subject to foreign influence of foreign domination in that way -- it’s had its huge problems and its awful growing pains, but it has made its own version -- highly successful version of modernity which the Muslims are finding more difficult to do. The colonial experience was dreadful.

This has been -- the sense of humiliation is acute, I think, in the Muslim world. There’s a sense of whatever -- Islam is so much a religion of success. Unlike Jesus the Prophet Mohammed was a dazzling success in his own day. A brilliant political leader as well as a spiritual, towering genius. And he achieved enormous success. The Islamic empire went from strength to strength to strength. Even when it had a major like the Mongol invasions in the Middle Ages it was able to respond creatively with a strong sufi revival and then with creating three new empires.

Now, I’ll move on. But this -- against the West they have been able to make no headway. This has been for some I would say, as disturbing for some Muslims as the discovery of Charles Darwin have been to some Christians. It seems to sort of say, ‘What’s gone wrong with Islamic history? The Koran tells us if we lived in a certain way we’ll prosper. What’s happening? And why are the godless West prospering and we not?” This is difficult and there’ s a sense of debilitation and conflict. I think in a place like the Middle East which as I say then sucks all these religious currents into its orbit and sort of sacrilizes the war in a very, very terrible way. Because then things become absolute and non-negotiable. And that’s happened on both sides, say of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

So let us not sort of sneer or leave them alone but reach out towards this and enter empathically with the real difficulties that Muslims are having and admire and applaud and appreciate the efforts that so many of them are making but which we never hear about much in the West. It would be good if we heard some more from -- if there were a publishing endeavor that could translate some of these creative Muslim thinkers and make people aware of the multifarious nature of the Muslim response to this challenge.

MIN. ABDERAHMAN: We have two minutes left and seven questions around what needs to be done. What should be done, both by Muslims and the U.S. to explain themselves the way you are doing? About the U.S. versus the Muslim world and how to encourage tolerance there, etc. And about Muslim and Arab countries, vis-a-vis the U.S. All the seven questions are around the same idea --

MS. ARMSTRONG: In two minutes?

MIN. ABDERAHMAN: You have two minutes.

MS. ARMSTRONG: Right. Now what can be done? I think Muslims in the United States have a key role to play here, almost as a bridge they can be, but they must come out strongly and be vocal and seen to be against terror. I know you are against terror. I have no doubt about that, but you have to keep impressing this upon the American people in creative, imaginative ways. And show the Muslim world that is suspicious of the West that it is possible to create a vibrant Islam right here in the United States. It is possible.

And I’ve seen -- before all this happened, I’ve seen some very exciting Muslim communities where they’re training their children to be good Muslims and good Americans. How can we heal this? I think knowledge. I’ve been impressed. I’ve been really impressed with the way Americans have responded to the horror of September the 11th by the descent upon the bookshops. Here you all are tonight listening to long disquisitions on Islam, to finding out about Islam. This has been very impressive to me. It’s not happening in the U.K. This is something -- and if something good can come of this horror, a greater understanding is important.

Something I think -- I’m not going to attempt to think politically. I’m not a political animal and you’re the experts here and know more about it than me. But something I think that could be done is that Americans could show the world how religious you really are. Very often people in the Muslim world, even in the U.K., we don’t realize that America is an extremely religious country. I believe I’ve been told it’s the second most religious country in the world after India. And it’s not a Godless society, but even in the U.K. what we tend to see is Coca Cola and oil and McDonalds and, you know, shopping-mania or else extreme forms of Christian fundamentalism.

We don’t see what I have been astonished and delighted and privileged to find on my travels round the United States, this really creative questing religious spirit. Show the world your religion and show that this is good creative plural religion. That’s what we need, our Muslim -- from the pulpit we need to hear Muslims giving this message of pluralism, and we too must do the same.

MIN. ABDERAHMAN: I will encourage others who I didn’t get the chance to get to their questions to approach Ms. Armstrong maybe later on and continue the discussion that we have to conclude here. Please join me in thanking Ms. Armstrong for a very interesting presentation.

(Applause.)

And I would like to thank you. You have been a wonderful audience, and I will just leave you with an announcement that our next event hosted by this Arab group for congressional staffers and members is going to be a reception hosted by the Embassy of Qatar on February 6th at the Golden Room of the Rayburn House Office Buildings, so contact the Qatari Embassy if you’re interested to attend.

Thank you very much and have a good night.

Being Muslims and More Besides.....Farish A Noor

I occasionally read Farish Noor's 'The Other Malaysia'. Historian,writer, social activist,prolific social commentator with an academic/ psuedo-Islamic bent. I do not necessarily agree with what he writes mostly. Occasionally he appeared spiritually confused in his writings.Probably commiting the usual 'sin' common amongst 'apologetic' Malaysian writers writing on Islam and the social millieu surrounding Islam: the need and hunger for applause from a 'secular' gallery often times, perhaps. Or the need to be politically correct most time? Or both? Why they need to apologise on behalf of Islam and Muslims , I cannot comprehend!....Or maybe he really is spiritually confused, I am not sure.... But this piece he wrote on 'Being Muslim......' is worth a thought:

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Being Muslims and More Besides: Muslim Identities as Complex and Cosmopolitan

By Farish A. Noor ~ April 21st, 2010. Filed under: TOM_Main, The Other Malaysia.
(*Note: I was invited to write a think-piece for an upcoming project and I thought I’d share it with anyone interested)

The past decade has witnessed a period of intense speculation on the subject of Muslim subjectivity; often prompted by reasons that have less to do with academic concerns and more with politics instead. We are back to the question of what is a Muslim subject, and what does Muslim subjectivity imply as far as individual actions in the public domain is concerned. It is not an exaggeration to state that the question of ‘what is being a Muslim’ has been asked more than ever. Why?

A simple answer to the question of why Muslim subjectivity has become a concern for so many is that Muslim identity today has been conflated with a host of other real and imagined agendas and objectives. Across North America and Western Europe in particular we see how the debate over issues of national identity and citizenship has brought forth the symbol of the Muslim subject as the liminal marker that stands on the border of what constitutes the nation. In countries such as Holland, Denmark, France and Switzerland, Europeans seem to be standing on the precipice of making a decision that will – in the long run – determine the heading of Europe and what Europe will come to mean in the future, as they debate the standing and status of European Muslims who may or may not be seen and accepted as part of the European family of nations and as European citizen-subjects.

Meanwhile in many Muslim-majority countries the debate has not been forgotten either, for in almost all postcolonial Muslim societies the same question is asked, albeit framed in slightly different terms: Can Muslims also be citizens of states, and if so which identity is to come first – Muslim identity or national identity couched in terms of a universal citizenship.

That such a question can be asked at all today is hardly a novel development as the challenge of reconciling many – sometimes primordial and essentialised – identities and loyalties has been part and parcel of modern nationalism and the project of modern nation-states from the outset. However this question as it is framed in the terms that it finds itself in today is of equal significance and importance for Muslims as well, wherever they may be, as it points us to a deeper existential and ontological question about Islam, Muslim religiosity and Muslim identity.

So let us identify some working premises: The Muslim citizen-subject is, and has always been, a cosmopolitan figure. Muslims live, work and abide by the laws and customs of the societies they find themselves in and exist in a plethora of contexts, be they in Muslim-minority or Muslim-majority states. However consciousness of being Muslim has grown as a result of the rise of identity politics, which is one mode of political economy that was the result of the advances and development of late industrial capitalism and its attendant phenomena, including globalisation.

In many parts of the world, Muslims exist and occupy several levels of identity at the same time: They are Muslims by faith, yet also defined by their class, gender, ethnic, communal, linguistic and historical background. Millions of Muslims also happen to be migrants who may harbour diverse loyalties and attachments, including loyalties to the new host country as well as nostalgic loyalties to their respective home countries. In their daily lives they also owe loyalties to the corporate/institutional bodies where they work and which employ them.

Yet all of the above are perfectly normal and mundane, everyday considerations that are faced by everyone on this planet. How is a Muslim any more different or unique to his or her non-Muslim neighbour when it comes to paying taxes, worrying about their children’s school fees and exam reports, or deciding where to eat and which movie to watch on the weekend? Amidst the academic and non-academic (or even pseudo-academic) debates over what constitutes Muslim identity, many of us have forgotten the simple fact that Muslims are perfectly ordinary human beings with downright ordinary (even pedestrian and humdrum) concerns like anyone else.

The tendency to render Muslim identity as specific, unique – and by extension different, even alien – however has grown in tandem with much of the over-hyped political discourse about ‘political Islam’ and Muslim political mobilisation. There are two sources that have contributed to this over-speculation and excessive concern over Muslims: The realities of international politics and the geo-strategic concerns of security agencies that now see and present Islam and Muslims as a potential threat to others; and on the other hand Muslims themselves who have taken on board the particularist logic of sectarian communal politics and who have used Islam as the basis for the construction of a communal form of identity politics.

It is to the latter that we will focus our attention here, as we feel that Muslims have more to lose if and when they choose to define their identities solely and primarily on Islam and Muslim identity alone. Simply put, the predicament is as follows: In many Muslim circles today, there has grown the tendency for some Muslims to identify themselves solely as Muslims – as if their normative religious behaviour was the benchmark of their respective individual identities in the most totalised sense, negating or sidelining all other identity-attachments.

This is not a universal phenomenon among all Muslims, but its development among some of the more vocal quarters of the Muslim community is something that has been noted by observers in and outside the community at least. In such instances, the Muslim subject becomes precisely that: A subjectivity that is defined in hyphenated terms with ‘Islam’ as the master signifier that defines all other values and identities. We have all come across instances of young idealistic Muslims who state time and again that they are Muslims first, and that all other identity-concerns come second.

Yet the problems that this poses are dual: Firstly if and when anyone locates the basis of his/her identity solely and primarily on any particular attachment – be it to religion, ethnicity, race or even nation – then it would be assumed that that primary attachment informs and determines all that he or she does, down to the most mundane level of everyday activity. This poses a logical problem for scholars at least, who fail to see how the most mundane of daily life-choices like parking your car, ordering a cheeseburger or watching a DVD can be determined (in a totally deterministic manner) by one primary identity-attachment. It also means that if we were to accept such claims at face value then the subject is left with no room for contingency, random choices or even free will, as all thought and action have become entirely determined by one identity-attachment solely. Cynics of such claims worry that in making such a claim the subject is surrendering all autonomy, independence and free will to a belief-system (be it religious or even secular) that henceforth takes over the subject like an autopilot. If and when such claims are made by Muslims, it has the added negative effect of reinforcing the negative prejudice against Islam that poses Islam as a totalising system that leaves no room for the individual’s conscience and rational agency.

The second problem with taking such a position is of a practical nature, and has to do with our concern about the negative stereotyping of Islam as an all-pervasive totalising system, which we have alluded to above. If and when we come across Muslim political actors and agents who articulate their politics in terms of a vocabulary of absolutes, and who then claim to speak as Muslim enunciators speaking of the religion and on behalf of the entire religion and its faith community, then our worries are compounded. Instances of this are abundant: Militants who kill do so in the name of the faith they profess, while conservative Imams and Mullahs may make irrational and/or downright faulty and false statements while speaking from the subject-position of Muslim enunciators speaking for Islam. Thus when an Iranian Mullah opines that earthquakes are caused by scantily-clad women behaving badly, the falseness (and downright irrationality) of that claim is attributed not only to the individual Mullah, but sadly to Islam as well – for the simple reason that the Mullah has claimed to be speaking on behalf of the faith he professes.

Here lies our concern with the privileging of one singular identity as the basis of subjectivity, regardless of whether that identity is a religious, ethnic, racial or cultural one: It denies the reality that we are all complex composite subjectivities who are the amalgamated assembly of many loyalties and attachments. But if and when Muslim identity is seen and presented as the one and only base to our individual subjectivities, then everything that we say, do, think (or do not do) is pinned on Islam too. Thus let us ask ourselves these simple questions: If and when a Muslim double-parks, is that the fault of the driver or Islam? If and when a Muslim fails to file in his tax forms on time, is that the fault of the individual or his entire religion and belief-system? Surely a commonsensical reply to these questions would be to rescue Islam from the responsibility of being a totalising all-encompassing factor that determines the behaviour of subjects in a totalised, maximalist manner.

It is for this reason that talk of identity and identity politics today has to be tempered by realistic and logical considerations about human subjectivities and how we live in the ordinary way. Identity politics – be it in the name of Islam, Christianity, Hinduism or any religion, ethnicity, language or culture for that matter – has the tendency to foreground one particular identity attachment at the expense of others; but this also has the effect of narrowing down the horizons of our subjectivities and perhaps also limiting the range of logical possibilities of our actions and behaviour. Islam as a way of life does not and need not be understood in terms of an identity straight-jacket that shapes Muslim subjectivities in such a closed and enforced manner; and Muslim subjects are not like Bonsai trees that are constrained by moral wires and ethical bonds so tight as to deny contingency, complexity and cosmopolitan multiple attachments to other things as well. Being a Muslim should not impoverish Muslim subjects, but this also entails accepting the mundane fact that Muslims are Muslims, but also something more.

2 comment:

Gram Massla
April 23rd, 2010 at 04:10
First, thanks for throwing us some red meat. We were being starved.
Second this discussson would have no traction were the subject Christians or even other religious groups. More or less they have been relegated to the sidelines. So why Islam and Muslims? As weltanschaaung goes only Islam challenges the Western perspective and current narrative. Like it or not this is a fact.
Westerners may feel smug about the superiorty of their rationality but their numbers are dropping. Oops! Something is wrong. The so-called Islamic problem in Europe is due to the fact that they cannot replenish themselves. They should sit up and question why.
Islam is the only religion that retains its weltanschaaung; nontheless I wouldn’t like to live in an islamic state. Such are the contradictions of life.

clk
April 29th, 2010 at 19:35
Without going into the academic field in detailed, I can only give my views from a layman perspective.

If one were to wind back the clock a few centuries ago, the same challenges facing the muslim community in a predominant Western culture were the same being faced by the less fundamental christians in the then Christian Western society then. One could just imagine an unmarried christian to-be-mother facing up to society much the same as an unmarried muslim to-be-mother facing up to society in Malaysia or any other muslim nation in the middle-east.

The other issue facing the Islamic world today is partly due to the fact that the media of this world is nearly dominated by the West and hence Islam-phobia gets a wider coverage.

Did anyone read about the debate over ethics vs scripture classes in the Australian school system? How much media coverage does Christophen Hitchens or Richard Dawkins gets compared to their equivalent (if any) in the muslim world in a media dominated by the Western perspective?

Why doesn’t Islam have any opposite view apart from the view they are currently potrayed? If it does have, why is this opposing view silent?

Dr Amin Rais in Conversation : Liberal Islam and Religious Pluralism

Lately there have been too many 'clowns', local and overseas, who should know better, who profess to speak for Islam, speaking to the gallery [ secular minded 'so called Muslims' and non Muslims ],who seemed mixed up and utterly confused in their aqidah. This exceprt of an interview with Indonesian intellectual,current doyen of the Muhammadiyah Movement , Dr Amin Rais, hopefully would clarify further the 'blurring' of vision and minds of the so called liberal "Islamists ". [ if there are such 'animals' that can be both liberal and Islamist at the same time!....just my after thought...as we all know there is only one brand of Islam: The way of Muhammad.. ]

Political correctness, an American exported disease, seem to be more important to our new intellectuals, rather than their aqidah!....Mashallah!!!


Excerpt from an interview with Dr Amin Rais by Majalah Tabligh, March Edition, 2010:

Pandangan Anda mengenai aliran pluralisme?
Akhir-akhir ini saya melihat istilah pluralisme yang sesungguhnya indah dan anggun justru telah ditafsirkan secara kebablasan. Sesungguhnya toleransi dan kemajemukan telah diajarkan secara baku dalam Al-Quran. Memang Al-Quran mengatakan hanya agama Islam yang diakui di sisi Allah, namun koeksistensi atau hidup berdampingan secara damai antar-umat beragama juga sangat jelas diajarkan melalui ayat, lakum diinukum waliyadin. Bagiku agamaku dan bagimu agamamu. Dalam istilah yang lebih teknis, wishfull coexistent among religions, atau hidup berdamai anatar umat beragama di muka bumi.

Tidak ada yang keliru dari aliran pluralisme ?
Nah, karena itu tidak ada yang salah kalau misalnya seorang Islam awam atau seorang tokoh Islam mengajak kita menghormati pluralisme. Karena tarikhnabi sendiri itu juga penuh ajaran toleransi antar beragama. Malahan antar-umat beragama boleh melakukan kemitraan di dalam peperangan sekalipun. Banyak peristiwa di zaman nabi ketika umat nasrani bergabung dengan tentara Islam untuk menghalau musuh yang akan menyerang Madinah.

Apa yang dibablaskan ?
Saya prihatin ada usaha-usaha ingin membablaskan pluralisme yang bagus itu menjadi sebuah pendapat yang ekstrim, yaitu pada dasarnya mereka mengatakan agama itu sama saja. Mengapa sama saja ? Karena tiap agama itu mencintai kebenaran. Dan tiap agama mendidik pemeluknya untuk memegang moral yang jelas dalam membedakan baik dan buruk. Saya kira kalau seorang muslim sudah mengatakan bahwa semua agama itu sama, maka tidak ada gunanya sholat lima waktu, bayar zakat, puasa Ramadhan, pergi haji, dan sebagainya. Karena agama jelas tidak sama. Kalau agama sama, banyak ayat Al-Quran yang harus dihapus. Nah, kalau sampai ajaran bahwa “semua agama sama saja” diterima oleh kalangan muda Islam; itu artinya, mereka tidak perlu lagi sholat, tidak perlu lagi memegang tuntunan syariat Islam. Kalau sapai mereka terbuai dan terhanyutkan oleh pendapat yang sangat berbahaya ini akhirnya mereka bisa bergonta-ganti agama dengan mudah seperti bergonta-ganti celana dalam atau
kaos kaki.

Apakah kebablasan pluralisme karena faktor kesengajaan atau rekayasa?
Saya kira jelas sekali adanya think tank atau dapur-dapur pemikiran yang sangat tidak suka kepada agama Allah kemudian membuat bualan yang kedengarannya enak di kuping: semua agama itu sama. Jika agama itu sama lantas apa gunanya ada masjid, ada gereja, ada kelenteng, ada vihara, ada sinagog, dan lain sebagainya.

Yang dimaksud dengan think tank ?
Saya yakin think tank itu ada di negara-negara maju yang punya dana berlebih, punya kemewahan untuk memikirkan bagaimana melakukan ghazwul fikri(perang intelektual terhadap dunia Islam). Misalnya, kepada Dunia Islam ditawarkan paham lâ diniyah sekularisme yang menganggap agama tidak penting, termasuk di dalamnya pluralisme, yang kelihatannya indah, tapi ujung-ujungnya adalah ingin menipiskan aqidah Islam supaya kemudian kaum Muslim tidak mempunyai fokus lagi. Bayangkan kalau intelektual generasi muda Islam sudah tipis imannya, selangkah lagi akan menjadi manusia sekuler, bahkan tidak mustahil mereka menjadi pembenci agamanya sendiri.

Sepertinya aliran pluralisme itu sudah masuk ke kalangan muda Muhammadiyah, pendapat Anda ?
Kalau sampai aliran pluralisme masuk ke kalangan muda Muhammadiyah, ini musibah yang perlu diratapi. Oleh karena itu, saya menganjurkan sebelum mereka membaca buku-buku professor dari Amerika dan Eropa, bacalah Al-Quran terlebih dahulu. Saya sendiri yang sudah tua begini, 66 tahun, sebelum saya membaca buku-buku Barat, baca Al-Quran dulu. Karena orang yang sudah baca Al-Quran, dia akan sampai pada kesimpulan bahwa berbagai ideologi yang ditawarkan oleh manusia seperti mainan anak-anak yang tidak berbobot. Jika meminjam istilah Sayyid Quthb, seorang yang duduk di bawah perlindungan Al-Quran ibarat sedang duduk di bukit yang tinggi kemudian melihat anak-anak sedang bermain-main dengan mainannya. Orang yang sudah paham Al-Quran akan bisa merasakan bahwa ideologi yang sifatnya man-made, buatan manusia, itu hanya lucu-lucuan saja. Hanya menghibur diri sesaat, untuk memenuhi kehausan intelektual ala kadarnya. Setelah itu bingung lagi.

Kenapa paham pluralisme itu bisa masuk ke kalangan muda Muhammadiyah? Apa karena Muhammadiyah terlalu terbuka atau karena sistem kaderisasi?
Hal ini perlu dipikirkan oleh pimpinan Muhammadiyah. Saya melihat, banyak kalangan muda Muhammadiyah yang sudah eksodus. Kadang-kadang masuk ke gerakan fundamentalisme, tapi juga tidak sedikit yang masuk Islam Liberal. Islam yang sudah melacurkan prinsipnya dengan berbagai nilai-nilai luar Islam. Hanya karena latah. Karena ingin mendapatkan ridho manusia, bukan ridho Ilahi. Oleh karena itu, lewat majalah Tabligh, saya ingin menghimbau kepada anak-anak saya, calon-calon intelektual Muhammadiyah, baik putra maupun putri, agar menjadikan Al-Quran sebagai rujukan baku . Saya pernah tinggal di Mesir selama satu tahun. Saya pernah diberitahu oleh doktor Muhammad Bahi, seorang intelektual Ikhwan, ketika saya bersilaturahmi ke rumah beliau, beliau mengatakan, “Hei kamu anak muda, kalau kamu kembali ke tanah airmu, kamu jangan merasa menjadi pejuang Muslim kalau kamu belum sanggup membaca Al-Quran satu juz satu hari.” Waktu itu saya agak tersodok juga, tetapi
setelah saya pikirkan, memang betul. Kalau Al-Quran sebagai wahyu ilahi yang betul-betul membawa kita kepada keselamatan dunia-akhirat, kita baca, kita hayati, kita implementasikan, kehidupan kita akan terang benderang. Tapi kalau pegangan kita pada Al-Quran itu setengah hati. Kemudian dikombinasikan dengan sekularisme, dengan pluralisme tanpa batas, dengan eksistensialisme, bahkan dengan hedonisme, maka kehidupan kita akan rusak. Sehingga betul seperti kata pendiri Muhammadiyah dalam sebuah ceramah beliau, “Ad-dâ’u musyârokatullâhi fii jabarûtih”. Namanya penyakit sosial, politik, hukum, dan lain-lain, itu sejatinya bersumber kepada menyekutukan Allah dalam hal kekuasaannya. Obatnya bukan menambah penyakit, yakni dengan isme-isme yang kebablasan, tapi obatnya itu, “adwâ’uhâ tauhîddullâhi haqqa”obatnya adalah tauhid dengan sungguh-sungguh. Jadi, saya juga ingat dengan kata-kata Mohammad Iqbal: “The sign of a kafir is that he is
lost in the horizons. The sign of a Mukmin is that the horizons are lost in him.”. Saya pernah termenung beberapa hari setelah membaca pernyataan Mohammad Iqbal yang sangat tajam itu. Karena betapa seorang mukmin akan begitu jelas, begitu paham, begitu terang benderang memahami persoalan dunia. Sedangkan orang kafir, bingung dan tersesat.

Sepertinya Muhamadiyah mulai terseret arus pluralisme, contohnya pada saat peluncuran novel Si Anak Kampoeng. Penulisnya mengatakan sebagian dari keuntungan penjualan akan digunakan untuk membentuk Gerakan Peduli Pluralisme, pandangan Anda ?
Saya tidak akan mengomentari apa dan siapa. Cuma adik saya yang anggota PP Muhammadiyah, pernah memberikan sedikit kriteria atau ukuran yang sangat bagus. Dia bilang begini, “Kalau orang Muhammadiyah sudah tidak pernah bicara tauhid dan malah bicara hal-hal di luar tauhid, apalagi kesengsrem dengan pluralisme, maka perlu melakukan koreksi diri.” Apakah itu tukang sapu di kantor Muhammadiyah, apakah tukang pembawa surat di kantor Muhammadiyah, apakah profesor botak, sama saja. Kalau sudah tidak kerasan berbicara tauhid, mau dikemanakan Muhammadiyah? Muhammadiyah ini bisa bertahan sampai satu abad, tetap kuat, tidak pikun, dan masih segar, karena tauhidnya. Implementasi tauhidnya di bidang sosial, pendidikan, hukum, politik, itu yang menjadikan Muhammadiyah perkasa dan tidak terbawa arus.

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"How can the blind be equal to the seer?"...The Quran.



"Among them there are some who listen to you. But can you make the deaf hear incapable as they are of understanding? Among them there are some who look at you. But can you guide the blind, bereft as they are of sight? Allah does not wrong people in any way; rather it is people who wrong themselves. On the day We gather them together-when it will seem as if they had tarried no more than an hour of a single day-they will recognize one another. Those who denied the meeting with Allah and did not follow the right path will be lost.".... (Surah Yunus: 42-45)

"The sign of a kafir is that he is lost in the horizons. The sign of a mukmin is that the horizons are lost in him".....Iqbal

Conversattions on Islam : Tariq Ramadan on Women's Right and Ijtihad

Islam in principle does not have problem with women, scientific progress or modernity.Some Muslims have.The scriptures are there, the seerah and sunnah are well laid out. The problems are not with them . The problem lies with the reader. This in essence is what Prof Tariq Ramadan, Swiss by birth, Islam by faith and spirit, seem to be saying wherever he goes.

He is a very busy man nowadays, besieged by traditional scholars for perceived 'playing to the gallery' and apologist to the West,hammered by Western secularists 'for still being too Islamic',courted by the 'munafikuns from within and from without',misquoted by many, and yet increasingly popular within the context of European Muslims as their spokesperson.Islam is the fastest growing religion in Europe and America where there are growing disenchantment and disappoitment with the soul-decaying forces of materialism and traditional belief in the nebulous and indefensible concept of Trinity.

My personal reading of Tariq Ramadan is that here is a suave contemporary scholar who is worth watching. European and American Muslims are going through a rough spell with Islamophobia."Siasah" par excelence is required to move forward.One cannot expect erudite scholars entrenched in Al Azhar, in a milieu of almost 100 % Muslim, to fully comprehend and emphaties with the problems of European and American Muslims.Their context and nuances differ slightly but significantly.I particularly like his practical 'helicopter' view of Islam in Europe: One has to view Europe as an opportunity to develop rather than take a myopic xenophobic and defensive view and subscribe to a dichotomy of Darul Harb and Darul Islam . Europe and America is Darul Da'awa and Darul Syuhada.A reorientation of notions rather than crass
rebranding of Islam [ Liberal Islam, Islam Hadhari seem stupid ].

Islam is afterall a universal Din to save the whole of humanity, Muslims and non Muslims.

Thus, despite the continuous onslought on Islam and 'talibanization' and demonization of anything Islamic by an 'unfriendly and biased' Western press and media, more and more people are seeing through the thick veil of hypocrisy and false media blitz.
Listen to Tariq Ramadan on Women's Right, Ijtihad and etc and etc:

Retrieved from QuranSpeaks's Channel on Youtube

Women's Rights



Ijtehad - Independent Reasoning


PS: My main worry is unless we have more Tariq Ramadans in Europe and America, even he may follow the fate that happened to Ismail Al Faruqi. Truth has a great propensity to create powerful and 'creative' enemies!

Conversations on Islam : Ustaz Dr Abdullah Yasin

Subject: Penghayatan Quran dengan Mendengar Vs Hanya Membaca Tanpa Penghayatan

Yang Berbahagia Ustaz Dr Abdullah Yasin, dengan doa agar Ustaz sentiasa diberi kerahmatan Allah dandidalam kandungan sihat walafiat selalu hendaknya.

Ustaz,

Saya ada kemuskilan mengenai Membaca Qur'an. Memang ianya dituntut, lebih2 lagi di bulan yang penuh kerahmatan ini: bulan dimana turunnya Qur'anal karim kepada umat Nabi Muhamad[saw]. Satu mukjizat yang di pandang enteng olih masyarakat masakini, dimana , pada hemat saya, kita keselurohan nya, terutamanya di persekitaran Nusantara Melayu ini, baik Malaysia mahupun Indonesia, lebih mementingkan bacaan dari penghayatan.Dengongan yang enak dan baik dari penghayatan dan praktiknya intisari 2 dan teguran2 dalam Quran. Soalan saya begini:

Bacaan saya tidak 'perfect', bahkan jauh dari tidak 'perfect', bunyi dan 'dengongannya' mirip macam 'mualaf'. Buat beberapa bulan yang lepas saya mengambil pendekatan dengan membaca tafsir penulisan Shaykh Muhamad al Ghazali [ A Thematic Commentary On The Quran ], bagi tiap2 surah yang saya mahu pelajari untuk hari itu, diikuti dengan mendengar bacaan Surah itu dari internet olih Qari Mishari Rashid [ yang begitu mempersonakan hingga 'segan' saya sendiri mahu baca mengikuti beliau], diikuti pula dengan transliteration didalam Ingeris ataau Bahasa Melayu pada tiap2 ayat .

[ http://www.quranexplorer/ ]

Dengan cara ini saya dapat habis satu juz sehari ,insyaallah.

OK Ustaz, apa pandangan Ustaz mengenai cara ini dari segi pahala/dosa nya.

vis a vis : Penghayatan Quran dengan mendengar dan mempelajari maana dan tafsir Vs Hanya membaca tanpa penghayatan.Saya faham mungkin jawapannya mungkin 'obvious' kepada ramai dan pernah juga saya 'terlintas' didalam pembacaan saya yang lepas didalam Quran [ dah lupa ayat dan surahnya ] dianjur supaya mendengar bacaan Quran selain dari membacanya. Juga didalam Sirah Nabi, dimana Nabi kita menyuroh sahabat beliau, Abdullah Mas'ud 'continue to read to him ' the Quran pasal kemerduan suara dan 'tajwid' beliau tepat sekali dari lain2 sahabat.

Namun demikian, ulasan Yang Berbahagia Ustaz di perlukan juga untuk kebaikan bersama kita.

Dr Nik Isahak Wan Abdullah

http://drnikisahak.blogspot.com/

Assalamualaikum,

Terlebih dahulu saya mohon maaf sbb lambat menjawab email Dr. Nik kerana bbrp kesibukan dakwah. Ustaz doa semoga dalam bulan yang penuh berkah ini Dr dan klrga sentiasa dlm limpahan rahmat dan berkat dari Allah. Ust juga ucap tahniah kerana Dr peduli dan ambil berat dengan Al-Quran yang agak berbeza dengan kepedulian majoriti umat Islam lain di Asia Tenggara yang hanya fokus kpd bacaan Al-Quran (Tajwid) sahaja tanpa usaha memahami isi kandungannya. Padahal Al-Quran diturunkan Allah untuk dijadikan pedoman dan petunjuk bagi umat manusia. Sila rujuk ayat 185 Al-Baqarah. Lebih-lebih lagi jika ingin jadi orang yang bertaqwa. Sila lihat ayat 2 Al-Baqarah. Manusia yang berpaling dari ajaran Al-Quran akan mendapat siksaan di dunia dan akhirat. Lihat ayat 124 - 126 surah Taaha. Sedang mereka yang mendustakan dan bersikap sombong terhadat ayat-ayat Allah boleh membawa akibat doa dan amalannya tidak diterima oleh Allah dan mustahil masuk syurga seperti mustahilnya unta masuk ke dalam lobang jarum. Sila lihat tafsiran ayat 40 dari surah Al-A'raaf.

Rasulullah s.a.w. bersabda : ( Sebaik-baik manusia siapa yang mempelajari Al-Quran dan mengajarkannya kepada orang-orang lain. ) - ( Al-Quran kelak akan menjadi penolongmu di akhirat atau sebaliknya akan mendakwa kamu. ) - ( Berapa banyak orang yang membaca Al-Quran tetapi Al-Quran mengutuknya ). Ini hanya segelintir hadis Nabi saw tentang kelebihan mempelajari Al-Quran dan bahaya mengabaikannya.

Oleh itu Dr. Ahmad Asrar (ulama besar dari Pakistan) dalam bukunya dalam bahasa Urdu yang diterjemahkan dalam bhs Arab yng maknanya : Apakah kewajipan Umat Islam Terhadap Al-Quran ? menyebut ada LIMA kewajipan umat Islam terhadap Al-Quran : 1. Beriman kepada Al-Quran bahawa ia adalah wahyu Allah yang diturunkan kpd Rasul akhir zaman Nabi Muhammad s.a.w. dalam bahasa Arab. 2. Tilawah yakni membacanya dengan baik / betul. 3. Memahami isi kandungannya sebab ia diturunkan bukan hanya utk dibaca tetapi dihayati dan direnung maknanya untuk dijadikan pedoman hidup. 4. Mengamalkannya dalam kehidupan harian. 5. Menyampaikannya kepada orang lain apa yang sudah kita fahami dan amalkan.

Ringkasannya : Jika kita renung LIMA kewajipan di atas ternyata kebanyakan umat Islam Asia Tenggara hanya penuhi DUA saja dari LIMA perkara diatas yakni iman dan tilawah. Maknanya kurang dari separo kewajipannya terhadap Al-Quran. Jika ini terjadi bagaimana kelak akan menjawa pertanyaan dalam kubur : Apakah IMAM kamu ? jika didunia tidak ada usaha utk melengkapi kewajipan yang lima itu. Agar iman sempurna kita perlu ilmu Aqidah, untuk kesempurnaan tilawah kita perlu ilmu Tajwid, agar sempurna kefahaman kita perlu ilmu Tafsir atau Tadabbur Al-Quran ( Lihat Attachmnt ) - Dengan cabang2 ilmu tsb barulah kita boleh amalkan Al-Quran dengan sempurna dan menyampaikannya kepada orang lain dengan lebih tepat.

Syaitan sangat suka jika kita menjauhkan diri dengan ajaran Al-Quran. Oleh itu Allah suruh kita awali setiap memulai membaca Al-Quran dengan Isti'adzah (mohon perlindungan kpd Allah dari gangguan syaitan) Lihat ayat 98 surah Al-Nahl.

Ustaz harapkan tulisan singkat ini berguna untuk Dr Nik dan kawan2. Sikap Dr yang berusaha menekuni Al-Quran dengan menghayati maknanya hendaklah diteruskan. Ini pertanda atau isyarat baik dari Allah agar Dr menjadi orang yang baik-baik. Sabda Nabi saw : Barangsiapa yang Allah berkehendak untuk menjadikannya orang yang bai-baik, nescaya Allah akan dorong dia gemar mendalami selok belok agama. ( HR Bukhari ). Secara tersirat jika malas dan rasa berat mendalami selok belok agama maka itu bermakna sebaliknya. Adapun tentang bacaan Dr yang dirasakan beluk perfect insya Allah dimaafkan oleh Allah asalkan jangan berhenti memperbaikinya dan jangan marah jika ditegor oleh orang lebih arif. Rasul bersabda : Siapa membaca Al-Quran dengan lancar (mahir) maka ia sederjat dengan malaikat Kiramil Bararah, dan siapa yang membaca Al-Quran dengan tesangkak-sangkat (tdk lancar) namun terus berusaha maka dia akan mendapat ganjaran dua kali ganda.

Demikian sedikit sumbangan ustaz. Salam buat keluarga ; Jasa Dr merawat abang ustaz bbrp tahun lalu tidak pernah pudar dalam ingatan. Jazakumullah Khairan Kathira.

Wassalam

Ustaz Dr. Abdullah Yasin

Conversations on Islam: Buff Parry on the Rise of Islam