Asia Times Online, arguably one of the more “balanced” news media outlets, ran a disturbingly misguided article entitled, “When Even the Pope Has to Whisper.”
The premise of the article is that, despite the West’s admitted attempts at “reforming” the Muslim world in its own image,
” the available facts suggest that the opposite result will ensue: more freedom equals more fundamentalism. Not the secular Shi’ite parties but the pro-Iranian religious parties dominate the Iraqi polls. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood quadrupled its vote despite heavy-handed measures to intimidate its supporters; Hamas threatens to displace Fatah in the Palestinian elections this month; Hezbollah has become the strongest electoral as well as military force in Lebanon; and, most important of all, Mahmud Ahmadinejad crushed a more pragmatic opponent in last June’s Iranian presidential elections.”
What the article admits, and what most Muslim already know, is that the “Muslim world” must bow before secularization, that we must convert to this ideology or face the “consequences.” And they do not mean economic sanctions or failure to “succeed” in the world market. By consequences, they mean warfare, unprovoked violence, removal of the democratic rights they claim to offer, and eventual unnatural death. Like the untamed barbaric image that they project onto Islam, we Muslims must either convert to secularism or die.
They have managed to even incriminate the Pope in their plan, as the article emphasizes,
“And immediately the holy father, in his beautiful calm but clear way, said, well, there’s a fundamental problem with that because, he said, in the Islamic tradition, God has given His word to Mohammed, but it’s an eternal word. It’s not Mohammed’s word. It’s there for eternity the way it is. There’s no possibility of adapting it or interpreting it, whereas in Christianity, and Judaism, the dynamism’s completely different, that God has worked through his creatures.”
So, the Pope has admitted that the Bible has elements of man’s ideas and the Qur’an does not. That is a bad thing? I think 1.2 billion Muslims would disagree. In order to discredit even the Pope’s assertion, the author, therefore, resorts to cheap shots such as,
“It is universally known among scholars that alternative texts of the Koran have been discovered in various archaeological sites.”
If it is universally known, why is it not universally published ? The reality is that, even if some “texts” do exist that contain the Qur’an along with other writings, that does not invalidate the Qur’an we have today at all. If anything, it strengthens it. After all, our assertion is not, “nothing exists besides the Qur’an,” rather that “only one Qur’an is valid and universally accepted by ALL Muslims since the time of Prophet Muhammad.” Furthermore, anyone who has done serious research will discover that the Qur’an compiled during the Prophet’s lifetime, is the same one that exists today, in full.
The caliph ‘Uthman standardized a particular reading of the Qur’an and destroyed the others because it was the correct reading, not because he had a hidden agenda (as was the case with other religious books in other religions). Thousands of companions had memorized the Qur’an, written it down, and (in the case of Imam ‘AliI and others), compiled in its entirety before ‘Uthman. His insistence on standardization had nothing to do with “apocryphal” copies of the Qur’an or about a divided community with several different versions of the same book. Had his goal been to choose “one Qur’an over another”, there would have been an uproar. Nevertheless, when his opponents protested and eventually killed him, this one not one of their grievances.
But I digress. The true agenda of the Asia Times article is to assert that Islam will never conform to secularism because Islam is inflexible and intolerant. Their assertion is right, but their reasoning is completely wrong. I would disagree with the Pope on one point. The shari’ah (path of Islam) is flexible. Our system of fiqh (jurisprudence) allows us to adapt to cultures, time periods, and situations. This adaptability allowed Islam to spread effortlessly across the globe. Furthermore, as I’m sure the Pope would testify, Islam’s level of tolerance is unparalleled among religions and among secularists.
The secularists’ assumption is that Muslims “deserve better.” Somehow, in some type of irreligious, yet cosmically unexplainable way, secularism is the “perfect way of life.” It is undoubtedly their religion, and they insist on forcing it upon anyone who stands in the way of “progress.” What is progress? Exploitation of land, natural resources, animals, and other human beings. Hyper-modernization has threatened the very existence of the earth, but anyone who is not eager to “just accept it” is seen as “backwards” and “intolerant.”
They assume that Islam is forced upon Muslims, especially Muslim women. They assume that, if we just try secularism for a few years, we will love it and never want to go back to the full implementation of Islam. They assume that their narrow understanding of democracy is the only valid system of government and that any system that differs from it is oppressive and wrong. Moreover, they assume that Muslims ever had an interest in forcing the West to conform to Islamic standards, while they are the ones who have invaded Muslim lands, colonized, waged wars, and sacrificed millions of lives, all under the banner of progress, much in the same way that early settlers in America believed themselves to be “civilizing” the indigenous people.
These are foolish assumptions that will unquestionably fail. They have ignored the very core of the Islamic understanding of God’s relationship with human beings. Islam is submission, not “submission when it is convenient or most pleasurable.” It is complete submission, in whatever form it takes. It can exist in a modern context, as the millions of practicing traditional Muslims living in the West have demonstrated. But all flexibility has limits, and not all “freedoms” are beneficial.
“In accordance with the real nature of things it is the human that must conform to the Divine and not the Divine to the human.” –Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Eid Mubarak to all of you! We’ve had a good one. We went to the festivities yesterday and prayed at the Zainabia this morning. Alhamdulillah, we live in a wonderful community. Yesterday was nice. I played Scrabble with some good friends of mine and listened to some live African drums and music.
