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| The 'Middle Way' of Islam Izzat Majeed History has no morality, and certainly no
sense of justice. Capitalism knows no religion and has no country. The
vast majority of the Muslims of the world do not care about Osama bin
Laden’s proclamations and his antiquated notion of Islam. He helped
create the Taliban (some say he actually rules over them). If the sheer
barbarism of the Taliban regime is his version of an Islamic society, then
he must be a true dreamer to think that any Muslim with half a brain will
listen to him. The long lost tribal simplicity and austerity that once
characterised the practice of Islam interests no one today. The
self-inflicted death of intellect in Islam a thousand years ago is the
main cause of the retrogressive and unenlightened mullah culture in Muslim
societies today. Bin Laden’s self-selected 'messiahism' is
too opportunistic and shallow to become a political movement of a
revolutionary sentiment among the dispossessed Muslims of the world. He
has gathered the delusion of strength and stumbled over the invention of
ideology based on a religious populism in an ocean of illiteracy and
abject poverty. And he has gone wild. Terrorism without an historical juncture
supporting a movement for change is just that—terrorism. It can shake
the world for a moment or two, but it is easily killed. His legacy of
terror, which also victimised the poor, uneducated and downtrodden Muslims
of the world, vanished in the caves of darkness and despair. He brought
wretchedness to proud but hungry and abused Afghans, with his empty
slogans and his money and showed them a new hell where bombs and
chocolates fall from the skies. We Muslims cannot keep blaming the West for
all our ills. We have to first get our own house in order before we can
even make any credible struggle possible to rid us of ignorance,
living-in-the-past chest thumping and intolerance of the modern world. The embarrassment of wretchedness among us
is beyond repair. It is not just the poverty, the illiteracy and the
absence of any commonly accepted social contract that defines our sense of
wretchedness; it is, rather, the increasing awareness among us that we
have failed as a civil society by not confronting the historical, social
and political demons within us. The social and political acquiescence to
this condition by the vast majority of our people has given rise to
cultural paralysis and a totally bogus interpretation of Islam based on
self-serving political agendas. Without a reformation in the practice of
Islam that makes it move forward and not backward, there is no hope for us
Muslims anywhere. We have reduced Islam to the organised hypocrisy of
state-sponsored 'mullahism'. For more than a thousand years Islam has
stood still because the mullahs, who became de facto clergy instead of
genuine scholars, closed the door on ijtehad and no one came forward with
a dynamic and evolving application of the message of the Holy Quran. All
that the mullahs tell you today is how to go back a millennium and more.
We have not been able to evolve a dynamic practice to bring Islam to the
people in the language of their own specific era. Little wonder,
therefore, that the bulk of our mullahs are illiterate in any modern or
ancient sense of the word. They are simply illiterate. Period. Oxford and
Cambridge were the 'madrasas' of Christendom in the 13th century. Look
where they are today - among the leading institutions of education in the
world. Where are our institutions of learning? The basis of ignorant mullahism issues from
a fundamental debasement of the human being. Ours is an ongoing
inquisition that thrives on ignorance and poverty. The pathetic ruling
elites of the Muslim world remain trapped in their own abandonment of any
knowledge about Islam. The likes of Bin Laden cannot lead all of us to a
barbaric social order and call it Islam. Most Muslims live in the dark
ages already. The last thing they need is the growing darkness of Bin
Laden’s caves and the stale intellect that is anti-human and
anti-progress. Source: http://www.the-south-asian.com/Dec2001/Middle%20Way%20of%20Islam.htm 'wasat' (Arabic) = middle, centered, balanced |