It is very sad and disheartening to watch the news and see our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers and children being killed in cold blood. Why is this happening? Not only because the Israeli occupier wants to crush the resistance, just like throughout history, but because Hamas is not just a resistance movement to occupation but even worse; it is an Islamic one. The situation is aggravated even further by the fact that the Palestinians dared to democratically vote for that resistance movement as their legal representation. Accordingly, they all had to be punished and slaughtered by the Israeli occupation in one of many holocausts against different Muslim populations across the world that the media chooses to twist and underreport.
Now the Gaza situation is not a unique one. Thousands of Muslims are being persecuted, jailed and killed around the world, in China, Burma, Philippines, Chechnya, Bosnia and elsewhere in an organized and steady fashion, but we don’t have enough media coverage to hear about the details. Gaza is not an exception or a transient situation. It is but part of a more global process.
Why is this happening to Muslims globally? It is because they are living, as a whole, a corrupted version of Islam that renders them weak and vulnerable. The Muslim response to daily events across the world has generally always (for almost 10 centuries now) been a short-lived reactionary one that barely does anything to fix the problem. Moreover, it, of course, has nothing to do with analyzing its cause and working on preventing its recurrence. Accordingly we live in a vicious circle of temporary reactionary responses that weakens Muslims more and more and deepens the corruption of Islam further.
Accordingly the ultimate solution for the current crisis in Gaza, and elsewhere in the world, is a root cause analysis and a strategic view of how to reform the Corrupted Islam and come back to life with a proactive rather than a reactionary Islam. This is how this series relates to the current events in Gaza.
· Concepts:
Before proceeding with the analysis we need to recognize 5 basic concepts the middle 3 of which all human beings accept as facts.
Sources:
Most Muslims will agree that the only 2 uncorrupted sources of Islam that are 100% pure are the Qur’an and Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). All other presentations of Islam have some degree of corruption or inaccuracy. The accuracy could range from 99% to 0% but never 100%. This is based on the fact that none of the presenters of Islam has 100% knowledge or 100% comprehensive view. No human being is perfect and hence all Muslims share in the corrupted presentation of Islam, albeit some more than others. Some do that out of ignorance, others out of arrogance and the majority out of narrow-mindedness. Some do that deliberately and others by virtue of their personal attitude in life in general. Accordingly besides the Qur’an and Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) one can learn Islam through facts rather than through people. In other words, whatever is said or done in the name of Islam, be it by a scholar or an average Muslim, needs to be filtered and analyzed before reaching a sound conclusion. Human error and bias are always factors that should be on one’s mind when reading anything about Islam, or any other topic open for discussion that actually includes everything in life!
Starting Angle and Projection Line:
This will sound very childish and irrelevant in the beginning but please bear with me! Get a pen and draw a small bullet (point A). Extend a straight line from it to the end of the paper (point C). Now start another line 1cm from the original starting point but from the same line albeit with a very small deviation. In the beginning the distance between both lines is very small but as you get further from the starting point the distance widens. If you start at a bigger angle the distance between the new line and the original one increases faster with further projections of both lines. See below.
Now let us consider the original line the pure form of Islam along a time line starting from A and C being our current time. The distance from point A to B would be the life of Prophet Muhammad and a little less than 3 decades after that. At point B (and many other points along the road from the original line) different Islamic schools of thought came into existence with deviations that vary from minor to major. If one picks one school of thought and chooses to stick to it, with time and through centuries one will deviate further and further away from the original. However if you relate back to the A-B interval you will be sure to stay on the original line. If the A-B interval is not clear then the best thing to do is pick from contradicting schools (lines that deviated at opposite angles) and average them in order to come as close as possible to the original line (the summation of the top most and bottom most lines in the above demonstration will result in a line that is much closer to the original than any of the deviations.
Of course the above example is very simplistic and the issue of change and corruption (and hence reform) is much more complicated than that but it is based on the same principle.
On Going Process:
Complicating the above diagram further and further we can draw multiple lines deviating from the already deviated lines starting at different points along the time line from point B to our current time at C. Depending on which line you choose to look at you sill see a different version of corrupted Islam. Amongst the thousands of lines the vision will be very murky and it will become a struggle to see the original line. Corruption is an ongoing process until the end of time. Hence reform is an ongoing process of meticulous research and hard work.
Point of View: A shocking experience!
We are all familiar with the term “different point of view” but how deep do we realize and appreciate that meaning and apply it in any argument or discussion?
I was 10 years old when I was exposed to a very simple and not noteworthy event that to me was brain shattering. From my bedroom window in our apartment I used to talk with my neighbor in the building right next to us while he was standing in his balcony. This was almost a daily process for years and from my vintage point the view is engraved in my mind. After years I went up to his balcony and looked across to my bedroom window. I was shocked that in spite of sharing the same surroundings the view from his balcony was like seeing totally different surroundings! I had a hard time, for days, accepting that we were actually looking at the same objects albeit from different angles. From that day I understood that the simple change of “point of view” towards the same object could show you a completely different picture that you never thought existed.
The only comprehensive view that sees Islam from all angles at the same time was that of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). All other views are just part of the picture that need to be combined in order to see a more holistic and authentic picture. Sticking with one point of view is never comprehensive.
Who:
There are 4 main groups of people responsible for the corruption that I will elaborate upon later namely Islamic scholars, average Muslims, extremists and hypocrites.
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