{Quick Reflections 46} Corrupted Islam 5

For those who have not read any of the previous episodes I would like to repeat my previous clarification of some terms I use. Generally throughout this series when I mention Muslim, or Scholar, I mean the ones contributing to the corruption, which are the majority, and not all Muslims or all Scholars.

To access the previous 4 episodes please visit Adage's forum or the Real Life blog

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In this episode I am going to pick up from where we last stopped and will hence discuss the second enemy of Islam from within.


Idol Worshiping

Early on in human history when idol worshiping started it did not start all of a sudden out of the blue. It was a very slow and gradual process of corruption of the human nature that then became so deeply rooted and widespread amongst all human races. Initially, and by pure human nature, good and evil from within were in a continuous struggle with good dominating and winning. With time people started drifting away from worshiping the one God that their parents, Adam and Eve, had told them about. Not only that but that was accompanied by a gradual decline in good manners and the development of injustice and transgression amongst people. However during that process a few people with a strong will and identity where struggling to maintain the original pure teachings of God to Adam which were based on three main themes, which have been the three main themes of God's message to human-beings throughout history starting with Adam, through Moses and Jesus, and finally to Muhammad. Those themes again and again are the Oneness of God, Perfection of Manners and the Pursuit of Knowledge.
Examples of such good people early on in the struggle are provided to us in the Qur'an and by name there was Wadd, Suwa', Yaghuth, Ya'uq, and Nasr. When these last strong holds of goodness and purity died lay weak people who were their followers continued to enjoin good and encourage others to do so by exemplifying them. For the younger generations who did not witness these people to remember them and emulate them statues of the above five were built and popularized. With time instead of remembering good through them the statues where glorified and slowly they rose in glorification until finally they were worshiped instead of God. Most people still knew about God but to them He was so far and not materialized enough for them to connect with and hence they settled for the materialistic idols as gods. Since then the materialistic part of the human nature dominated most of the time, struggles and atrocities increased, and spirituality became rudimentary. The need for continuous reminders of the Truth and the basic 3 Divine messages arose and hence Prophets of all races and ethnicities where sent from God to remind their fellow human-beings of the Original Good. The struggle continued worldwide and throughout time and until now.

However the need for a materialistic representative/substitute of God had corrupted human nature deeply and was the main technique used by Satin to drive people away from God until 2 centuries ago when another technique arose strongly to work on others who would not submit to a “god” in principle but was still based on materialism which is atheism. Atheism is but a detractor to keep people away from God for a few centuries. However it is deemed to fade away, along with its supporting evolution myth, when people adopt a true scientific approach to the issue. I will discuss that in a separate article in details if God wills.

The attitude of idol-worshiping is strongly supported by preventing the mind from thinking and contemplating, and is heavily rooted in following tradition or whatever one's ancestors did without putting any inherited tradition to intuitive criticism or critical testing. That mind blockage is the main cornerstone in the foundation and structure of Idol-worshiping and its continuity and survival amongst humans depends on the continuity and survival of mind blockage. Also throughout history simple logic, usage of mind and questioning of inherited corrupted tradition was the main argument used by Prophets and Messengers from God to guide people back to the Truth.

The deeply seated idol-worshiping attitude exists in the majority of Muslims and is encouraged by their Scholars. Is that true? How did that happen? Why is it supported by Scholars?

Yes it is unfortunately very true and exists at 2 main levels and forms.

One is more common amongst the less educated population who revere, to the extent of worship, the tombs of some scholars that exist in many Muslims countries especially in Misr (Egypt) and the Indian subcontinent. They visit those tombs to supplicate to the buried and ask them to help them in their problems. Yes they do not worship statues but they believe in supernatural powers and Divine like abilities of those dead.
Actually one of the main parameters used by the British Intelligence (MI5) to assess for the level of education and threat to the UK amongst the Middle Eastern countries is the number of visitors and “worshipers” to those tombs in the annual festivals held in Misr! The more the visitors and the greater the gatherings in those festivals the less the threat and vice versa as it is a strong indicative of how active are the truly educated leaders and what is the response to them amongst the laymen.
That practice is unfortunately encouraged by the authorities to keep the population in their deep sleep and letting them drown in their ignorance because if people become more educated and aware of the true facts of Islam they would then turn against them.
As to how did it happen it started out very similar to the above mentioned mechanism when idol-worshiping first started amongst humans. It continued to thrive through the willing submission of the human mind to inherited false beliefs and ideas.

The second level or form is the more dangerous and subtle one that exists more commonly amongst the educated population. This form did not develop randomly or spontaneously as the previous one. Two major techniques were exercised by religious authorities and hence developed by the rest of the population to achieve it throughout the past 13 centuries.
I will relate a true tragic story to demonstrate the 2 techniques and then I will discuss the form of idol-worship that they lead to.

In the year 204 Hijri the great Imam Shafi'iy was assassinated in Misr at the age of 54 by a group of Misrian (Egyptian) youth on his way back from Fajr prayers. Those youth were followers of Imam Malik and his school of thought and revered Imam Malik so much to the extent they thought that no one should think differently from him. They had been harassing Imam Shafi'iy and vandalizing his house and tearing it down and destroying his writings previously to try to intimidate him and stop him from spreading his school of thought. When he did not stop they killed him.
The 2 techniques used here are terrorism (mainly mind terrorism) and limitation of freedom.

Both techniques are totally against the basic, and very natural, Islamic teachings of peacefulness and freedom. However it is those 2 techniques that are used by both religious and political authorities in Muslim countries all the time against the population to oppress thinking and innovation. Even worse it the method by which parents raise their children and teachers deal with their students at school and in the university. The current corrupted universal way of terrorizing the mind and limiting the freedom is endemic in almost every Muslim household on the planet. Everyone has the right to think, contemplate and express themselves as long as they do not transgress on others.
I totally agree that not any layman can progress the religious sciences or issue rulings and that that has to be done by scholars. However the scholarly world in itself has locked up the mind and terrorized the younger generations of Scholars in addition to the average layman. With time every generation grew up to do the same with the following one. The end result is you end up with a stagnant atmosphere while the rest of the world progresses. Not only that, scholars are looking backwards to the wrong age in the Islamic civilization and returning to copying them without any constructive criticism to modify and improve. They are looking back to the early Golden Age of the Islamic Civilization (the age of the followers or Salaf) and literally copying their teachings and taking it as a standard guide line.
They somehow totally ignored the fact that those followers were in themselves innovative and modified and advanced the religious sciences to suite that age and time. They somehow totally ignored the spirit of that age which was to think, contemplate and innovate and settled for the literal copying of their teachings.
Instead of going back to the original teachings at the time of the Prophet, as pure and direct original source as it is, and work on thinking, contemplating and innovating to suite that to our age and time they settled to copying from one generation that had taken that initiative and were proactive to benefit their own age and time.

In the process of doing that they developed the 2 techniques described above of mind terrorism and limitation of freedom. They managed to develop the ever destructive form of idol-worshiping in the form of revering the Followers (salaf) and many other Scholarly figures to the extent that you can not criticize these people or think that they could be mistaken or their teachings could be suitable for one age but not another.

It is that form of idol-worshiping that has invaded every Muslim house and dominated. It is the persons rather than the ideas and concepts that are revered and idolized. It is the same pathway that was tread by the people of Wadd, Suwa', Yaghuth, Ya'uq, and Nasr. Same attitude and same concept. “Those people are way better than us, we should revere them, period.” Why were they better and how did they become better is totally ignored and lost.

You cannot criticize your father or older people in the family. You can not criticize religious figures, you can not criticize political figures. You can not criticize, period! Generation after generation that has become the theme of the Muslim world leading to the decline in all sciences and arts.
I am not saying that we should be rude. Not at all. On the contrary, as mentioned many times, good manners is one of the 3 main themes of Islam. However criticism can be done in a polite way which creates brain storming and blooming of new ideas and thoughts.

Most of us know that al-Hassan and al-Hussayn, the grandsons of the Prophet are the leaders of the Paradise Youth in the afterlife. Accordingly there is a lot to learn from their attitude and behavior. In 'Abqariet Aliy” (The Genious of Aliy) by Abbas al-Aqqad, he narrated a dialogue that occurred in the last few days of Imam Aliy Ibn-Abi-Talib between him and one of his sons. He demonstrated how he criticized (in a polite way) almost all his father's earlier decisions and actions in regards to the great division and the then ongoing civil war. It was an amazing dialogue in which each of them used a completely different logic to reason their different decisions. Wasn't al-Hassan aware that his father is the Imam Aliy, the almost most wise of all people of his time? Yes he was aware of that, but he was raised to think for himself and have his opinion and independent identity.

Civilization and advancement is not a single action.

Civilization is an attitude.

Once we lost that attitude we lost the means to form a civilization. Summing up Ahmad Y Hassan beautiful article about the causes of decline of the Islamic civilization we can define the following factors;
Political mismanagement after the early Caliphs (10th century onwards), closure of the gates of ijtihad (12th century), institutionalization of taqlid rather than bid'ah (13th century), foreign involvement by invading forces and colonial powers (11th century Crusades, 13th century Mongol Empire, 15th century Reconquista, 19th century European colonial empires), and the disruption to the cycle of equity based on Ibn Khaldun's famous model of Asabiyyah (the rise and fall of civilizations) which points to the decline being mainly due to political and economic factors.
Amongst these factors the ones that are from within and controlled by only us are the ones concerned with thinking, contemplating and innovation which is the attitude of Civilization.

Did the mind-terrorizing Scholars ever stop to think that if Imam Abu-Hanifa, the first of the 4 Imams had thought the way they do there would have never been schools of thought in the first place? Did the freedom-limiting Scholars ever stop to think that if any of the other 3 Imams had thought like they do they would have not dared start their own schools of thought especially Imam Shafi'iy who was a direct student of Imam Malik?
Did the mind-terrorizing and freedom-limiting Scholars ever stop to think that Imam Shafi'iy himself changed many of his own teachings based on geographical locations to suite the culture of not so much culturally different peoples when he moved from Iraq to Misr? Imagine the amount of modification and change needed if you live 12 centuries later and in a culture that even speaks a different language! (Lectures and slide presentations about the lives of the 4 Imams can be found here ).


This episode ends the analysis of the current version of Corrupted Islam. In the next episode, if God wills, we will discuss in general an outline of a strategy on how to counter this corruption and exit our current dark age.