I have to use language as it is available, even though frequently I bend it to my own purposes to express ideas from Qur'an and Hadith, as I need to.
Islamic ideas if you want to call them.
Therefore, when I say "usual religious stuff," it is heartbreaking, to have to say things like that. For, that is what the Muslims have done. They have turned Islam into a "religion," and the foundations of Islamic culture and practice like Salah into "rituals."
Religion is man made. And it is run by priests and pundits and Rabbis. Islam is from Allah and, in Islam, every man and woman is their own priest, as it were.
There is no professional priest or pundit or Mowlana class in Islam.
So yes, Islam is about Salah and Siyam and all else. But Islam is also about knowledge and science and research and discovery.
And Muslims have dropped the ball on things like science and research. And on things like counseling, therapy, medicine, lab work and all that, even though Islam was supposed to be about all of that, and it was supposed to be about much, much more about everything else that could possibly be related to every single aspect of life on earth.
A campaign that does not have those frontiers of human life on mind, does not start out by telling people to go get educated. It does not cry out from the rooftop on Day One: Iqra'!
Hey Everybody, go get the best education you can. No matter where you find it. Even if it is in China!
So, when you replace knowledge with idiocy, and replace truly enlightened, educated and scientifically competent and grounded leadership with idiots, this is how you end up. Beaten up by everybody everywhere on every excuse that anyone could think of.
And then this is how the world of Allah ends up, teetering on the brink of extinction as it were, facing a worldly Qiyamat of some kind, because no one saw this Coronavirus threat coming.
Certainly not Muslims, even though they should have been the ones to be in the forefront of it all, as scholars, researchers, scientists, doctors, pharmacists, field workers, and everything else.
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