Pasha Hour International of Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Hashim Mohammed
This week's program focused mainly on the deplorable condition of the Muslims in the so-called Muslim world and their dictatorial leadership.
Muslims ran in the lizards’ holes mentioned in the Hadith by separating life into secular and religious whereas Islam came to end this artificial dichotomy by fusing the two together and creating a new world model where life is an integrated unit.
About 60 years ago, after European colonialism ended at least in form, two types of leadership were set up in the Arab and many Muslim countries: kings and dictators, many of them brutal to their own people, and religious leaders, many of them supportive of their regimes or not speaking out against the corrupt vested interest.
In the meantime, most Muslims lived under military or civilian dictatorship, suffered harsh conditions and settled for second-class or ghetto existence.
The religious leaders in the Muslim world also did not strive to lift their standard of scholarship resulting in generally sub-standard levels of speeches and writings. One example of this is the English translations of the Qur'an. Another is the lack of clarity of their thinking on Islam when they pushed such ideas as Islamization of knowledge, whereas knowledge itself is Islam.
Islam stands for full democracy with government of the people, by the people, and instead of for the people, as Abraham Lincoln put it, for the pleasure of Allah.
Attempts in the Muslim world to establish democracy, as in Egypt, have been resisted and fought resulting in the overthrow of legitimate democratically elected governments and the deaths of thousands of innocent people.
What happened to India and Pakistan is instructive. After independence in the middle of the 20th Century, India chose the Islamic approach of democracy, whereas Pakistan ended up living with the un-Islamic approach of military or civilian dictatorship. The result was a further breakup of the country of Pakistan creating Bangladesh.
What is important to note is that bodies can be enslaved while the minds can continue to be free, like Malcolm X of the United States for example.
But what happens when both the minds and bodies of a people are enslaved? And that is what seems to be happening to many Muslims around the world. There is widespread slavery of both body and mind in much of the Muslim world with the results that one can see everywhere.
It is sometimes hard to resist the sad and heartbreaking conclusion that much of what is so widely called the Middle East may be little more than a patchwork of ghettos and concentration camps of various levels of severity and brutality, with different degrees of foreign domination and control, even though some of the cages that hold the populations prisoner could be highly gilded and bejeweled.
One way out for Muslims may be to strive for highest standards in what they do – the best standards – in other words, the Islamic standards.
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