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Today's Reminder

March 28, 2024 | Ramadan 18, 1445

Living The Quran

Own Volition
Al-Baqara (The Cow) Sura 2: Verse 256

"There is no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from Error: whoever rejects evil and believes in God has grasped the most trustworthy handhold, that never breaks, for God is All-hearing, All-knowing."

The word for religion, and Islam's own self-description, is deen. Deen is a way of knowing, being and doing, a way of life. What is more, this way of living, based on God consciousness, brings God near to us, it illuminates our lives.

Muslims frequently say that religion, their deen, is a total way of life. What this means is that just as belief in God is a free, informed choice, so the consequence of belief is about making choices about seeking what is best for oneself, one's family, for society, for the whole of humanity and the world, in all aspects and actions of daily life. And part of living one's deen, since we cannot live in splendid isolation, is seeking out and working for the free, willing collaboration of other people in the project of making the world the best possible place we can. A reflection of this is that the Arabic word for city, the concentration of human cohabitation, is medina, from the root deen. It was the new name given to Yathrib after Prophet Muhammad migrated there from Mecca and began to organise the new religion.

Community organised by consent of the governed follows from the proposition of religion as a way of life embraced by the consent of free will. The distinctions that illuminate how to live are the values and principles revealed by God for human betterment, which we accept as a consequence of faith. In opting for the light we willingly commit ourselves to working for justice and equity, and put ourselves on the right path.

The word used in this passage for evil is quite interesting: al-taghut. The evil ones are those who exceed their legitimate limits, and arrogate powers, wealth and lordship that do not belong to them—leading to arrogance and worship of other things besides God. Evil is interfering with, distorting and turning to the wrong ends, the free choices of free individuals. There is little point in saying we have free will if we are not free to exercise the option to abide by the constraints of moral and ethical behaviour of our own volition. And of our own volition it is necessary to turn away from the excesses of intoxication with worldly wealth and power, from arrogance and indulgence, from naked consumerism, especially that which squanders, wastes and despoils the human spirit and the world in which we live. That is the light that leads us away from the darkness of ignorance and unconsidered, short-sighted judgements.

Compiled From:
"Reading the Qur'an: The Contemporary Relevance of the Sacred Text of Islam" - Ziauddin Sardar, pp. 180, 181

From Issue: 994 [Read original issue]

Understanding The Prophet's Life

False Accusation

False accusation of innocent people is a crime, the real cause of which is ill-feeling and hatred. Since it is extremely effective in mutilating the realities and to condemn the innocent persons, Islam has declared it to be the worst kind of falsehood.

Aisha, may Allah be pleased with her, narrates that the Prophet, peace be upon him, asked his companions, "Do you know what is the worst aggression?" They said, "Allah and His messenger know better." He said, "Before Allah the worst aggression is to make Halal (permissible) for oneself the honour of another Muslim."

For those guilty of falsely accusing any person, Islam has decreed punishment in this world also, and it is difficult to imagine the punishment in the next world. The Messenger of Allah said, "He who, in order to find fault, says something about a person that was not there, Allah will throw such a person in hell till he tastes fully what he had fabricated." (Tibrani)

The Prophet also said, "He who has harmed his brother's rights or has hurt his honour, then he should please him today, before the day comes when there will be neither dirham nor dinar with him." (Bukhari)

Compiled From:
"Muslim's Character" - Muhammad Al-Ghazali, pp. 155-158.

From Issue: 576 [Read original issue]

Blindspot!

The Divine and the Human

Muslim countries need to set aside the pointless, counterproductive, and empty quarrel over the conflict between secularization and Islam and/or Islamism (which masks important issues by reducing to so-called essentials the relations between religion and state, glossing dangerously over the substantial variances in historical experience that separate the two civilizations); far from these warped controversies, Muslim countries must give serious and sustained consideration to the relationship of Islam to authority in its many forms. From the outset, Muslim scholars in their work of interpretation distinguished between divine authority on the one hand, as expressed in the texts bearing upon the credo (aqida), worship (ibadat), and religious duties and prohibitions (wajibat, muharramat), and human authority on the other hand, which, in social affairs (muamalat) must manage the primary sphere of the permitted through consultation (shura) and a majority decision-making process. The distinction between the two levels of authority is absolutely not foreign to Islam; it is, in fact, an essential teaching in a religion that has neither a clergy nor a religious hierarchy. These legal stipulations can be found in the works of the founders of Islamic legal philosophy (usul al-fiqh: the fundamentals of Islamic law and jurisprudence), figures like Jafar as-Sadiq or ash-Shafii, in both the Sunni and Shiite traditions.

The history of Islam and of its cultural and social references demonstrates that rationality, criticism, recognition of the status of the individual, and of social and political dissent (up to and including the legitimate challenge of particular dynasties, despots, or religious castes) are an integral part of Islamic civilization. The principled position of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), whose Decisive Treatise criticizes state authoritarianism, is not at all remote from the stance of his predecessors, the Muslim scholars of the dominant Islamic legal tradition, who rejected any attempt by the state to impose any particular school of jurisprudence. Malik ibn Anas (711-795), who in the name of jurisprudential pluralism stood steadfast against the efforts of Caliph al-Mansur (714-775) to declare his work, al-Muwatta, as the state’s sole legal standard, or Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855), who resisted attempts by the state to impose a single doctrine on the createdness or uncreatedness of the Quran, stand out as examples.

How curious, and disturbing that in the West only Ibn Rushd’s position is credited (undoubtedly because of its philosophical proximity to Locke’s Letter concerning Toleration) to the detriment of scholars who, despite their courageous struggles and stands, have gone unrecognized as thinkers and intellectuals. Even more disturbing, in Muslim majority societies, Muslims themselves accept what amounts to a reductive and biased reading of the history of Islamic thought. This is no small matter: it locates outside the purview of religion the distancing of oneself from the state, criticizing it and opposing its despotic character (politically, doctrinally, legally, and religiously)—in keeping with a very “Western” way of what a secular “thinker” or “philosopher” should be. In so doing, it overlooks the critical rationality and political independence of Muslim scholars like Malik ibn Anas and Ahmad ibn Hanbal, whose courage cost them years of imprisonment (though, historically, they were far from the only ones). They are seen as too “religious” to be recognized as having early drawn a distinction between the two authorities, divine and human, doing so not only as Muslim scholars but also as legal philosophers, according to the categories of the Western social sciences.

Muslims must reconcile themselves with this aspect of their history; they must study it anew instead of either ignoring their own past and their own being, or seeing themselves through the prism of the West’s reductive view of Islam, its values and its multiplicity of tradition. It is time to rediscover how the two powers—the divine and the human—are articulated, but also to relearn the ways of relating to knowledge, and to the independence of rationality and science.

Compiled From:
"Islam and the Arab Awakening" - Tariq Ramadan, pp. 79-83

From Issue: 879 [Read original issue]