Auron ka hai Payaam aur, mera Payaam aur hai, / Ishq key dardmand ka tarz-e-kalaam aur hai! (Iqbal)
Islam considers truth to be the critical difference between Islam and non-Islam: Haqq. Islam is all about truth, not only in terms of finding it, but also in terms of using it as the means to salvation and success right here in this world as well as in the next world.
In Islam the path to Paradise is not paved with falsehoods and trickery. As a Muslim, you cannot lie and deceive to make the world believe the way you do and come to Allah, even if you had all sorts of guarantees from all kinds of experts that your lies and deceptions will work.
That is not how Islam works. Islam is truth – Haqq – and it only permits the most honest and honourable of means to be used in its service. How can it be otherwise when God himself is Truth – Haqq? Therefore, the farther you go from truth, the farther you get from God.
This is a lesson the Western culture and civilization, and their adherents and practitioners in the world, including many Christian thinkers and scholars, never learned. They often operated under the assumption that the ends somehow would justify the means.
MUSLIMS ARE ONE NATION
As we explained earlier when we were talking about the concept of Hijrat in Islam, Muslims are an Ummah – one nation under God. They are a composite nation that incorporates and shelters under its big tent all racial and ethnic differences. This nation then moulds and shapes them all into a single human family whose striving in this world is identical and whose destiny in the next world is also identical.
They are all truly of a body. They are all one single body whose parts are organically welded to one another. And Hijrat is the Islamic process that creates, fosters and nurtures this dynamic new unified identity of the Ummah.
Therefore, when Muslims set out on Hijrat, the new unknown lands and unchartered seas become their home and all they have from the familiar old landscape is their fading memories. The migrating Muslims thus plant themselves, body, soul and mind, in their Newfoundland and strike root. They become part and parcel of the new land and environment.
They intermarry and procreate and they produce children and form families that are part native and part immigrant and wholly bonded and welded together. What a beautiful vocabulary has emerged from this natural fusion of the locals with the incoming outsiders: Ansaar and Muhajirs.
Thus do the Muhajirs and Ansar together bring into this world a whole new breed of people, truly a breed apart. They spawn a whole new culture and civilization. And in the process they build a whole new world. A world and culture that are inclusive of all – immigrants as well as natives.
Thus, they eradicate that curse that has plagued this world forever: the curse of dividing people, places and objects into US and THEM and doing everything to build the US and denigrate and destroy the THEM.
But Muslims generally forgot this all-important lesson of history and of their Deen. They forgot that they were part of the process of Hijrah and not of Colonisation. As we explained earlier, these two concepts are diametrically opposed to each other.
And they have very different objectives and methodologies. And they produce very different consequences and outcomes, for themselves as well as for the native lands and peoples that they visit. Hijrat liberates, uplifts and elevates the locals. Colonisation, on the other hand, enslaves, dominates, denigrates, exploits and plunders the locals and their wealth and resources.
So, many of the Westward bound Muslims of the second half of the 20th Century forgot this important lesson Hijrat. Furthermore, some of them became so bewitched by the dazzle of their new home that it went to their head. They could barely handle the freedom and opportunity that greeted them, coming as many of them did from lands that generally lacked both.
While some of them went about doing Allah’s work in whatever form they could, some others got power-drunk, ran amuck and did pretty much what they wanted to do and how they wanted to do it without much regard for logic or rationality or for Islamic principles or practical imperatives.
This was pretty much the same thing that happened to them earlier on – several centuries ago. At that time, they gave the world education and themselves decided to lag behind. They lost the spirit of innovation and they lost their creativity. As a result, they also forgot that they were a unified nation, more united in their belief and behaviour than any other group of people on earth.
As a result, they quarrelled among themselves. They conspired against each other. And they betrayed and fought each other. Their life became an unending saga of internecine warfare, a generalized Muslim fratricide. They forgot that these were the very things Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, had warned them against.
In a word, they lost their Islamic character. And they lost all other qualities that truly make a winning and successful character in this world.
LOST CHARACTER LEADS TO SLAVERY AND BONDAGE
For the Muslims, with the loss of character – and of course education – came the loss of leadership in the world. In fact, leadership gave way to slavery and bondage: economic, military, political, and of every other kind. Non-Muslims from the East and the West then conquered, colonized, pillaged, plundered and enslaved them, often with help and connivance from their own so-called Muslim people, who betrayed and sold them out to their enemies for money, land, power or position.
This was not very different from the way things are happening in our own time – with the same results and consequences.
The downhill slide on the education front continued and got worse. Instead of acquiring all kinds of education even if it were in China, as Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, is reported to have ordered them to do, they sat around arguing and hair-splitting endlessly about what kind of education was Islamic and what kind was not.
I know, because I am a victim of that same abortive debate. I have personal and painful knowledge and memories of it.
As a result of all this, Muslim leadership passed in the hands of all kinds of tyrants and dictators, some hereditary and some temporary, who paid homage to their often foreign masters and duped and fooled Muslim masses using the sweet name of Islam as a Talisman, for which they often employed hordes of so-called Muslim scholars and preachers who were ready to do the bidding of the hand that fed them.
Ulama’ Soo’ – Mullahs for hire or scholars without conscience or character is a well-known concept of Islamic history. And they have been a bane of Muslim life, liberty and progress forever.
For the longest time, the mission and specialty of these Bad Ulama’ have been to deliver the Muslim masses, as well as the truly God-fearing and smart Islamic leaders and scholars, bound hand, foot and mouth to the princes, dictators and tyrants who greased their palms and conferred upon them land, power and honour.
And yet, in spite of all this, whenever the Muslim masses tried to get away, and whenever truly devoted, courageous, noble and wise leadership sprang new shoots among them, and appeared likely to liberate the Muslims and usher upon them a new era of personal, social and political liberty and economic self-determination and independence, their domestic masters, often with active assistance from their own foreign mentors and masters, crushed them ruthlessly and returned them to their yoke.
Examples are too numerous to count here. One such example is what happened to Muslims in Algeria who won the first round of elections fair and square in 1991 before the army stepped in and cancelled the election. Years of Muslim bloodbath and torture followed.
Muslims of Algeria are still paying the price in blood and money of that betrayal by the so-called Muslims in the Algerian army at the behest of their foreign masters and minders who never stop mouthing clichés about liberty and opportunity for all. But their profession of these noble – and in fact Islamic – ideals is a bald-faced lie when it comes to extending them to the Muslim peoples and societies of the world.
[Write to the author at Drsyedpasha@aol.com. Also visit www.IslamicSolutions.Com and Listen to Pasha Hour International.]