Mullahs and Heretics
My Response:
After going through the article I had a feeling the writer was some distant relative of Nadeem F Paracha (a writer from Dawn Newspapers)…the likes of whom criticize and question the basic tenets of religion specifically Islam without any formal knowledge or in-depth study of it.
If I were to sum up the article in three points it would be the following:
1- Mullahs and Heretics have a history to date where the former has always suppressed the latter and furthermore mullahs are not a very impressive lot in muslim population.
2- “Islam” is the basis of a political movement started by the prophet(pbuh) and Quran was not the word of God but merely a creation of the prophet(pbuh)
3- Logic and critical thinking should dominate all affairs and be accepted as the ultimate criteria for analyzing the truth (i.e if sumthing can’t be proved logically it is false)
My views on each point:
1: Unfortunately nowadays people tend to judge everything (Celebrities, Politicians, Religion) by face value and the face of Islam have become the corrupt, hardliner Mullahs / Maulvis. According to me judging by face value is a sign of racist mentality, because this is exactly what racists do. They look at a stereotype and at once assume it to be an ultimate and a wholesome representative of a community without bothering to probe further into their subjects.
Once I googled websites created by Christians themselves that disclosed immoral acts of their own priests by names. Now does that make every priest immoral ?….NO…We have to understand (for the millionth time) that there are black sheep in every community.
If you truly want to learn about Islam at face then please refer to learned Scholars and Sheikhs like Ahmed Deedat, Dr Zakir Naik, Hamza Yusuf and the list goes on. Don’t insult your intelligence by falling for the corrupt Mullahs. There is a plethora of truly learned and educated Islamic scholars that are available online (use technology ..forget Qari sahib)
2: Over here the writer took one aspect of the prophet’s life and built his case on it. Alas he fails to see that Islam is not merely a political movement but a way of life (Deen). It does not only teach how to play politics fairly but a lot more. It is the only religion that not only teaches morality but the way to establish morality itself.
The writer claims to believe that Quran is not the word of God and in fact seems to admire heretics who [“questioned the Revelation, rejected predestination, insisted that the Koran was a created and not a revealed book, and criticised the quality of its composition, its lack of eloquence and the impurity of its language. Only Reason dictated obligation to God.”]. In fact he went as far as historically citing that the Quran was compiled thirty yeas after the prophet’s death hence its authenticity is questionable (OMG).
There are billions of people who believe it to be the word of God and it’s the only book which has not been changed over the years or even over different regions. If you take a copy of Quran from another time and compare it with a current copy they will be IDENTICAL. Even if you take copies of the Quran from different regions and then compare they will still be IDENTICAL. It’s promised by Allah (SW) in the Quran that the Lord himself has taken responsibility to preserve its content and therefore it is preserved …..such perfection only comes from the true God. And if still one wants to believe that the Quran is the creation of the Prophet(pbuh), then how does one explain established scientific facts quoted in the Quran which could definitely not be known by the people at the time of its revelation.
I find this so objectionable that such self-proclaimed pseudo intellects and cynics criticize a book without reading it (so affects their credibility). They speak of criticism and reason and yet not a single reason from the Quran itself has been given by the writer as to why he thinks it is not the word of God. He practically summarized the entire religious history (by the ways the article was a drag, especially for people who don’t like history) and not a verse from the Quran which he finds flaw in.
3: There’s only one person that comes to my mind at this point…. “Edward De Bono”. This gentle man is a Jew, a leading authority in the field of creative thinking and thinking techniques. His methods are used world-over in schools and in leading corporations such as IBM, Microsoft, Nokia , Siemens ….and where not.
He has actually pointed out the flaws of logical thinking or rather the argumentative mode of probing a subject and considers it primitive but not obsolete. Mr De bono has proposed techniques for parallel and lateral thinking and according to him the modern way of thinking should be a combination of the logical and parallel.
There are many flaws that he points out with logical thinking in his books I however will only speak of one which is that logic can be applied in a single paradigm at a time therefore a logic that works in one situation might fail in another.
The parallel thinking has more to do with probing a subject completely from all aspects and instead of going sequentially as in logic where the beginning point is considered to be the truth….in this method we stay at the beginning and don’t move on until we have all the information on the subject and we are certain it is the truth. Only then we move on logically.
I’ve noticed from the various interviews of converts that before converting they actually use the parallel mode of thinking where they probe into different religions in search of the truth.
I can go on and on about these thinking techniques but I don’t want to start a lecture here.
In the end all I’d like to say is that please update your knowledge and seek the truth. Don’t just criticize for the sake of it….this method is now outdated. Try to probe into the subject, the reality and then use as much logic as you want to put your point across.
Also I recommend that people read Edward De Bono he’s a great thinker and his books are very enlightening.
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