jazakAllah khair…

1. What are the chances of a person changing religion?

2. Do people embedded in a religious society avidly defend their faith?

3. What can be concluded from the above two answers?

4. Are their smart people in all faiths?

5. Is there a chance of religious script being influenced by man to divert readers towards particular biases?

My opinionated answers:

1. 0.0001% means I’m pretty well born into my religion.

2. Absolutely. They were divinely chosen to be born in the perfect religion. How blessed.

3. When people defend their faith, they are actually defending their family, community and social structure (NOT GOD). They are to be considered treasonous should they not defend their allotted faith to the death.

4. Geniuses in every religion and sect. Yet they also stuck to their religion all of their lives too. One religion doesn’t seem to be more “blessed” than another in any measurable fasion for any considerable length of time. If it was to the contrary then all the smart people would migrate towards that particular religion. But, as I said, they are content with their native beliefs.

5. Yes. God wants us to come closer to Him. Yet, for some reason, he allows men to blow us off of that course. Only through genuine prayer (communication with God) and fasting (seperation from this world) can we sort through the genuinely divine messages and the influences of man.

Dhiyaa Al-Musawi’s words have great depth.

To believe this one must have been dangerously uncurious throughout the entire 20th century and be naive.

To begin with the 150 million or so violent war time deaths in the last 150 years have been due entirely to secular ideologies, nationalism and racial superiority and the politics of greed over resources, territory or influence, not due to religion as all.

WW2 60 million
WW1 30 million
Japanese in Manchuria 13 million
Stalin 12 million
British in Kenya 5 million to 10
Belgians in the congo 5 million (Belgian historians) 20 million independent historians

are the ones that come quickly to mind, in none of these conflicts did religion feature.

I see no need to be tolerant of a devil worshipers beliefs, or a white supremacist or even a follower of rugby league. But it is not my intolerance of them that leads to violence but other elemental issues.

Just because I am intolerant of those imbeciles who view aussie rules as a sport, does not mean I will make war on them.

As religious conflicts go they tend to produce only small numbers of highly spectacular deaths, because they are not funded or authored by nation states that are the only institutions in the worlds that can manage slaughter on an industrial scale

I think this says it all and is 100% accurate. It has 2 implications for me:

1. I cannot accept any religion as the truth.

2. Even if you don’t accept 1. it seems to me that everyone should treat a person’s choice of religion only as a sign of their parenthood. Hence tolerance makes sense.
‘

Any arguments you make in defense of people who have openly slandered muslims and non-muslims alike are well-defended when you say things like ’sufe goofee’…

by the way, I spent time at Madinah University, have friends amongst students and teachers there, and made a comment more particularly about some of the students who’ve gone through there. When I spoke with some of the teachers, they confessed to me that they themselves were terrified of some of the students, particularly from gang or ghetto backgrounds from the UK, who “passed through our school, learning nothing in four years of usool-ul-fiqh or respect for other opinions, but leaving just as they came in.” [What they said to me]

Shams, you exemplify that poor quality. Are you a graduate of ‘hard knocks’ UK street schools or of Madinah U?

I was watching this interview and when I saw this brother speak it made me think a lot bout the adab of some of these brothers in the video. I think its on point in so many ways and gives a hint to why so many brothers come back with a outright grim disposition of the world and the way they practice the deen. So here is a translation of the video.

Following are excerpts from an interview with Bahraini intellectual Dhiyaa Al-Musawi, which aired on Abu Dhabi TV on December 29, 2006.

Dhiyaa Al-Musawi: I do not believe in gallows of ideology. Our problem in the Arab world is that we have many gallows of ideology and of accusations of social betrayal, on which we try to hang an intellectual, a thinker, or a poet every day, just like in the case of Naguib Mahfouz and others. We, I’m sad to say, are against creativity and civilization, and against any language that seeks common ground in society.

[...]

We must have the courage to get rid of the “backward” cholesterol of ideology, accumulating in the arteries of Arab awareness and the Arab mind. We suffer from backwardness. This is not masochism – the kind psychologists talk about – acts of self-flagellation. This is the truth. We have not developed even to the point of admitting defeat. We [have to] admit our cultural defeat. In the past, we had a civilization in Andalusia and in many other places, but today we are regressing – we export violence, we terrorize whole countries, we threaten national security, and many other things.

[...]

We need to reform and to reshape religious thinking, because, in all honesty, the pulpits of our mosques have begun to “booby trap” the people.

Interviewer: In what way?

Dhiyaa Al-Musawi: They booby trap them by generating hatred towards “the other.” We have claimed a monopoly over Paradise, and each of us has recorded it in the land registry in his name.

Interviewer: But the pulpits are under government supervision.

Some of them are under government supervision, but in some Arab countries, although they are under government supervision, the government itself encourages the booby trapping. This problem has political reasons, but who pays the price? The country, society, civil society, and the young man, who is being told that the black-eyed virgins await him at the gates of Paradise, and that all he has to do is kill himself, to slaughter himself. He might blow up his family and children to get the virgins of Paradise. This is the language and culture of death. We were not born into this world in order to die this way. The beauty of Man lies in his living for the sake of his homeland, not in dying while booby trapping others.

[...]

In the Arab world, we have religious clerics who are beacons [of knowledge], but I think the problem is that we are constantly intimidating the public. We talk only about Hell, and not about Paradise at all. The Koran is balanced. It talks about the fire of Hell and the fruits of Paradise, but we constantly preach about the horrors of Judgment Day, saying that a bald Satan, or a bald serpent, would visit them in the grave. It is constant terror. It is always a dark picture. Why? That is the problem. Unfortunately, some young men – out of a wrong interpretation of religion… The moment he becomes religious, he ceases to smile and to greet others. He accuses some people of heresy and others of sin. He begins all that discourse. He hates music, and refuses to dress neatly. His mind is abducted into the dungeons of ideology, I’m sad to say.

Interviewer: Let me ask you a question. If a Shiite, or even a Sunni, becomes a religious cleric, yet he listens to music, can the Arab public possibly accept him?

Dhiyaa Al-Musawi: In my view, the Arab disposition suffers from many problems. We have destroyed many things, including the beauty of the general disposition. Music is a beautiful thing…

Interviewer: Do you listen to music?

Dhiyaa Al-Musawi: Yes, I listen to music. I listen to classical music, and I think Beethoven’s symphonies are very beautiful. They are among the masterpieces of human art. I believe that music develops the spirit of Man and humbles him. What is wrong with that?

[...]

Some of us say: “May Allah curse the Jews and the Christians, the offspring of apes and pigs.” Is this the language of progress? Is this the language of enlightenment and tolerance? If you had been born in Rome, you would have been Christian, if you had been born in Tehran, you would have been Shiite, and if you had been born in Saudi Arabia, you would have been Sunni, and so on. How wonderful it would be if all these people could gather in love around the table of humanity.

[...]

Nations that read more are the nations that are most respected, like the Western nations, where people read… When you travel to Switzerland, everywhere you go – on the bus or wherever – you see people reading books. Do you see such sights in the Arab world?

[...]

The problem of the Arab youth is that they do not read. As Gustave le Bon wrote in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, the Arab youth sometimes smile while they are taken to the slaughterhouse. Why? Because they lack awareness. We suffer from illiteracy. Today, the Arab world has, according to a U.N. report, close to 70 million illiterate adults – in other words, 70 million people whom you can booby trap, against their country and society, because they do not read.

Are you a soofe goofe or what? What’s your problem with Madeena Uni.