LAGI SOAL KEDUDUKAN HADIS/SUNNAH
DALAM PERUNDANGAN ISLAM
JAWAPAN KEDUA KEPADA NORDI ACHIE
Oleh: Kassim Ahmad
1 Ogos, 2006
Saya berasa senang sekali berbahas dengan penulis Sdr Nordi Achie, kerana nyata beliau seorang di antara sarjana-sarjana Islam kita yang berfikiran terbuka dan bersikap rasional apabila membahas soal-soal agama. (Lihat Al-Islam, keluaran Ogos, 2006; h. 74-82.) Jika kebanyakan sarjana Islam kita, termasuk ulama, terbuka dan rasional seperti beliau, banyak masalah umat Islam sekarang akan terungkai dengan mudah.
Ulasan beliau terhadap jawapan saya dalam Al-Islam keluaran Julai, 2006 panjang, membabitkan tidak kurang dari tujuh belas perkara, dan meliputi sembilan halaman majalah itu. Saya akan pilih tiga perkara yang saya anggap besar dan penting untuk saya jawab. Ketiga-tiga perkara ini telah pun saya huraikan dengan secukupnya dalam buku-buku saya, Hadis – Satu Penilaian Semula dan Hadis – Jawapan Kepada Pengkritik. Malangnya, buku pertama telah diharamkan oleh pihak berkuasa dan dengan demikian, suatu perbahasan saintifik dan rasional tidak dapat diadakan untuk membolehkan masyarakat mengetahui di mana letaknya kebenaran. Walaupun buku kedua tidak diharamkan, kedai-kedai buku kita tidak berani menjualnya, kerana mereka menganggap buku itu telah diharamkan!
Pengharaman buku sebagai cara untuk membasmi kepalsuan nyata kaedah yang silap. Cara kita membasmi kepalsuan ialah melalui kritikan sainifik terhadap idea-idea yang salah. Contoh Quran sangat baik. Quran menyanggah idea-idea yang salah, bukan dengan mengelak perbahasan, tetapi dengan menjatuhkan idea-idea salah itu dengan hujah-hujah saintifik dan rasional.
Tiga perkara penting yang saya pilih itu ialah (1) kedudukan Hadis/Sunnah dalam perundangan Islam, (2) kebebasan beragama, dan (3) prinsip hukuman dalam undang-undang Islam.
Kedudukan Hadis/Sunnah dalam Islam bukanlah seperti yang dirumuskan oleh Iman Shafi’e. Tidak ada sarjana Islam, malah tidak ada orang Islam, yang menafi bahawa mana-mana ajaran, sama hadis, ijmak atau qias, yang terang-terang bercanggah dengan ajaran Quran batal. Oleh yang demikian, seperti sepatutnya, kita mengiktiraf bahawa Quran itu sumber nombor satu; sumber-sumber lain terletak pada kedudukan kedua, tidak kira bagaimana kita tulis sumber-sumber lain itu.
Sdr Nordin salah faham tentang perkara pertama dalam soal ini. Kita harus bezakan antara laporan tentang sesuatu peristiwa dengan peristiwa itu sendiri. Kedua-duanya tidak sama. Hadis itu laporan, dan ia belum tentu betul atau palsu sehingga laporan itu memenuhi beberapa syarat. Di antara syaratnya ialah laporan itu disahkan oleh saksi-saksi lain, yakni kita tidak bergantung kepada dakwaan seorang individu. Umpamanya, tiap-tiap ayat Quran disahkan oleh dua orang saksi atau lebih. Inilah yang dikatakan mutawatir. Dalam kes hadis, kesahihan tidak ditentukan oleh kemutawatiran pelapor. Kebanyakan hadis yang didakwa sahih oleh Bukhari dan Muslim bertaraf ahad, yakni pelapornya seorang saja!
Salah satu syarat yang dikenakan oleh sarjana Hadis ialah keselarasanya dengan Quran. Saya bersetuju sekali dengan syarat ini. Malah inilah saja kaedah yang harus kita pakai sekarang, kerana semua orang yang terlibat dalam perkara ini sudah tiada. Saya telah melakukan satu kajian kecil tentang tajuk keselarasan atau tidaknya Hadis dengan Quran. Hasil kajian ini telah saya terbitkan dalam sebuah risalah Dilema Umat Islam – Antara Hadis dan Quran (Forum Iqra’, Ogos, 2002).
Dua kes percanggah di antara Hadis dan Quran ialah hukum murtad dan perzinaan. Nyata sekali hadis-hadis ini palsu, kerana mustahil Nabi Muhammad membuat sesuatu yang bercanggah dengan ajaran Quran. Kita tahu bahawa Bukhari mengumpul 600,000 hadis, dan dari 600,000 ini beliau menerima sebagai sahih 6,000 saja, yakni 1% saja! Ini membuktikan bahawa banyak sekali hadis telah direka oleh pelbagai kumpulan dan orang pada waktu itu untuk pelbagai tujuan, termasuk tujuan untuk menyelewengkan umat Islam dari ajaran Islam yang sebenar dengan menggunakan nama besar Nabi Muhammad!
Sdr Nordi bertanya apa bukti bahawa hadis-hadis ini diambil dari kitab Taurat. Buktinya tidak lain ialah kerana hukuman-hukuman ini terkandung dalam kitab Taurat dan bukan dalam Quran; malah Quran menafikannya!
Dalam Quran, kedua frasa “taatilah Allah dan taatilah rasul” dan “taatilah Allah” dipakai silih-berganti untuk makna yang sama, yakni taailah Tuhan dan berpeganglah kepada Quran. (Lihat Quran, 4: 146) Quran, walaupun wahyu Tuhan, disampaikan melalui rasul-Nya, Nabi Muhammad. Oleh itu, frasa “taatilah rasul” kadang-kadang disebut bersama.
Nabi Muhammad memegang dua peranan. Pertama, beliau nabi lagi rasul, yakni beliau menerima dan menyampaikan wahyu Tuhan, iaitu Quran. Kedua, beliau juga pemimpin masyarakat Arab pada waktu itu. Ia dinyatakan dalam frasa ulil-amr, yakni pihak berkuasa atau pemerintah. Dalam tugas inilah beliau menggubal Piagam Madinah yang masyhur itu. Tidak perlu ditegaskan lagi bahawa Piagam Madinah itu selaras dengan ajaran Quran.
Juga sebagai pemimpin, Nabi Muhammad boleh memberi pendapatnya tentang pelbagai perkara yang timbul pada waktu itu, termasuk menghurai dan mentafsir Quran. Namun demikian, ini bukan tugasnya yang utama. Seperti yang telah kita katakan, tugasnya yang untama ialah menyampaikan Quran kepada manusia. (Quran, 5: 99) Berhubung dengan pengajaran dan penghuraian Quran, Quran menerangkan bahawa tugas itu dipegang oleh Tuhan Sendiri, (Quran, 55: 1-2; 75: 16-19; 2: 242) termasuk juga mereka yang Tuhan pilih dari hamba-hamba-Nya (Quran, 35: 32) dan mereka yang asas ilmunya kukuh, tanpa menyebut golongan-golongan tertentu. (Quran, 3: 7)
Saya memetik kenyataan Prof. Ahmad Ibrahim tentang kedudukan ijmak dalam hal-hal kesahihan hadis dan juga keabsahan tafsir. Keunggulan kedudukan ijmak ini meyalahi kaedah saintifik, kerana semua ilmu berkembang dan ia perlu dikemaskini dan dikembangkan oleh tiap generasi. Jika ilmu dipaksakan untuk berhenti pada sesuatu titik sejarah, ilmu itu akan ketinggalan zaman dan masyarakat yang berpegang kepadanya pun akan ketinggalan zaman!
Perkara besar yang kedua ialah kebebasan yang mutlak yang diberi kepada kita oleh Tuhan untuk memilih agama. Hal ini dinyatakan dalam banyak ayat dan jelas sekali. Amatlah menasabah bagi Tuhan tidak memaksa sesiapa untuk menganut atau meninggalkan agama-Nya. Jika seseorang itu dipaksa, ia bermakna penganutan agama itu tidak ikhlas, dan penganut-penganut seperti itu (munafik namanya) tidak akan memperkuat agama itu. Malah pengatut-penganut seperti itu akan merosakkan agama itu, seperti dalam kes musuh-musuh Nabi yang menerima Islam pada peringkat akhir pada waktu Nabi dan pengikut-pengikitnya memasuki kota Mekah dan membebaskannya dari penguasaan kaum oligarki Quraisy yang kafir dan memusuhi Islam.
Sejarah membuktikan bahawa musuh-musuh Islam memerangi Islam bukan kerana prinsip kebebasan beragama ini, tetapi kerana Islam berdiri teguh atas kebenaran dan keadilan. Islam membela kaum yang tertindas dan yang berjuang untuk kebebasan. Inilah yang tidak disukai dan ditakuti oleh kaum penindas pada semua zaman, dan atas asas inilah Islam, Agama Allah dan Agama Kebenaran (dua nama lain bagi agama Islam yang digunakan dalam Quran), akan menang akhirnya.
Hukum bunuh terhadap si murtad yang tiada dalam Quran dan yang ada dalam Hadis nyatalah diambil dari kitab Taurat. Kita tidak tahu apakah hukuman dalam Taurat itu sahih atau palsu, kerana kitab Taurat yang wujud pada zaman kebangkitan Nabi Muhammad hingga sekarang telah pun dipinda.
Kita memang tidak suka jika ada orang-orang Islam, apalagi dari keluarga kita, yang meninggalkan agamanya dan kemudian memeluk agama lain. Tetapi lihatlah kes-kes anak Nabi Nuh, isteri Nabi Lut dan suami Raja Mesir Ramses II semuanya kafir dan memberontak terhadap Tuhan. Hukuman bagi orang kafir ialah Neraka di Akhirat, tetapi tidak ada hukuman di dunia, dan hukuman itu hanya boleh dijatuhkan oleh Tuhan, bukan manusia!
Akhir sekali, perkara hukuman. Dua prinsip hukuman dalm Islam ialah keadilan dan kerahiman. Pengertian keadilan berbeza dari zaman ke zaman dan dari masyarakat ke masyarakat. Terpulang kepada pihak berkuasa untuk menentukan hukuman ini, asalkan hukuman itu memenuhi kehendak prinsip-prinsip keadilan dan kerahiman.
Sebelum saya akhiri jawapan ini, bolehlah saya cuba menjawab pertanyaan Sdr Nordi mengapa Ima Shafi’e membuat doktrin bahawa orang-orang Islam juga wajib memegang kepada Hadis selain dari Quran. Kemungkinan besar, seperti yang dinyatakan oleh Sdr Nordi sendiri, beliau ingin menamatkan “kecelaruan” fikiran yang sedang berlaku dalam masyarakat Islam pada waktu itu. Ini kaedah mudah: “Tutup perbahasan. Terima diktat Hadis.” Tetapi lihatlah apa akibatnya! Akibatnya, percanggahan Hadis dengan Quran terus wujud hingga hari ini, menyebabkan faham kepuakan terus kekal dan masalah tidak selesai. Kaedah yang betul ialah dengan mengadakan kritikan saintifik terhadap Hadis. Saya percaya perkara ini terus berlaku dan kebenaran akan muncul akhirnya. Islam akan menang, tetapi bukan “Islam” seperti yang ditafsirkan dalam kitab-kitab ulama. Islam yang akan menang ialah Islam, seperti yang terkandung dalam Quran, yang dibawa oleh para nabi dan rasul dari awal hingga kepada Nabi Muhammad, penutup segala nabi – agama Allah dan agama kebenaran! Agama inilah yang telah dijaminkan oleh Tuhan akan mengatasi agama-agama lain yang palsu. (Lihat Quran, 48: 28; 9:33; 61: 9 dan 110: 2)
Kassim Ahmad seorang penulis bebas yang tinggal di Pulau Pinang. Beliau boleh dihubungi di alamat: kasmad172@yahoo.com.my. Laman web beliau ialah www.kassimahmad.blogspot.com
Sunday, July 30, 2006
Monday, July 17, 2006
“FALSE ULAMA VERSUS SECULARISTS”
AN EXTENDED COMMENTARY
By Kassim Ahmad
6 July, 2006
Although the word ‘ulama’ occurs in the Quran, the word means what it was desired to mean – “scholars”. However, the word in its plural form today has come to mean something different, i.e. a class of clerics who has authority to speak on religious matters and who are accepted by the majority of society as such. Such a class of religious people did not originate in the early Muslim society of Prophet Muhammad’s time. The Prophet and his companions were never known as such. The Prophet was their leader in both secular and religious matters. There was in fact no division between the two spheres of life, both existing in perfect harmony and unity.
This division came much later, as a result of Muslim interaction with the Christian and Jewish communities as well as internal developments within the Muslim community. The Christians and the Jewish communities had their own priesthoods and the young Muslim community took over this practice, although their religion clearly forbade them from doing so. The internal developments they were going through at this time – the emergence of a powerful financial and feudal power elite around the Muawiyah familiy – broke the democratic republican tradition of governance begun by Prophet Muhammad right to the fourth Caliph Ali, ending what has come to be known as the Righteous Caliphate. That led to a new feudalism, fracturing the Community into two distinct though inter-related powers, the secular and the religious. This pattern continue until today, even though the Caliphate was dismantled by the revolutionary Turkish nationalist leader, Mustafa Kamal Attaturk, after the First World War. Attempts by the religious elite to take over state power completely in Muslim countries succeeded only in Iran in 1997 with the so-called Iranian Islamic Revolution.
Europe, after the 30 Year-long Religious War that ended with the landmark Treaty of Westphalia (24 October, 1648), and having gone through what is known as the Enlightenment – the triumph of reason and science over religion – has taken the road of completely relegating religion to a personal sphere and rendering man’s life to be completely secular. Thus the spiritual and the moral sides of man have been pushed to the sideline of his being, and he became the animal par excellence, the predator.
The IKIM writer of the Tuesday column (The Star, 4 July, p. 30), Md. Asham Ahmad, referred to this development when he said, “It is a phenomenon we may call natural to the West considering the long bitter experience that they have had with the church, leading ultimately to the marginalization of religion and secularization of the philosophical programme.”
This early and fatal turning of the Western road explains much of Western history: economic and political philosophy based on private greed; the eastward and the westward push of European colonialism; the World Wars resulting from the clash of competing colonialisms; the foisting of the colonial-settler state of Israel in the midst of the Muslim-Arab world; and now the so-called worldwide War on Terrorism camouflaging as a new Crusade against Islam and bent on hegemony and domination. It is a self-destructive course, but who except God, can divert these American-led criminal gangs of power-crazy fascists, brandishing weapons of mass destruction, launching wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq and would ever be ready to launch them at whoever they choose as their enemy, and bringing chaos and destruction upon themselves and the world?
The Muslims, on the other hand, went into reverse gear. Instead of progressing up the ladder of success (Arabic ‘falah’ meaning ‘to succeed’) where they had assimilated and carried forward world existing science, philosophy and culture (Greek, Indian, Persian and Chinese), which Europe now took over, they developed a “self-sufficient” theology and jurisprudence, not excluding the retreat into quietist “spiritualist” refuge of Sufism, to keep the Community “united, happy, complacent and self-righteous”. This Community became formed around the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries and it stayed there in cold storage until the beginning of the Nineteenth Century when it had to deal seriously and as a matter-of-life-and-death practice with the West. At this point, the problems begin: the orthodox stances of anti-Orientalism, anti-secularism, anti-modernism, anti-Liberalism, and the elevation of the Ulama (i.e. the priesthood) into position of power and influence as “Guardians of the Faith”.
The ideological weapon (“The ulama are the heirs of the prophets.”), a so-called prophetic saying, is brought into full, strident aggressive display. I have termed it “so-called” as a matter of scientific accuracy, not to denigrate it. One of the great tragedies of the Muslim community is that its members read their Quran in Arabic (which is not the mother-tongue for most) without understanding its meaning. Their religious educational system puts the learning of the Hadith as more important than the understanding of the teachings of the Quran. So, in the case of this so-called hadith, as in the case of very many hadith that contradict the teachings of the Quran, they are quite unaware of. The clear Quranic teaching on this matter of Quranic inheritance is that it is being handed over to those of God’s servants whom He chooses (note that God does not even use the word ‘believers’, implying that God’s choice may not square up with our idea of people who should inherit the Quran). (See Quran, 35: 32:) It is clear from this verse that no particular group of people, including the ulama, has been appointed by God to inherit and carry forward His message to the world.
When the Quran states that it is the learned who truly fears God, it is pointing to the fact, because these learned people truly know the comprehensive and awesome power of God by their studies of the planets and of nature.
There seems to be a misunderstanding among many of us, believers in various religions, as to who should protect God’s religion, minding that every religious group claims that theirs is the true religion. In the first place, such people must be quite presumptuous to think that they have been given the task of protecting God’s truth, for God’s religion is surely God’s Truth. No, there is no such task assigned to men in the Quran. The highest task given to him is to struggle, body and soul, in the course of God, i.e. in the course of truth, justice and goodness. (See Quran, 9: 111). No one is entrusted with the protection of God’s religion, as no one except He can do it. So it is the height of folly and presumption for Md. Asham Ahmad to claim in that article that “Without the ulama, who inherited the teachings of the Prophet and who preserved those teachings and then conveyed them to the rest of mankind and who protected these teachings from alteration, corruption and false interpretations, there would be no Islam.” It is surely truer to say that had it not been for God’s miraculous intervention in the case of the Quran, Islam would have been completely corrupted by men, including their ulama! It has happened before with Christianity and Judaism, and, by extension, in all religions. The saving grace of Islam is its-divinely protected Quran.
True believers, whether Muslims or non-Muslims, should rest assured that God’s truth, including God’s religion (which I have designated in another location as the “Islam of the Prophets”, to distinguish it from the “Islam of the Theologians”) will triumph in the end. I believe that time is not far off. I can say that it is almost here.
However, we bear God’s trust as being His vicegerent on Earth, the earth meaning the entire Universe. What does this vicegerent role actually mean? Looking at men’s past history as well at the words of the Quran on the matter, it means men’s freely re-making and re-ordering it in accordance to God’s law of a truthful and lawful Universe, to be the lasting Abode of Felicity or Paradise for God’s righteous servants, and the temporary Abode of Hell – temporary for the cleansing up process – for the sinners.
What a grand finale! God be praised, then, in the Heavens and on Earth!
__________________________________________
Kassim Ahmad is a Malaysian free-lance writer, based in Penang. He can be contacted at kasmad172@yahoo.com.my. His website is at www.kassimahmad.blogspot.com
AN EXTENDED COMMENTARY
By Kassim Ahmad
6 July, 2006
Although the word ‘ulama’ occurs in the Quran, the word means what it was desired to mean – “scholars”. However, the word in its plural form today has come to mean something different, i.e. a class of clerics who has authority to speak on religious matters and who are accepted by the majority of society as such. Such a class of religious people did not originate in the early Muslim society of Prophet Muhammad’s time. The Prophet and his companions were never known as such. The Prophet was their leader in both secular and religious matters. There was in fact no division between the two spheres of life, both existing in perfect harmony and unity.
This division came much later, as a result of Muslim interaction with the Christian and Jewish communities as well as internal developments within the Muslim community. The Christians and the Jewish communities had their own priesthoods and the young Muslim community took over this practice, although their religion clearly forbade them from doing so. The internal developments they were going through at this time – the emergence of a powerful financial and feudal power elite around the Muawiyah familiy – broke the democratic republican tradition of governance begun by Prophet Muhammad right to the fourth Caliph Ali, ending what has come to be known as the Righteous Caliphate. That led to a new feudalism, fracturing the Community into two distinct though inter-related powers, the secular and the religious. This pattern continue until today, even though the Caliphate was dismantled by the revolutionary Turkish nationalist leader, Mustafa Kamal Attaturk, after the First World War. Attempts by the religious elite to take over state power completely in Muslim countries succeeded only in Iran in 1997 with the so-called Iranian Islamic Revolution.
Europe, after the 30 Year-long Religious War that ended with the landmark Treaty of Westphalia (24 October, 1648), and having gone through what is known as the Enlightenment – the triumph of reason and science over religion – has taken the road of completely relegating religion to a personal sphere and rendering man’s life to be completely secular. Thus the spiritual and the moral sides of man have been pushed to the sideline of his being, and he became the animal par excellence, the predator.
The IKIM writer of the Tuesday column (The Star, 4 July, p. 30), Md. Asham Ahmad, referred to this development when he said, “It is a phenomenon we may call natural to the West considering the long bitter experience that they have had with the church, leading ultimately to the marginalization of religion and secularization of the philosophical programme.”
This early and fatal turning of the Western road explains much of Western history: economic and political philosophy based on private greed; the eastward and the westward push of European colonialism; the World Wars resulting from the clash of competing colonialisms; the foisting of the colonial-settler state of Israel in the midst of the Muslim-Arab world; and now the so-called worldwide War on Terrorism camouflaging as a new Crusade against Islam and bent on hegemony and domination. It is a self-destructive course, but who except God, can divert these American-led criminal gangs of power-crazy fascists, brandishing weapons of mass destruction, launching wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq and would ever be ready to launch them at whoever they choose as their enemy, and bringing chaos and destruction upon themselves and the world?
The Muslims, on the other hand, went into reverse gear. Instead of progressing up the ladder of success (Arabic ‘falah’ meaning ‘to succeed’) where they had assimilated and carried forward world existing science, philosophy and culture (Greek, Indian, Persian and Chinese), which Europe now took over, they developed a “self-sufficient” theology and jurisprudence, not excluding the retreat into quietist “spiritualist” refuge of Sufism, to keep the Community “united, happy, complacent and self-righteous”. This Community became formed around the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries and it stayed there in cold storage until the beginning of the Nineteenth Century when it had to deal seriously and as a matter-of-life-and-death practice with the West. At this point, the problems begin: the orthodox stances of anti-Orientalism, anti-secularism, anti-modernism, anti-Liberalism, and the elevation of the Ulama (i.e. the priesthood) into position of power and influence as “Guardians of the Faith”.
The ideological weapon (“The ulama are the heirs of the prophets.”), a so-called prophetic saying, is brought into full, strident aggressive display. I have termed it “so-called” as a matter of scientific accuracy, not to denigrate it. One of the great tragedies of the Muslim community is that its members read their Quran in Arabic (which is not the mother-tongue for most) without understanding its meaning. Their religious educational system puts the learning of the Hadith as more important than the understanding of the teachings of the Quran. So, in the case of this so-called hadith, as in the case of very many hadith that contradict the teachings of the Quran, they are quite unaware of. The clear Quranic teaching on this matter of Quranic inheritance is that it is being handed over to those of God’s servants whom He chooses (note that God does not even use the word ‘believers’, implying that God’s choice may not square up with our idea of people who should inherit the Quran). (See Quran, 35: 32:) It is clear from this verse that no particular group of people, including the ulama, has been appointed by God to inherit and carry forward His message to the world.
When the Quran states that it is the learned who truly fears God, it is pointing to the fact, because these learned people truly know the comprehensive and awesome power of God by their studies of the planets and of nature.
There seems to be a misunderstanding among many of us, believers in various religions, as to who should protect God’s religion, minding that every religious group claims that theirs is the true religion. In the first place, such people must be quite presumptuous to think that they have been given the task of protecting God’s truth, for God’s religion is surely God’s Truth. No, there is no such task assigned to men in the Quran. The highest task given to him is to struggle, body and soul, in the course of God, i.e. in the course of truth, justice and goodness. (See Quran, 9: 111). No one is entrusted with the protection of God’s religion, as no one except He can do it. So it is the height of folly and presumption for Md. Asham Ahmad to claim in that article that “Without the ulama, who inherited the teachings of the Prophet and who preserved those teachings and then conveyed them to the rest of mankind and who protected these teachings from alteration, corruption and false interpretations, there would be no Islam.” It is surely truer to say that had it not been for God’s miraculous intervention in the case of the Quran, Islam would have been completely corrupted by men, including their ulama! It has happened before with Christianity and Judaism, and, by extension, in all religions. The saving grace of Islam is its-divinely protected Quran.
True believers, whether Muslims or non-Muslims, should rest assured that God’s truth, including God’s religion (which I have designated in another location as the “Islam of the Prophets”, to distinguish it from the “Islam of the Theologians”) will triumph in the end. I believe that time is not far off. I can say that it is almost here.
However, we bear God’s trust as being His vicegerent on Earth, the earth meaning the entire Universe. What does this vicegerent role actually mean? Looking at men’s past history as well at the words of the Quran on the matter, it means men’s freely re-making and re-ordering it in accordance to God’s law of a truthful and lawful Universe, to be the lasting Abode of Felicity or Paradise for God’s righteous servants, and the temporary Abode of Hell – temporary for the cleansing up process – for the sinners.
What a grand finale! God be praised, then, in the Heavens and on Earth!
__________________________________________
Kassim Ahmad is a Malaysian free-lance writer, based in Penang. He can be contacted at kasmad172@yahoo.com.my. His website is at www.kassimahmad.blogspot.com
Monday, July 10, 2006
“FALSE ULAMA VERSUS SECULARISTS”
A COMMENT
By: Kassim Ahmad
3 July, 2006.
Allow me to comment on IKIM’s Md. Asham Ahmad’s above article in your Tuesday column (See The Star, 4 July, p. 30).
For the Muslim community today, there seems to be an intractable problem with both the ulama and the secularists. Is this a real problem, or is it some misunderstanding?
No Muslim denies the necessity for the existence of an intellectual group called scholars, including religious scholars, in society. The role of these scholars is to study, teach and develop the branches of knowledge they are interested in. Being humans, however, they are not free from making errors in their work. How does human society remove these errors? It is through free scientific debates. This much is clear and accepted by every reasonable person.
What is not acceptable is Md. Asham’s statement that “The ulama must be allowed to decide”, because otherwise, according to him, “The ignorant will decide.” Now, according to Islamic principles, those who decide are those whom society puts in position of authority. (See Quran, 4: 59). A scholar cannot be in position of state authority (with power to decide) unless he is put there by the society. The problem is that there have been times in history when a religious class put itself up as state-governing power, presuming to govern in God’s name – a theocracy, as the Muslims now have in Iran, since the so-called Islamic Revolution in 1979. This is in direct contravention to true Islamic teachings, as there is no priesthood in Islam.
Those who reject mortality and religion – the true secularists – have no right to talk about any moral government. But there are those who believe in God and in morality, but who wish to separate religion (in the narrow sense) from politics. These are not secularists, because they believe in God and in morality. They wish the separation from a practical point of view. Md. Asham Ahmad would probably know that both the Quran and Prophet Muhammad’s famous Medina Charter provide for this separation. (See Quran, 22: 67)
There is no need for us to go into abstruse arguments about religion, truth and the verification of truth.
We probably also would not want to be so pompous as to legislate as to who should or should not talk about religion, “for fear of confusing the masses” (as if the scholars are free from confusion!), because of “confusion and error in knowledge”. Let error be corrected by knowledge in free scientific debate where everyone can participate, and not pontificated by some pope, grand mufti or grand ayatollah.
Kassim Ahmad is a Malaysian free-lance writer, based in Penang. He can be contacted at kasmad172@yahoo.com.my His website is at www.kassimahmadblogspot.com
A COMMENT
By: Kassim Ahmad
3 July, 2006.
Allow me to comment on IKIM’s Md. Asham Ahmad’s above article in your Tuesday column (See The Star, 4 July, p. 30).
For the Muslim community today, there seems to be an intractable problem with both the ulama and the secularists. Is this a real problem, or is it some misunderstanding?
No Muslim denies the necessity for the existence of an intellectual group called scholars, including religious scholars, in society. The role of these scholars is to study, teach and develop the branches of knowledge they are interested in. Being humans, however, they are not free from making errors in their work. How does human society remove these errors? It is through free scientific debates. This much is clear and accepted by every reasonable person.
What is not acceptable is Md. Asham’s statement that “The ulama must be allowed to decide”, because otherwise, according to him, “The ignorant will decide.” Now, according to Islamic principles, those who decide are those whom society puts in position of authority. (See Quran, 4: 59). A scholar cannot be in position of state authority (with power to decide) unless he is put there by the society. The problem is that there have been times in history when a religious class put itself up as state-governing power, presuming to govern in God’s name – a theocracy, as the Muslims now have in Iran, since the so-called Islamic Revolution in 1979. This is in direct contravention to true Islamic teachings, as there is no priesthood in Islam.
Those who reject mortality and religion – the true secularists – have no right to talk about any moral government. But there are those who believe in God and in morality, but who wish to separate religion (in the narrow sense) from politics. These are not secularists, because they believe in God and in morality. They wish the separation from a practical point of view. Md. Asham Ahmad would probably know that both the Quran and Prophet Muhammad’s famous Medina Charter provide for this separation. (See Quran, 22: 67)
There is no need for us to go into abstruse arguments about religion, truth and the verification of truth.
We probably also would not want to be so pompous as to legislate as to who should or should not talk about religion, “for fear of confusing the masses” (as if the scholars are free from confusion!), because of “confusion and error in knowledge”. Let error be corrected by knowledge in free scientific debate where everyone can participate, and not pontificated by some pope, grand mufti or grand ayatollah.
Kassim Ahmad is a Malaysian free-lance writer, based in Penang. He can be contacted at kasmad172@yahoo.com.my His website is at www.kassimahmadblogspot.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)