THE MISTAKES THAT
MAN MAKES, BUT HE IS FREE
TO RETURN TO THE
RIGHT PATH
By: Kassim Ahmad
4th April, 2016
Revised and expanded on 6th April, 2016
At times I wonder whether man is a tragedy
or not. Considering the mistakes, big and small, that he makes against all odds, one loses
faith in the human being. No wonder when God informed the angels that He was
going to create man, the angels protested. They averred that he was going to
cause destruction and shed blood. Except that God replied to the protestation
of the angels that He knew better. God, being All-Knowing, knew the good side
of man. (See Quran, 2: 30)
One million years of man’s history on earth has vindicated
God’s optimism of man. He was not only a warlike and a warring creature; he was
also a builder of civilizations. This side of man happens to be the stronger
side of him.
I shall now enumerate the mistakes, the big ones first. God
informs us in the Quran that most people do not believe in Him; even those who
believe in Him do not do so without associating Him with His creatures. Even most
Muslims do not believe that God alone is sufficient for them. They need Prophet
Muhammad to be a god besides God! Hence the two syahadahs! How they can
ignore the clear injuction against the second syahadah in Surah 63: verse 1 is beyond me!
This is a most glaring mistake that essentially has led to
their downfall. Note also that this is
the one sin not forgiven by God.
The wonder is: “Where are their teachers of religion?” Those that have graduated from universities
in the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. Note also that the Al-Azhar University in
Cairo is the oldest university in the world, prior to other famous centres of
learning, including Oxford and Cambridge.
All prophet-messengers of God, from Adam to Muhammad,
including Abraham, Moses and Jesus, taught the essential Divine message of the
acknowledgement of the One true God for
all mankind, otherwise called the religion of submission or Islam. Note that
Quran names twenty-five of them. Many others, hundreds of them, are not named.
We know that there are many others because God informs us that He sent
messengers to all human communities.
That being so, we can now see that what has come to be the
religion of Judaism is not the religion taught by Moses, and the religion of Christianity not the religion
taught by Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ was not a Christian; he was a Muslim.
It was Paul, a Christian-persecuting Jew
who later turned Christian, who made Christ into a Son of God.
For that matter, the completed and perfected religion of
Islam brought by the last of the prophets, Prophet Muhammad, with its protected
scripture, the Quran, did not escape this corruption. Three hundred years after him, Islam broke
into sects, Sunnism being the majority sect. The master-architect was none
other than Shafi’e (767-820), who introduced the doctrine two principal sources,
the Quran and the Sunnah/Hadith.
When Prophet Muhammad migrated to Medina, he granted to the
community a constitution called the Medina Charter, the first written
constitution in the world. It is unfortunate that our present teachers of
religion almost never mention this great legal document of Islam (Dato’ Din has
kindly published this along with my comments in this blog.) when they endlessly
quote the so-called hadiths.
The so-called Hudud law (fixed punishments) is another great
mistake. It is nowhere mentioned in the Medina Charter. It is a
misinterpretation of some frases in the Quran. The current fashion of headscarf
(the tudung) for Muslim women is
another. Thirty five years ago Muslim women in Malaysia wear the selendang, a partial headscarf. The simple
proof that a woman’s hair is not ‘aurat
(nakedness) is that when she takes ablution she has to wipe her head.
When the Quran is recited or even quoted in a speech, most speakers
tend to sing, in a manner not dissimilar to any singer, even if he or she does
not understand the language of the song. This is in contradiction with the
clear statement in the Quran that it is not a book of songs and that Muhammad
was not singer. What is more, the practice has grown into an art of the highest
excellence. In Malaysia, we have been holding international Quran-reading competitions
since a long time!
Then there is a mantra repeated by most Muslims whenever they
metion the name of Prophet Muhammad. The mantra is: salla’al-Lahu alaihi wasallam, meanging ‘the blessing of God and
peace be on him’. This phrase occurs twice in Sural Al-Ahzan (33), firstly in verse 43, referring to believers, and secondly
in verse 56, referring Prophet Muhammad. Notice how most Muslims happily ignore
the blessings God bestows on believers! The Arabic word ‘salla’ means ‘to bless’.
Less I do not just mention doctrinal matters, let me turn my
mind to more mundane matters, the bread-and-butter issues. My friend, Dr. Hassan
Hanafi, a professor of philosophy at Cairo University, criticized me for
ignoring politico-social and economic matters. This is the reason why I have expanded
this essay.
It is not that I do not consider these matters important. I
do. But these matters have to be the logical outcome of a world outlook, a philosophy.
The European social system is the result of a European secular humanist world
outlook that came with the Europeans Renaissance of the 14th right
through to the 16th centuries.
Europe has two wings, the Western liberal-capitalist wing, and the Eastern Marxist-communist
wing. The latter has collapsed before
our eyes at the end of the 20th century; the latter will collapse
too in the not-too-distant future.
Unfortunately most European historians conspired to erase the
fundamental role of Arab-Islamic phase in world history. A few objective Western
historians, including Robert Briffault, bear witness to this fact.
Has any civilization completely erased poverty, waste and
corruption? The island city-state of Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew came very
near it. What a Lee Kuan Yew has done other Lee Kuan Yews can do. In short, all
human beings are endowed by their Maker the ability to rule and change the
world, indeed the Universe, to their liking . Therefore, it can be logically
deduced that the Good Society with zero corruption, zero poverty, zero ignorance
and so on and so forth can come into being, nationally and internationally. Enough
number of men and women must decide to do it.
Why all these deviations, when the
Quran and the examples of the early republican-democratic caliphates are with
us? It is man’s tendency to revert back after the teacher is gone. In our souls,
there are two opposite tendencies: one pushing us up, and the other pulling us
down. It is up to us, free spirits that
we are, to choose which way to go.
