Sunday, April 24, 2016

WHY I WRITE

WHY I WRITE
By; Kassim Ahmad
24th April, 2016

            I developed a penchant for writing  when I was in secondary school. It was to create a world of my own, a world beyond and above reality, a utopia, so to speak, withing the bounds of reason. It means a world that can be realized, a just world, in other words.
            I write to please no man, although many men and women are in fact enthralled by my writings, and ask me to go on writing. I write to uphold the truth. I make no apologies for being a monotheist, in the footsteps of the true great masters, prophet-messengers of our One Creator, -- a religion of submission, to wit, a mukmin, a believer in the existence of one lawful God. 
            I also make no apologies for believing in the divinely-protected Quran, a scripture given in Arabic to an Arab Prophet Muhammad. I say protected, because I know it is protected by a mathematically-awesome-imposible-to-imitate structure based on 19. (See Quran, 74: 30). It is what has come to be known as Code 19.
            All prophet-messengers are without exception are submitters to God, monotheists and believers. The great names include Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. Jesus was one of the great monotheists of his time. When I stated that Jesus was not a Christian, but a  monotheist, a submitter and a believer, most Christians were up in arms against me. Let me repeat, I write to please no man; I write to the uphold the truth, although the truth is bitter. The doctrine of Trinity was promulgated by the Christian Church in the Council of Nicaea in 315 A.D., long after Jesus was dead.
One Christian reader asked why Jesus had no father; he must be the son of God, he argued. Another claimed that Christians felt the Trinity in the marrow of their bones. The current Pope Francis, a “peoples’ pope”, who when he visited the United States recently never talked about doctrine, but talked about the down-trodden and about inter-religious dialogue. The Pope knows better.
It is a truism that one should not discuss religion. “It is sensitive.” Again I say I write to please no man. I write to uphold the truth, although most people do not like the truth.
What the is the truth? asked Pilate, the Roman governor charged with judging Jesus, whom he found not guilty of rebellion.
This is what I call “the Mother of All Questions”. Does the truth exist objectively? To Jesus it does, for he said, “The truth will set you free.” To answer this question is to answer all questions. Why did God create this world? One answer among many goes, “God created the heavens and the other with truth.” (Quran, 22: 44) What does that mean? It means all orders of creations submit to the law of truth. It means God is the truth.
Some clever people might asks, “Can God contravene His own law of truth?” The answer is of course He can, but God  will not  act against Himself. That would mean two gods who would fight for dominion. That is impossible. As to the atheist, who says religion is the opium of the masses, challenge him to create one that will last beyond his lifetime.

KASSIM AHMAD is a freelance writer. His website is www.kassimahmad.blogspot.com     
 


Thursday, April 07, 2016

THE MISTAKES THAT MAN MAKES



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. [1]  It was Paul, a Christian-persecuting Jew who later turned Christian, who made Christ into a Son of God. [2]
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.  
  
KASSIM AHMAD is a Malaysian freelance writer. His website is www.kassimahmad.blogspot.com     




[1] This is not a claim by Muslims. It is a factual information given to us by God Himself when He named Jesus, a Jew, as one of His prophets.
[2] It was the Council of Nicaea in 325 that established Christian theology for the first time into what is known as the “Nicene Creed”. The creed was re-written in 362.