The City Of The Prophet (sws)
THE CITY OF THE PROPHET (sws)
A unique experiment in spiritual correction and improvement and social engineering took place fourteen centuries ago in a small Arab oasis town called Yathrib. In 622 a great man, very great by all standards, ran for his life from his home town Mecca to this town which was soon to be renamed ‘Medina an-Nabi (the Prophet’s (sws) town) or Medina for short. He was being persecuted for what I humbly intend doing now: He reminded people that things as they were then were not be acceptable. Tribalism, idolatrous superstition, inequalities and exploitation of the weak were all there. Without tribal protection each and every person was regarded as fair game by the rest. Like all ancient societies it was a slave owning society and the lot of slaves were no better than animals- they could be abused and killed as their masters thought fit. The poor had nobody to turn to, the orphan was pushed and kicked and girls could be buried alive to pre-empt their ‘dishonoring’ their parents and to leave ‘precious’ boys to be looked after better.
This great man named Muhammad (sws) condemned all these and claimed that he spoke on behalf of the Unique Creator of the Universe Who wanted man to feel and act far more kindly than they were used to. Naturally those who, by their own kind nature and sensitive conscience , approved of this call for moral improvement believed in Muhammad and those who were selfish and proud hated his call and teachings. So as always a prophet had acted as a sieve to separate the good from the evil. When the persecution became too unbearable the prophet was providentially thrown a lifeline- some people of Medina came across and believed in him and offered him and his few Meccan believers not only a sanctuary in their town but submitted to him as their leader and prophet sent by God. In this town of Medina he began to build a utopia the world as other prophets before him, like Jesus, had also attempted. True, nothing in this world can be perfect but by all standards he came closest to it, allowing of course for the limits to possibilities of the age .
However, his stay there lasted barely more than a decade when he died in 632 and it had to wait Umar his second caliph (successor) who ruled between 634-644 to found the full-fledged Islamic state and society as the Prophet (sws) would like. Umar’s rule also coincided with the explosive expansion of the frontiers of Islam which reached from North Africa to beyond Persia and in fact included all Middle East with its Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia. Over this vast domain Umar’s will reigned supreme not based on any arbitrary will on his part but on the teachings of the Prophet and Umar’s own profound assimilation of it and the others’ realization of this. He lived an ascetic and totally pious life, utterly just and incorruptible which gave him an irresistible aura of deserved and compelling authority. Additionally he saw to it that nobody lived a life of luxury and corruption or could abuse his power and authority and carry out injustices. His governors, commanders and other executives stood in awe of Umar. This was more from moral leadership and personal example than coercion. His reign was the golden era of Islam when Muslims universally prospered thanks to good government, superb organization and effective redistribution of wealth among them under Islamic rules of charity and sharing as greatly enhanced by the suppression of all luxury and pomp.
If a Muslim had too much wealth the right place to direct it was charity and not a bigger house or pompous entertainment parties. If anybody was somehow forgotten Umar took unto himself personally to visit the excluded family and give them their share of wealth with apologies. In other words in the lands of Umar’s rule the first ever welfare state was created. What is more it was equally a spiritual welfare state as material. All had equal access to spiritual education and prosperity as to material. All was for free. Mind you, the welfare system included a Child Benefit, a salary payable to all children born under Islam’s rule. All the surviving companions of the Prophet were given pensions which, admirably enough they distributed as charity. They could not admire and respect (and occasionally fear) Umar more (and the admirers included great Ali) and when he died the grief and wailing was almost as great and general as when the Prophet himself had died twelve years earlier. Legends began to circulate that since Umar died wolves had began to attack sheep again. Islam has had no better and greater ruler than Umar after the Prophet who of course stood in an exalted, incomparable category of his own. In Umar’s lands there was best possible justice, policies realistic to a fault as well as successful, across the board equality, universal welfare and spiritual enlightenment relative to the means available at the times. Moral and financial corruption almost disappeared both because Islam’s spiritual authority was universally taken to heart to the best of ability by each citizen and Umar’s eyes and arms were everywhere to pick up and strike down any who dared to offend. The evil-minded still existed among the Muslims but Umar’s atmosphere acted like a strong immune system keeping such pathogens and malignant tumors in check.
THE PROPHET’S (sws) RECIPIE FOR HUMAN BETTERMENT
Umar owed his success to his master and mentor Muhammad (sws) the true and final messenger of God. The greatest genius ever both spiritually and pragmatically as well as the kindest of men Muhammad (sws) had conquered both souls and bodies and left an incomparable legacy of wisdom and personal example. He emphatically declared the equality of men irrespective of race or any other natural differences and paved the way for universal liberation and suffrage for all. He even did something no religion before him could- he abolished priesthood! All Muslims are equally lay in their worldly roles and equally priestly in their spiritual. Anybody can raise to rule over them provided he has the ability. Race, family status or anything else cannot stand in his way. In other words Islam neither recognises aristocracy nor suffers fools who base their claim to any privilege on anything other than personal merit. Such an egalitarian and meritocratic society as Muhammad (sws) preached and Umar implemented to the best of his ability does not exist even today, East or West. It was later that Muslims failed Islam and drpped to where they are now.
For their part, non-Muslims ignored it at best and wrongly detested it at the worst. If Muslims could not bear its perfection and revert to moral laxity how could others ruled by entrenched elites with vested interests in inequalities, like the aristocracy, cast system and priesthood give it an ear and a chance? For example how could the fabulously powerful and entrenched churchmen entertain losing their privileges by embracing that starkly egalitarian faith of this new prophet? How could they countenance the propect of their flocks whom they had been fleecing and milking so well for so long abandoning them by joining that all-liberating Islam? That is why Muhammad and Islam have been slandered to this day with incredible unfairness and venom by the priesthood of rival religions claiming the same ground. For their part Muslims created many great states and a civilization which truly constituted the first Renaissance from which the European Renaissance was more or less copied. Modern Western scholars, unlike those until mid 19. century came a long way in recognizing Islam’s merits and the Prophet’s genius and greatness thanks to the weakening of the church’s stranglehold on people’s minds and hearts. Many of them, like professors Masignon, Smith, Arberry and Schimmel have favourable and positive opinions on Islam and the Prophet and the number of admirers and even converts from among the academicians are increasing. The general academic opinion is as we said above: The Prophet’s claim to prophethood is at least as valid as any Biblical prophet and the Qur’an is entitled to be seen as the Word of God as any part of the Bible. Additionally, they are agreed that Islam has been a great beneficial revolution in human civilization and contains a very high quality spirituality second to none. They especially admire Sufism and cannot stop publishing books on it often with merits implied throughout.
What is it that is impressing them so much. It is the Prophet’s (sws) extremely simple, rational and pragmatic faith and laws and manners he introduced. It is his enlightened attitude towards the weak and discriminated against in general and women, slaves, the commoner and the stanger in particular. His anti-racism was absolute. His championship of the destitute and the oppressed in general was unquestionable and irrepressible. We promise to prove the reader all these points in our printed and electronic (website) publications. As to creed, no religion’s creed is simpler and more effective than Islam’s in winning hearts and minds and inspiring righteous action. From top scientist to bushmen everybody at every level of educatedness or with none of it fully understands Islam’s creed, can appreciate as well as perform its devotions (ibadat) at no time and is in need of no intermediaries like a priest to arrange his spiritual matters. But it does not stop there. Islam presents its believers with a set of laws from food regulations to the rules of conducting of least destructive, most humane warfare and that as the last resort when persuasion fails and most serious human rights are at stake.
Centuries ago, Islam stipulated that only armed adversaries could be killed and that in the heat of the battle and only if they persisted in fighting. Any member of an enemy force who gave up fighting or is incapacitated may not be killed but only taken prisoner. And all prisoners are entitled to be ransomed and poorer ones can be released free for God’s pleasure. Again, any harm done to anybody under any circumstances imposed on the guilty party compensation to paid to the wronged party without any costly court procedures. The judge could simply sentence the wrongdoer once witnesses testified against him. Freeing of slaves and failing that their humane treatment was so vigorously encouraged that very many regularly went free and those who remained slaves could sue their masters openly for any wrongdoing (like beating) and get compensation. If a slave was tortured (like branding with hot iron) the judge set him or her free automatically and punished the owner additionally. All between the lines readings of the Qur’an and the Sunna (the Prophet’s (sws) practice and advice) indicate that he would like to abolish slavery and give women rights equal to men but modified to allow for the differences between the two sexes which meant sparing the women from many tasks that could endanger and harm them (like military service except in desperate situations or backline duties which women of Medina did carry out in the Prophet’s armies anyhow). All the same he improved the circumstances of all the weak and underprivileged classes beyond all comparison thus paving the way for their eventual liberation and enfranchisement.
In short he was a man light-years ahead of his times, yet unlike most reformers, wisely realistic enough to know what was possible under any given set of circumstances and what was best left to time for other similarly motivated and enlightened reformers to complete. He encouraged Muslims to take his reforms even further and update Islam with his famous hadith “Allah will send at the turn of each century somebody to renew your religion”. Many take this to mean to remove any additions and adulterations from Islam subsequent to the Prophet’s time and restore Islam to the form it was during the Prophet’s time. But that is not renewal or updating (‘yatajaddadu’- tajaddud). Such an interpretation of renewal (tajaddud) is just the opposite of renewal. In fact it means ‘taraddi’ (going BACK). Islam is like a building whose foundations determine the upper parts. On the unchangeable foundations of Islam as founded by Allah’s messenger Muslims have always added new walls, floors, rooms and furnishings in response to the needs of their times and only after 12th century or so, basking in the success of their enterprises they got the erroneous notion that what they then built so far was the epitome of perfection and therefore immutable. It was then that they declared the ‘gates of ijtihad’ closed. How could they know that Crusader’s West which they so much loathed as barbars and infidels, despite being eventually repulsed, would turn home not empty-handed. By the time the Crusades ended (14. century) the Islam’s cultural treasures had already been stolen and carried to the West to be improved upon and enormously expanded until the West, by the 18. century at the latest, could become a lion thanks to that cultural diet and play with the cat named the Muslim World and keep it under its paws.
Only recently we heard some Muslim ‘ulama’ who insisted that the earth was flat or it was the sun which circled the earth because ‘that was the evidence of the senses’ and the infidel scientists were out to destroy Muslims’ faith. How easily they forget that on a smoothly running train ‘the evidence of the senses’ tells them that it is not the train they are on which is moving but the land around them! Or how disgraceful for them when they or their loved ones become seriously ill they are the first to resort to scientific medicine and subject themselves to its infidel-made devices and remedies. Or how readily they jump on the luxurious airliners to reach their destination travelling at 35,000 feet into space. That is the cost of banning ijtihad on the delusion that the world had reached its cultural apex by the Muslims’ Medieval’ accomplishments and not a leave would move to change anything afterwards. Sure, Medieval ulama could be excused for thinking like that- after all they like us were fallible, humble servants of Allah and not prophets with access to heavenly secrets. But after the disasters that befall us we modern Muslims should know better. The ironic truth is that despite this muftis have been churning out fatwas to this day some of them on subjects that never existed before, with no precedent, like blood transfusion and prayer in the space and now the genetic manipulation some of them with great medical potential. Ijtihad has been continuing and will continue despite who says what from an ivory tower. God’s servants are hard pressed with this today and with that tomorrow and both God is merciful and Islam’s judicial skills resourceful enough to keep Muslims happy with new solutions to new problems through ijtihad.
WE CAN AND MUST REPEAT OUR ANCESTORS’ FEAT
Our argument is that Islam can be updated with great profit opening up for us as well as the rest of humankind brilliant prospects hardly imaginable now. Updating Islam does not mean changing it at all. It only means modernizing its presentation and agenda. It is being done already for at least two centuries now by all serious, thoughtful Muslims all over the world. That has been possible because such a foundation of strength, durability and resilience was laid down by Allah’s messenger thanks to Allah revealing and teaching him. Thanks to this healthy start Islam absorbed and improved upon, among others, also THE WESTERN SCIENCES AND SKILLS LOST TO THE WEST ITSELF (i.e, the classical Greek sciences and skills which had uplifted the West in the form of the fabulously great Roman Empire) but was not corrupted by it. We modern Muslims also can repeat our glorious ancestors’ feat and absorbing the present sciences and skills of the modern West build up a renewed Islam incorporating all that is best in the Western world which best things should be natural to Islam anyhow.
After all, as increasingly admitted by the Western scholars and intellectuals themselves almost all reforms carried out in the West after the Crusades were inspired by Islam as Islam stood at the apex of its accomplishments. Not everything in today’s West pleases or suits Muslims but a lot do. How and why to discriminate. That is next.
THE BAD SIDES OF THE WESTERN WAYS
Some things are undisputably wrong which means that any good that may come potentially from them is less than the potential harm. Let’s take that darling of the Western life the alcoholic drinks which Islam could not hate more. Islam detests the artificial kind of happiness created chemically when alcohol and other mind-altering drugs are employed. Why are we unhappy sometimes. Often the cause is our mistakes in life. We cannot handle our relationships or businesses etc. and are disappointed and often suffer from a bad conscience as well. The cure to the pain of such failure should be a positive one- attacking and solving the problem. Drowning the pain in alcohol is a very bad substitute. If alcohol is used not for killing heartaches but to just feel relaxed and cheerful than beware- ‘alcohol, once opened and drunk, do not stand as it stands in its bottle’. Its cheerfulness is very unstable and can move on to or somersault into rage and murder without warning. It also relaxes and confuses self-control so much that accidents become very likely. It also destroys health slowly but surely. It also wastes money and resources at both personal and national level. And lastly it loses all its claims to usefulness when one remembers that those who never used alcohol, every other thing equal, live as good lives as users- which means alcohol is not a need we must satisfy for our welbeing’s sake. It is an acquired taste with great addictive potential and to the non-user it means nothing except danger from its users. Like being knocked down by a drink-driver. By banning this foolish and very harmful drink Islam did a great service to mankind. To introduce it into Muslim life in the name of modernization is criminal folly. What need be done is the very opposite. Muslims should work hand in hand with non-Muslim anti-alcohol lobbies to drive alcohol out of the lives of people. The same with the abuse of sexual powers which is even more prevalent and ruinous than alcohol in the West.
Islam blesses but regulates sex to the benefit of all. Sex is for forming stable and responsible male-female relationships for the promotion of natural reproduction and the best care for all involved in a warm and secure family setting. Provided good matches are made married, chaste sex delivers not only the safest sex but the fullest and sweetest. It is also rewarded by genuine offspring and parent-child love which is the strongest and most delicious of all loves. A reasonably well-matched husband-and-wife friendship is one of the most rewarding friendships and is often crowned by genuine romantic love which is the very top in sweetness and colorfulness. What a heady bliss it is to permanently love somebody and be loved back. Only fools and mad people can barter all these heavenly blessings with the present sexual anarchy with all its debased and short-lived, shallow pleasures and its extremely dangerous and costly potentialities. It both ruins personal and inflates the costs of national life. As if you have nothing better to do carry on goose chasing by distributing billions condoms and birth-control agents, provide housing for and put on salaries single mothers and their babies and drown in the problems created by generations degenerated by lonely and unstable ‘family’ circumstances and the lack of care that causes. What can be more destructive to a child’s life and character than seeing his or her mum change partners like changing nappies and keep depositing new siblings from different and sometimes unidentified ‘fathers’ and often caught up in triangles of love and jealousy and desertions and beat-ups even. The West stooped to all these levels and folly as a swing-back from its Christian puritanical past which itself was an opposite folly masquerading as piety. Islam has had none of it. The West should better stop it.
The difference between Islam’s sexual arrangement and the West’s is like the difference of a group of people preparing and eating around a well laid-out table delicious foods cooked from fresh and high quality ingredients by expert cooks and paid for well-earned legitimate earnings and another people who spread throughout the wilderness and compete to eat anything and everything which comes their way, raw or alive- wild berries, grass, live rats or rabbits and each other occasionally. Many get sick, many may die of bad diet and many gets eaten up and the whole wilderness fills up with destruction, debris and carcasses and equally also with blobs and blobs of excrement ‘decorating’ the scene as far as the eye can see. This is what all those unmarried mothers, their differently fathered children, their neglected and deprived images, the dreamy lunatic-looking gay couples groomed and dressed in bizarre ways and in general the orgasm-obsessed amateur sexology specialists out to fix the day’s sexual menu as the ultimate good of life- be them directors of a big company secretly estimating the off-duty potentialities of their young female secretaries or porno worn-out loners combing dating and mating agency columns for new encounters of a fantasy acting-out kind. This sexual madness, this mania of orgasm at all costs by all means is among the Western malaises awaiting Muslims if they believe those among them who advise that the Western ways are adopted in toto or else.
It is not only the issues of private life that are badly handled in the Western system. Economy also has many nasty habits and wrong priorities. Among the nasty habits are usury and gambling. Both help rich get richer and poor get poorer as well as causing great waste. By usury I do not mean reasonable interest under one name or another. In a modern society of large and urban populations and huge enterprises credit cannot be handled on from a person to person basis and banks and bankers are needed for large scale, anonymous loan transactions. These institutions and their owners and employees cannot work for nothing and their premises and various expenses need be paid by somebody. They are also entitled to a profit for investing so much in the handling of money and its customers. Lastly the effect of inflation must be countered if anybody is to be persuaded to be a creditor. All these considerations make some sort of cost bearing on the part of the institutional borrower. This can be called interest. Usury must be something else: fleecing and bleeding the borrower more than expenses, reasonable profit and risks would warrant, exploiting the customers weak, desperate state. Usually banks and other credit institutions are guilty of usury, especially towards their private, small business or desperate borrowers. On top of interest they are also experts in charging shock expenses like hefty overdraft penalties. The rich on the other hand consistently get better deals from their banks. Insurance companies are even more sharkish. The cost of insuring the very same house or car may vary as much as several times between different insurers. There is simply no reason and no conscience involved in quoting prices and settling claims fairly. Hence one gets palatial bank and insurance premises dotting the land from one end to the other with fabulous earnings and perks for those in charge. A lot of this wealth come from the combined financial exploitation of the smaller customers.
The second reverse sucking pump is the gambling system. Because the gambling prices are uniform and the less well of dream more about winning a jackpot the net result of gambling is a net flow of money from bottom to top. Even the proceedings of a national lottery do not flow back to meet national needs before being decimated by a hefty cutback for the pocket of the lottery runners. That on top of the lottery profits being wasted on silly white elephants of public projects. That on top of any jackpots being wasted on silly luxuries on the part of unprepared winners which means such winnings again end up in the pockets of the rich who sell these luxuries.
These are things Muslim nations who are mostly dirt poor need to import from the West. Yet often their rulers import them for them apparently for local rich to get richer. The West owes its wealth to two things: Past colonial plunders and hard intelligent work. It unnecessarily suffers from the waste caused by usury, interest and luxury. From among these poor Muslims need only the hard intelligent and honest work. The others may remain in the West.
There is still one particular bad mistake the West is committing which other traditional cultures mush avoid however they want to adopt Westren ways. This is the insistence that women also work at all professions full time, except for child birth and early care of babies. To start with, what the Western economies produce are in response to the unavailability of mothers to look after their families. Fast foods, processed snacks, crèches, baby sitters, laundries, house cleaning firms… all are largely the superfluous products of driving women from home-making into the work market. The basic mistake is this: They are forgetting that the human individual is the most fundamental and crucial asset and ingredient of social and economic success. This asset need be cultivated with greatest care and skill possible if we want to have both physically and mentally highest quality possible individuals to make up our society. Since individuals begin life as children and need almost 20 years to become a proper, independent individuals they should be raised and cultivated by the best available carers- their natural mothers. Eject mothers from home into the workplace and the young must gorge on indifferent and often bad food, be befriended by employed pretenders to motherly care and additionally left to the bad acculturation of the streets and you have worst possible individuals on the coming. What mothers are earning are wasted on expensive and bad feeding of them and their families, cost of stand-in carers, more cars with all the accompanying expenses to drive to and from work… and more pollution from throwaway packages, more fuel, more refuse mountains etc.
Although Islam fully recognizes the need for women to work at someplace sometimes looking after family is woman’s most natural and for all society the most rewarding employment. She is a born expert on child care and undisputably the best carer and mentor for her offspring. By encouraging open and full time employment of married women the Western economies are causing great waste as well as great neglect of their upcoming top assets- their children, their future adult citizens. No wonder in the midst of plenty crime and its victims are mounting together with the cost they are adding to the waste budget- more destruction of wealth and human happiness, more policing, more court manhours, more prisons and prisoners, hospitals and medical costs. Just because mothers are expelled from the care of their young and their quality is destroyed in the course of ‘sexual revolution’ which both masculinalizes them and exposes them to all the degradation and dangers of promiscuity.
The truth is that as Muslims saved the West from their Medieval rut they should again save them by first adopting their good achievements and after enriching and empowering themselves thereby go on and do a second service to them- by the good example of an alternative advanced civilization divesting them of their foolish and destructive habits from alcohol and drugs to sexual anarchy and all the appalling waste these cause. The multi billions which shall be saved from this improvement in Western behavior can then be spent on doing far better things for all mankind.
HUMANITY IS ONE- WE ARE THE SAME
Now all this is not to arrogate to Muslims all the merits of being the brighter and wiser guys and gals. Most Muslims inherited Islam, benefit from its blessings like alcohol avoidance and proper family life but neither the Islam they inherited is full and correct Islam nor the culture they are born into anywhere as near perfect as its label of Islamicity would make one expect. Nor for that matter most people are able to learn or understand Islam fully and correctly, let alone to implement its saving command-ments and recommendations. Even more shamefully and disastrously, the general and overall level of today’s Muslims’ morality is far below the level of the Western in many departments of life.
For example, while Muslims in general have stronger family ties and sexual chastity and therefore far less suffering from family breakups and torments of venereal illness they also have far higher financial and administrative corruption which bankrupts the livelihood of the majority and paralyses their governments. As such they have very limited incentive to look into the mirror or ground to moralize the West. It is no surprise even when very rich (which is rare anyhow) Muslim countries are political lightweights standing attention to a carrot and stick from their Western ‘friends’. Whether they ape the West slavishly or keep some of their distinctive traits and displays they are universally disdained and dismissed as if the Qur’anic verses containing the curse “Be ye despised apes” are directed to them. Simply nothing goes right for them and the more they try get unstuck the more they sink.
Why? Why the West is strong and winning despite its very many shortcomings, some blasphemous? And why Muslims are weak and losing despite their ostensible faith and some good sides born of it?
The reason is that realities always beat labels. Frankly and bluntly speaking Islam is not so much a set of dogmas and taboos whose memorization and pretended partisanship improves one’s qualities and objective lot. It is rather a set of realities having to do.
CHARACTER AND GOOD HABITS
Faith is like a root. If real and healthy it sends up shoots and produces plentiful perfect fruits. These are fruits of good character traits. The real world of human action and interaction is ruled by real characters and habits the actors and actresses in it possess and wield. A mere label Muslim community with bad character and bad habits is doomed to be beaten by another community with a better character and better habits. Let’s take the Crusades. They descended upon Islamdom when Muslims were at their most divided and corrupt. When Muslims were so disuniting Europeans were uniting against them. Can you imagine, in Egypt and beyond in north Africa the blasphemous so-called Fatimid dynasty was ruling as a rival caliphate against the Bagdad caliphate and these Fatimid caliphs were so secure in their rule that they could play with Islamic faith and practices as cat with mouse. It was one of these impious ‘caliphs’, namely Hakim who persecuted orthodox Muslims for having orthodox beliefs and practicing orthodox rites and declared himself God asking to be worshipped. This was the state of the Muslims at the time. This madman then burnt down the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem thereby igniting the Crusades!
It was as if he wanted to destroy Islamdom by provoking the heavily armed and ferociously valiant Western barbarian knights and hordes to attack Muslims, which they soon did. For about a century the ocean of Islamdom was overwhelmed by a relatively small Crusader contingents attacking and sacking this city today and tomorrow razing to the ground and massacring the inhabitants of the next and that not infrequently with some Muslims as their allies. For example, if the Muslim ruler of Homs wanted to beat the Muslim ruler of Hama he would not hesitate to join the local Crusader princes and together conquer, lay to waste and sack Hama. They even exchanged princesses with the Crusaders and founded kinships of blood as if they were already brothers. So among such ‘Muslims’ the the tiny minority of Crusaders walked, stalked and attacked like a solitary pride of lions among deer and wildebeest in Serengeti. While the lions devoured one particular animal the others just kept grazing and a few hyenas and jackals and vultures converged to capture a chance share. Muslims studied Islam, attended mosques and fasted Ramadans but could not unite and fight back. Why? Because they had both the label and the window display but not the real goods- the real character of Islam which allows nothing less than unity of purpose and action among Muslims and prizes the rewards from Allah more than the pleasures of this world. Early Muslims could defeat both the Roman and Sassanid empires on enemy territory. Later Muslims collapsed before small armies of Crusaders on home territory.
Today the situation is even more dramatic. The West do not even have to invade Muslims to impose its will. It only has to dangle a stick or a carrot in front of them and from thousands of miles away. Because they more have the crucial Islamic character traits which determine some power issues. Their administrative efficiency, far better business integrity, far vigorous honest hard work and tighter unity and cooperation plus their better observation of human rights and the rule of law contrast only too favourably with Muslims’ administrative shambles, often crooked business practices, institutionalised laziness and factionalism and unashamed totalitarian and government-terror practices. Islam has become a lip-service competition and an industry of emotional manipulation and means of political blackmail. Islamic character isn’t simply there and the few that the West unwittingly have are winning the battles for them.
So we sons of Adam, called Muslims or not, are the very same material and labels do not distinguish us in reality. Distinction comes from better quality and character and because we have recently been unable to create high quality and good character despite having Islam those who produced something better without Islam but with some Christianity which is the best religion after Islam and some imitation of and importation from Islam at its zenith won against and the whole world in fact. It is fashionable among Muslims to dismiss Christianity in toto as it has been fashionable among Christians to dismiss lslam in toto. But both sides are wrong. Despite many severe criticisms (mostly for their deification of Jesus) Allah appreciates Christians in some respects pointing out to some good qualities of theirs such as compassion and kindness and ascetism and as such declares them as closest to Muslims in loving disposition. Read from the Qur’an if you wish “You will find nearest in love to Muslims those who say ‘we are christians’. That is because amongst them are pious priests and monks and they do not entertain pride” (5: 82). Even today we have many good Christians who are epitomes of humility and charity. And it could come true and stay so had Christians returned the compliment and had Muslims kept patience with any abuse from not so good christians. Mutual accusations and abuses poisoned the relations and the legacy of that intolerance still haunts both sides today.
BUT MORE, FAR MORE IS POSSIBLE
We know this for sure and that is why we created the Prophet’s Academy. It is in Muhammad (sws) that we have a detailed and accurate picture of what and how a true messenger of God is. He said all prophets are brothers and that he was the last and final one of the line of them, the line which began with Adam, passed through all prophets like Noah and Abraham and Moses and Jesus and many more in between (upon them bepeace) mostly forgotten and unknown. According to one report from our master and benefactor Muhammad Allah’s Messenger (sws), Allah sent one hundred and twenty four thousand prophets among them all the prophets mentioned in the Bible and the Qur’an (for the Qur’an tells about several prophets not mentioned in the Bible). Because of this unique position and status of Muhammad (sws) studying him and following his teachings and example amounts to following all the prophets including Moses and Jesus Christ (may God bless them all). This is the orthodox Muslim faith and position. Allah is One, His Message is one and prophethood is one. Times and names varied but not the essence nor the spirit.