Dr. Aslam Abdullah's Advice to Tableeghi Jamaat
Arif Syed , Carlsbad, NMI have great respect for Dr. Aslam Abdullah and I think his writings are scholarly and worth reading, but I know little about Mohammad A.A. Khan of Chicago, IL, whose letter appeared in the August 11 issue of Pakistan Link. The language used was crude and painful to read. Our young boys and girls, who read in American schools and colleges, are not interested in abusive language on insignificant subjects. If our scholars read books about Islam written by non-Muslim scholars and then write something, they would be rendering a great service to the Muslims of North America, both young and old.
To cite one example, Edward Gibbon, in his world famous book Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire writes about Islam thus: If Muslim invaders had defeated Charles Martel at the battle of POITIERS in France in 732 AD, Western Europe would have come under the sway of Islam, and perhaps the interpretation of the Quran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelations of MAHOMET.
More recently (August 14), Mr. Ormsby, Professor of Islamic Studies at the McGill University in Montreal, wrote in The Wall Street Journal : “If not for Poitiers, indeed our churches and synagogues might very well be mosques, from which five times a day the melodious call to prayers would reverberate through our cities. All public buildings would have verses from the Quran, in intricate script, on their portals. There would be no banks, since interest is forbidden, but there would be an even greater number of lawyers, for Islamic law addresses itself to all spheres of life, from ritual cleanliness to the rules of commerce. Shopping Malls would probably be segregated by sex; in the stricter Islamic regimes, men and women do not mingle in public. There would be no novels or plays, nor would there be any theaters; but lyric poetry would reverberate its pre-eminence, and successful poets would be idolized like Hollywood stars”.
Winston Churchill once said England was lucky that the infidels never reached the shores of England and Scotland during the 8th century. One French scholar has written that if Islam were ever dominant in Europe, we would have never seen the steam engine, locomotives, motorcars, airplanes, and telecommunications.
A few decades ago, under advise from the United Nations, the government of Pakistan, wanted to introduce a birth control scheme to restrict uncontrolled increase in population. Maulana Maudoodi of Jamaat Islami wasted millions of rupees on street posters saying that birth control is hararn. In our mosques, the learned Imams taunt learned Muslims that they have all the time in the world to obtain MBAs and Ph.D.s, but no time for prayers. But nowhere in the Islamic world has a single cleric ever hammered out the following Hadith to the Muslim masses, either in Friday prayers, or at a school or college. In no Muslim institution or gathering, posters spotlighting this Hadith have been posted.
It reads:
- The ink of a scholar is holier than the blood of a martyr.
- He who travels in search of knowledge walks in the path of Allah.
- He who leaves his home in search of knowledge walks in the path of Allah.
- Seek knowledge if one has to go to China ( China is a non-Islamic distant country with a culture totally different from that of Arabia).
In our letters and comments, our scholars should try to rebut the allegations against Islam in a learned way and our language should be as polite as possible. We should try to avoid personal attacks . We should try to avoid attack and counter attack on trifling matters.
At first, I was proud of our religious organizations, but when I learned that bulk of their funds come from the drug mafias and other questionable sources, tears came to my eyes. Today, I have respect only for the Edhi Foundation, which is not a religious organization, but is doing more service to the Muslim community than any religious organization has done until now.