Maariful Quran - Mufti Shafi Usmani RA - Vol - 1 - Page

Swab Al-Baqarah 2 : 1 - 5106-al-Hurnarn reports the agreement of all the authentic scholars in thisrespecte2... who believe in what has been revealed to you and in what hasbeer1 revealed before you, and do have faith in the Hereafter.This verse speaks of some other attributes of the God-fearing, givingcertain details about faith in the unseen with a special mention of2. Today one finds a very wide-spread confusion, sometimes amounting to atotal - incomprehension, with regard to the distinction between Islam and'Imiin, essentially under the influence of Western modes of thought andbehaviour and, to be more specific, that of the ever-proliferating Protestantsects and schools of theology. Since the middle of the 19th century therehave sprouted in almost every Muslim country a host of self-styledReformists, Revivalists, Modernists et al, each pretending to haveunderstood the "real" Islam for the first time, and each adepting anextremist, though untenable, posture with regard to Islam and 'ImZn. Onthe one hand, we have people claiming that Islam is only a matter of the"heart" (a word which has during the last four hundred years been used inthe West as an equivalent of "emotion" or, worse still, of "emotionalagitation") or of "religious experience" (a very modish term brought intocurrency by William James). As a corollary, they stubbornly refuse to seethe need for a fixed ritual or an ethical code, all of which they gladly leaveto social exigency or individual preference. They base their claims on theunquestioned axiom that religion is "personal" relationship between theindividual and "his" God. It is all too obvious that this genre of Modernist"Islam" is the progeny of Martin Luther with cross-pollination fromRousseau. On the other hand, we have fervent and sometimes violentchampions of Islam insisting 011 a merely external performance of rituals -more often on a mere conformity to moral regulations, and even these, oftheir liking. They would readily exclude, and are anyhow indifferent to, theinternal dimension of Islam. A recent modification of this stance (in thewake of a certain Protestant pioneering, it goes without saying) has been toreplace divinely ordained rituals by acts of social service or welfare, givingthem the status and value, of acts of worship. Counselling on divorce,abortion, premarital sex and the rest of the baggage having already becomea regular part of the functions of a Protestant cl'ergyrnan, it would not betoo fond to expect, even on the part of our Modernists, the speedy inclusionof acts of entertainment as well. There is still another variety ofdeviationists, more visible and vociferous than the rest, and perhaps morepervasive and pernicious in their influence, finding easy credence among acertain section of Muslir,is wi~h a sloppy western-style educaiion. Whiledispensing with the subtle distinctions between Islam and 'Imgn, theyreduce Islam itself to a mere system of social organization, or even tostate-craft. According to their way of looking at things, if Muslims fail to setup a social and political'organization of a specified shape, they would ceaseto be Muslims. Applied to the history of Islam, this fanciful notion wouldlead (Continued)