ARE WE REMAINING MORE CONSERVATIVE?

Where Are Muslim Youth going?

Very many leading senior Muslim scholars of South Asia, Iran, the Middle East and other countries are worried a lot about Muslim youngsters involving in all sorts of immoral, illegal, dirty, unlawful and dastardly obnoxious activities to make a living and to continue with their undeserving lavish standard of living.

Internet access gives a tremendous opportunity to enhance knowledge but at the same time, it wide opens the gates of dirty sewerage into the lives of far too many youngsters. It makes it easy for them to access immoral, irreligious, violent dirty and undesirable web sites.


Muslim societies, like many other societies, are now very much enlightened. Both parents work and are away from home almost for 12 hours, leaving their grown up children under the custody of housemaids in rich countries or alone at home, to look after themselves under a sort of supervision by the old grand-parents: very many themselves are weak and ignorant.

We have to think of ways and means to instill in our youths the need to preserve Islamic moral values. Mere teaching of religious education alone or emphasizing on rituals alone is not enough. There are far too many Muslims who are regular in disciplining themselves in rituals(Ibadah)thinking that that will guarantee enough scores for rewards in the Akhirat, but in their daily transactions,(mu’amalat) many are as bad or worse than agnostics.

Is only ritual based Ibadah Islam? What about the following shortlist of morals that we have to abide by if we are good Muslims. But, many of us are indifferent.

- paying the wages of our workers before their sweat dries.
- keeping up our promises
- repaying money borrowed on time
- believing in the international brotherhood of Islam
- the spirit of generosity, love and tolerance
- not boasting and having ego and pride in one’s wealth
and Position and fame and not treating others with contempt
-respect and devotion to the elders, children and the marginalized ones in the society.
-concern for justice, equity and fairplay,
-dedication to education, knowledge and criticism

The list can go on on.

We have neglected the mu’amalat and have concentrated on showing off rituals without understanding the spirit behind those rituals.

Mere lecturing about Islamic Akhlak has fallen in deaf ears. A lot of lip service is given but very little is done in the form of effective control and implementation.

Trained Alims alone cannot solve these social ills. We need a much stronger iron fisted decision makers, morally righteous police force and clean and religiously convinced bureaucrats. All of them should think of several measures to arrest the tide of immorality and crimes in Muslim countries and in countries where we live as minorities.


For instance, on 25 March 2008, the Indonesian Parliament had passed a law, which made producing or accessing web sites with pornographic or violent contents, as illegal. The law provides for a maximum penalty of six years or a fine up to US$ 80,000 for disseminating pornographic materials on line.

How effectively will such laws be implemented in a corrupt society is a different matter. We should appreciate the intention and principles behind.

A similar law is an immediate first step that very many Muslim Governments should take to stop our youngsters becoming the friends of the most cursed one ( the Shaitan)

We have the technology to do this and we have liberal financial resources to employ the best brains. So what stops us from preventing the decay( except the political will to face the opposition of the scatter brained) before it gets out of control as in the West where in the name of freedom of expression, the nude pictures of even a President’s wife is on all newspapers in the U.K.

There is no shame or etiquette. Anything and everything is okay and can be commercialized as long as it pleases the sensualities of some people, and brings money and name to others. This is sheer freedom of the jungle. Man has become intoxicated and lost his power to think and accept the moral laws of God Almighty

If a very large country like Indonesia, can pass such laws and implement them, it should be very much easier in smaller countries in the Middle East and Southeast Asia ( Brunei is the smallest country that can easily bring in and implement such laws). It has become much more important now since mobile telephones are now turning out to be secretly hidden but openly exposed gimmicks for youths to access the most undesirable and dirtiest web sites.

We hope serious discussion takes place and an effective action plan is drawn to create an economically, educationally and technologically thriving Muslim society without losing our cherished Islamic culture and values.

There is a great need for reinterpretation and Ijtihad.

We got to integrate without losing Islam based moral values. Knowledge belongs to neither the east nor west. It is universal. It does not belong to the West as many assume.

“Europe would have remained dark without the intellectual contribution of Islam”

Briffault in The Making of Humanity.

The 8th and 9th centuries witnessed the most intellectual awakening in the history of Islam and one of the most significant in the whole history of thought and culture………

When there was shining light in Islam, Europe was in complete darkness…..

The intellectual achievement of Muslim Spain made renaissance possible in Europe……..

Prof. Hitti in the History of Arabs.


Europe heavily borrowed Islamic knowledge and used it as a base to build on and in the same way, right now we can borrow the knowledge of the West to build an economically, scientifically, technologically and medically strong and viable Islamic societies.

But, In the process we should not lose sight of Islam based ethics and regulations and the Shariah. In other words, we have to Islamicise knowledge (as Prof. Ismail Faruqi has said)

Some suggestions:

: Control and block some of the dirty TV channels, literature, adult magazines and newspapers publishing and glorifying famous singers and entertainers, of course all the pornographic sites. Make it a crime to access any pornographic or violent or anti-Islamic web sites. Make the law strict on Dish Antennas.

: Bring a law on dress code not only for Muslims but also for non-Muslims, because some of them are allowed to dress as harlots do, revealing far too much of their Awrat and walk around the shopping complexes wearing underwear length shorts and broad-necked upper garments, particularly when shopping complexes have become places of entertainments and avenues for killing time for our youth.

All Muslim women must be asked to wear a proper veil covering their bosoms and heads, the length of which should come up to their navels-this will help.

We cannot have two standards as we have in some Malaysian States, one expecting Malay boys and girls to dress modestly and another giving as much freedom as England has given to non-Muslims in the matter of dress. Can anyone deny the fact that revealing dress certainly leads to sex crimes?

The present day Hijab designed just to conceal their hair but show off their feminine curves to grown up male students and men, in my opinion should not be acceptable.

: Muslim countries like Malaysia should try to go back to single sex educational institutions, at all levels from Form 8th Grade to college education. We have to build more educational institutes, to cater for girls and boys separately.

We should never have hostels for boys and girls adjacent to each other. The State of Georgia in USA, for instance, is considering segregating girls and boys in educational institutions because of teen related sex crimes and unwanted pregnancies among teenagers. What more to say in Muslim communities


: We need more recreational facilities separately for boys and girls. Every big town must have a sports facility, a football pitch, women community centre and a good well-stocked library. We got to change the basic attitudes and habits of the people and cultivate more serious outlook in the lives of our youths.

P.A.Mohamed Ameen.
Brunei.

SUFFERINGS OF PALESTINIANS

What is happening in Gaza. It is terribly depressing. Humanity that seems to have developed its culture, civilization and positive thinking to a great extent, seems totally dumb and deaf to the sufferings of poor Palestinians. 

The Jews who had been terribly persecuted in its long diaspora, are in turn persecuting another race( the Palestinians) the only race in the known civilised world that was not responsible for the atrocities committed against the Jews. 

What a perversity of morals? One of history's gifted and intelligent people( my Jewish brothers) have been viewing the world from an arrogantly selfish but in the long run self-destroying angle simply because they got powerful friends duw to political expediency, but they may turn out to be powerful enemies in due course when priorities force them change.

Is humanity getting more civilised or becoming more barbaric I wonder? Simple folk like me do nothing but shedding tears and raising our hands in prayer ( I can see the ridicule in the wry smile of my adversaries and atheists)

But it is a well known fact that as every human will taste death, every boastful and powerful race or nation will also face sufferings and death. There is no exception.

Was there a bigger empire than Rome?
Where is the Rome empire now? Where are the conquering mongol hordes? Ethiopia was a powerful empire in 5th century? Do we have the trace of that now?

Pharaohs will never thrive indefinitely under the Laws of Divinity.

Far too many nations that have been much more powerful than the 21st century empires have been wiped out and destroyed by the laws of nature, and wallhi, the laws of God never fail.