Re: “I found Christ but may lose my Muslim family”
Mr. Khokhar,
This is a letter regarding your article published on the 8th of January 2003 in the “Times 2” section of the Times Newspaper entitled “I found Christ but may lose my Muslim family” [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,2736-535582,00.html].
I write on behalf of Hizb ut-Tahrir [The Liberation Party] Britain to convey to you the concerns of the Muslim community in Britain that have been raised by this article. I have received many complaints from concerned Muslims who interpreted the article as being an intellectually lazy slur on Islam.
The article in question purports to examine your experiences in deserting Islam and embracing Christianity. However on occasions it turns into a diatribe against Islam, Muslims and the Islamic heritage. Sadly the article at no point presents an intellectual argument to confront the issues that are discussed. We take this opportunity to present to you the intellectual views of Muslims towards what you have raised.
It is concerning that you think that the answer to the most important questions of life can be gleaned from watching the movie “Jesus of Nazareth”. Such an approach to belief is based on personal experience alone, and does not imbue certainty, conviction and tranquillity in belief. It is saddening that you say you have deserted Islam, which raised the intellectual level of the ignorant pre-Islamic tribes of Arabia some fourteen hundred years ago, solely on the basis of a ‘spiritual’ experience while watching a movie.
We would like to draw your attention to the fact that mankind progresses through his intellectual endeavours. The most important factor affecting our actions in life is the thoughts we believe in and carry. Without thought man drifts aimlessly from situation to situation, waiting for things to happen, rather than initiating action and progressing. There are answers available to the most fundamental of questions of who we are, why we are here and how we relate to life, not only now, but life before us and life in the future. The challenge facing us is to exercise our minds to their full capability in finding the correct solution, a solution that can be tested against reality, and ration, and will be comprehensive for all circumstances.
Whilst man may believe in the existence of God through use of his instinctive emotions, this can be unreliable and dangerous as emotions change and can add errors to one’s beliefs and actions. In history we see many examples of men going far astray in believing fantasies or superstitions, or attributing human qualities to God, talking of a son of God, God reincarnate, etc. For this reason Islam obliged Muslims to believe in the existence of God not solely through instinctive emotion, but with use of the mind. The Muslim must be intellectually convinced of the existence of God or else emotions of belief could be adversely changed.
Islam is built on the decisive rational evidence that there is a Creator who created man, the universe and life, and that this Creator has prescribed a system for man to follow in this life and He will account him after death on his adherence to this system. The Muslim is forbidden from having any doubt in his or her belief and any type of blind following or imitation in the matter of belief is condemned. Allah (swt) says in the Qur’an:
“And when it is said to them: ‘Follow that which Allah has revealed,’ they say: ‘We follow that wherein we found our fathers.’ What! Even though their fathers were wholly unintelligent and devoid of guidance!” [TMQ Al-Baqarah: 170]
Contrary to the Christian doctrine, the Islamic belief is based upon the mind and not mere emotion or inner feeling. By this, it confirms the true nature of our existence:
“Lo in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the difference of night and day and the ships which run upon the sea with that which is of use to men, and the water which Allah sends down from the sky thereby reviving the earth after its death and dispersing all kinds of beasts therein, and in the ordinance of the winds and the clouds obedient between heaven and earth, these are signs for people who have sense.” [TMQ Al-Baqarah: 164]
Historically, man has responded to his innate desire to worship, sanctify and revere something of greater power or influence, in diverse ways. History shows us many instances of man worshipping the sun, stars, fire, stone idols, and more recently books, writers, leaders and material things. Faced with this strong innate desire man strives to satisfy this need, but without a system or clear guidance in this matter purely intuitive or instinctive acts of worship have led man astray. Basing one’s belief on an individual ‘spiritual’ experience such as watching “Jesus of Nazareth” paves the way for an erroneous belief and denigrates the importance of the fundamental questions of life that man must answer in order to progress.
A cursory study of Christianity would reveal that it does not imbue certainty, conviction and tranquillity in belief. Your recollection of how you realised that you would become a Christian is a clear evidence of this.
No doubt your bitterness against Islam and Muslims is a reflection that Christianity has been completely marginalised by the Capitalist ideology and that droves of people, disillusioned with the Capitalist societies in the West that are plagued by spiritual and political voids, are entering Islam, on the basis of intellectual conviction and not on the basis of some abstract form of “spiritual rebirth”.
About half of the UK population say they have no religious affiliation and only a very small minority attend Church. Peter Brierley, the leading expert on church attendance in Britain, suggested that Christian life will be all but dead in 40 years with less than 0.5% of the population attending a church service. A recent survey showed that a staggering 14 % of the UK population did not even know who Jesus [Isa (as)] was.
The Church believes in secularism- i.e. the creed of detaching “religion” from life, a creed that is a compromise between two contradictory ideas; the idea which the clergy used to call for in Medieval times, namely the submission of everything in this life to “religion”, i.e. Christianity and the idea which some thinkers and philosophers called for, namely the denial of the existence of a Creator. Western societies are built on the idea of the detachment of “religion” from life - a compromise solution between these two sides. A compromise solution is conceivable between two similar views where there is some disparity, but it is inconceivable to exist between two contradictory views. Either there is a Creator who created man, the universe and life or there is no Creator and accordingly religion would not be detached from worldly life but rather would be rejected from it completely.
The Church accepted that the affairs of life be “rendered unto Caesar” and that God be relegated to Sunday if that. The Psalms, Romans and Corinthians may be the recognised text for the Sunday sermon but Machiavelli, Rousseau and Hobbs are the required text for the rest of the week, for both parishioner and preacher alike. Therefore mankind became arrogant enough as worshippers at the altar of Capitalism to believe that they were in the best position to determine the shape - not only of their own lives - but also the direction of the whole society. They set initial limits but introduced all kinds of freedoms as a precursor to the evolving society. The state would not set laws in stone to govern human existence - human organisation was deemed an elastic model that changes according to the needs of the people.
You fail to acknowledge the surge in conversions to Islam that has taken place despite the negative image of Islam and Muslims conjured up in the Western media following the events of September 11th 2001. In a recent poll it was estimated that 100,000 people every year convert to Islam in America alone. The same poll found that for every 1 male convert to Islam, 4 females convert to Islam, which is a surprising finding for some given the widely held view in the West that Islam treats women badly.
Non-Muslims are attracted to Islam by the universality and appeal of its ideological call, the intellectual nature of its doctrine, the practicality of its systems of life, economic, judicial and social, and its heritage of world leadership under the Islamic Khilafah (Caliphate) for over one thousand years.
The Muslim community believes that the greatest threat today comes not from Christianity, but rather from the ideology of Capitalism - a system which has no humility, humanity or compassion and whose foreign policy treats the world and its inhabitants as mere cattle fodder. For this reason, Muslims are at the forefront of standing up to Capitalism and presenting Islam as an ideology. The return of Islam to state and society will be a beacon of light for the oppressed peoples of the world including those millions who suffer in silence in the West.
Rather than following mere conjecture, we invite you to ponder, contemplate and think about the issues we have raised in this letter.
“But most of them follow nothing but conjecture: Truly conjecture can be of no avail against the truth. Verily Allah is well aware of what they do.” [TMQ Yunus: 36]
Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain