Islam and Our Common Human Future

Islam and Our Common Human Future

I am not a Muslim as normally understood. However my heart was filled with hope when I heard Amr Khaled talk the other day on the BBC World Service.

It was a joy to hear positive, constructive caring thoughts emanating from what many fear is the negative, nihilistic, uncaring parts of the world as created by many declared followers of the man they see as God’s last great prophet. From what we know of Mohammed’s life and work he was a positive, constructive caring human being. He never allowed rules, even his own, to stand in the way of his compassion. His caring sense of the justice he knew God wished for those willing to follow him out of the love warmth and devotion they felt for their caring, compassionate, merciful God was always evident.

Student’s (Taliban) of God and the Prophet may fear him. One should perhaps ask how could they fear such a God? They clearly feel that it is only by their own strict adherence, and their willingness to enforce that on others, to their understanding of God’s law that they can hope through their own lack of compassion to access God's mercy. This is a strange aspiration give the Prophet's and God's own compassion and mercy.

Language, and humanity's capacity to understand it, is always limited. We do not only communicate in words. Our bodies and our unarticulated feelings also speak for us. Thi sis true even when the words we use are those originally spoken by God in Arabic then recorded for us by the Prophet in the Qu'ran. Human beings are demonstrably capable of misinterpreting each other when speaking to their brother or sister how can we expect them to be any better at interpreting God's meaning.

How can any of us have the arrogance to believe that in our ill educated flawed minds ,especially when using Arabic as our second language, we can grasp God’s true intent. We may do so but not through mere consideration of the words and phrases God chose to utter. In them are decriptions of the object of our devotion and a guide to God’s hopes for our action but how can our own or other’s interpretations of these be anything but flawed.

The emotional content of God’s, and his Prophet’s, messages to humanity are clear in the Qu'ran and the Haddith but not just in the words. One can not read these in isolation from their intent. God’s message is surely for each man to help heal the schisms between God’s children. We are expectd to do so by exemplifying for others, in the goodness of one’s own life, the path others they can follow to find the unity God seeks for humanity. The rules God and the Haddith suggest for those who come to accept God’s hope for his people on his Way are merely means by which God’s followers can express for others the closeness they feel to the at-one-ment that is God’s will.

These intents are manifest in rules God suggests would support human at-one-ness: all humanity should pray at the same time in the same direction with the same purpose every day; at least for part of the year, Ramadan, all men should live as the very poorest so we can truly feel this at-one-ness; differences between men and women that engage lust rather than love and mutual care should be de-emphasised, so that men and women meet as human beings not only objects of sexual desire, etc.

The emotional intelligence and spiritual love through which each of us chooses to approach their understanding of God’s will is sureyy far more important than rigid adherence to ones own or any other human beings limited capacity to understand the will of God as expressed in words in an unfamiliar language

God the merciful, compassionate and all powerful surely understands the validity of our emotions and knows the truth of our love for him and others. God does not need recourse to our spoken or thought words nor on our limited capacity to understand what he deems as right or wrong. How therefore can any of us presume to judge anything right or wrong on God’s behalf.

We may collectively feel we need social order. The pursuit of this is however in our selfish human interest in security. This is not necessarily co-incident with God’s will. It is dangerous for anyone to be arrogant enough to presume it so.

Until 1400, and the closing of the Gate’s of Ishtehad, the Ummah of Islam, scattered along the ancient "Silk Route" that linked East to West, contained within its bounds the most tolerant (Islam forbids compunction in belief) haven (highly protective of individual liberty) on the planet for scholars artists and creative thinkers to relax, mature and grow. If these Gate’s could now be re-opened as Amr Kkaled seems to wish, then Islam might find its Way to the "The Global Silk Road" the Internet. The potential of this to unite mankind commercially, creatively and emotionally is considerable and on fullfilment would unite mankind in a manner consistent with God’s intent as expressed in the Qu'ran.

If this is God’s purpose for me, and the Qu'ran and the Prophet say it is, then I to am a Muslim and more and more of us would be willing so to declare themselves so whither they profess as Christians, Jews, Sikh, Hindus, Taoists or agnostics. Could current Islamic Christian or Jewish believers accept this? I fear not.