What The Muslims Did To Islam

While the great religion of Islam calls for peace, tolerance, freedom of belief and mutual understanding, almost the exact opposite has been happening in the so-called Islamic world. It is no wonder therefore that many “Muslim” nations of the world are in constant misery and turmoil through fighting and hostilities with their neighbors or each other. They are generally the least democratic and the most tyrannized people plagued with political and civil corruption. Also, they have relatively no religious tolerance and have little consideration towards the faith of their own people or the people of other nations.With the events of September 11, 2001 and those which followed it, there is more awareness today than ever about the religion of Islam and the state of Islamic countries. Many recognized the fact that the terrorists who killed innocent people in the name of Islam were indeed radical groups that have nothing to do with the main stream Islam. But more importantly, some people started realizing and questioning the wisdom and current state of so-called Islamic practices, and the need for returning to the real roots of Islam, Submission to the will of God, as practiced by Muhammad and those who truly followed him.

In an article called “What Went Wrong?” the January 2002 issue of Atlantic Monthly, the author Bernard Lewis has written the following:

By all standards of the modern world—economic development, literacy, scientific achievement —Muslim civilization, once a mighty enterprise, has fallen low. Many in the Middle East blame a variety of outside forces. But underlying much of the Muslim world's travail may be a simple lack of freedom.

…In the course of the twentieth century it became abundantly clear that things had gone badly wrong in the Middle East— and, indeed, in all the lands of Islam.

Compared with Christendom, its rival for more than a millennium, the world of Islam had become poor, weak, and ignorant…

The author continued with a question “Who did this to Muslims?” This is a frequently raised question in the discussion of the sad situation facing the people in the Islamic world, and people come up with several different answers. Some Muslims blame others for their misfortunes, which is usually the easiest way out. Some others blame the religion of Islam itself. But the author makes the following valid points:

If Islam is an obstacle to freedom, to science, to economic development, how is it that Muslim society in the past was a pioneer in all three—and this when Muslims were much closer in time to the sources and inspiration of their faith than they are now? Some have posed the question in a different form—not "What has Islam done to the Muslims?" but "What have the Muslims done to Islam?"—and have answered by laying the blame on specific teachers and doctrines and groups.

For those known nowadays as Islamists or fundamentalists, the failures and shortcomings of modern Islamic lands afflict those lands because they adopted alien notions and practices. They fell away from authentic Islam and thus lost their former greatness. Those known as modernists or re-formers take the opposite view, seeing the cause of this loss not in the abandonment but in the retention of old ways, and especially in the inflexibility and ubiquity of the Islamic clergy, who, they say, are responsible for the persistence of beliefs and practices that might have been creative and progressive a thousand years ago but are neither today. The modernists' usual tactic is not to denounce religion as such, still less Islam in particular, but to level their criticism against fanaticism. It is to fanaticism—and more particularly to fanatical religious authorities—that they attribute the stifling of the once great Islamic scientific movement and, more generally, of the freedom of thought and expression.

It’s the corrupt Muslim religious leaders who have turned the true religion of Islam into something virtually against what Prophet Mohammad preached 1400 years ago.

To better understand what the Muslims have done to Islam, let us list some of the things that “Muslims” practice against the teachings of God and His messenger, prescribed in the Quran.  (SEE TABLE BELOW)

Therefore, the author’s following assessment of the situation in the “Muslim” world is indeed valid. Unfortunately, it is the Muslims themselves who should realize what’s happening to their great religion and should wake up from their illusions and false pretense.

During the past few weeks the worldwide exposure given to the views and actions of Osama bin Laden and his hosts, the Taliban, has provided a new and vivid insight into the eclipse of what was once the greatest, most advanced, and most open civilization in human history.

To a Western observer, schooled in the theory and practice of Western freedom, it is precisely the lack of freedom—freedom of the mind from constraint and indoctrination, to question and inquire and speak; freedom of the economy from corrupt and pervasive mismanagement; freedom of women from male oppression; freedom of citizens from tyranny—that underlies so many of the troubles of the Muslim world.

By: Abdullah

The extent to which Islam (Submission) has been corrupted is illustrated in the following table:

Click on the verses to go directly to the Quran