THE MISTAKES THAT MAN MAKES

THE MISTAKES THAT MAN MAKES
By: Kassim Ahmad
4th April, 2016
darul_hikmah333@yahoo.com.my

At times I wonder whether man is a tragedy or not. Considering the mistakes, big and small,  that he makes against all odds, one loses faith in the human being. No wonder when God informed the angels that He was going to create man, the angels protested. They averred that he was going to cause destruction and shed blood. Except that God replied to the protestation of the angels that He knew better. God, being All-Knowing, knew the good side of man. (See Quran, 2: 30)
One million years of man’s history on earth has vindicated God’s optimism of man. He was not only a warlike and a warring creature; he was also a builder of civilizations. This side of man happens to be the stronger side of him.
I shall now enumerate the mistakes, the big ones first. God informs us in the Quran that most people do not believe in Him; even those who believe in Him do not do so without associating Him with His creatures. Even most Muslims do not believe that God alone is sufficient for them. They need Prophet Muhammad to be a god besides God! Hence the two syahadahs! How they can ignore the clear injuction against the second syahadah in Surah 63: verse 1 is beyond me!
This is a most glaring mistake that essentially has led to their downfall.  Note also that this is the one sin not forgiven by God.
The wonder is: “Where are their teachers of religion?”  Those that have graduated from universities in the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. Note also that the Al-Azhar University in Cairo is the oldest university in the world, prior to other famous centres of learning, including Oxford and Cambridge.
All prophet-messengers of God, from Adam to Muhammad, including Abraham, Moses and Jesus, taught the essential Divine message of the acknowledgement  of the One true God for all mankind, otherwise called the religion of submission or Islam. Note that Quran names twenty-five of them. Many others, hundreds of them, are not named. We know that there are many others because God informs us that He sent messengers to all human communities.
That being so, we can now see that what has come to be the religion of Judaism is not the religion taught by Moses, and  the religion of Christianity not the religion taught by Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ was not a Christian; he was a Muslim. It was Paul, a Jew who later turned Christian, who turned Christ into a Son of God.
For that matter, the completed and perfected religion of Islam brought by the last of the prophets, Prophet Muhammad, with its protected scripture, the Quran, did not escape this corruption.  Three hundred years after him, Islam broke into sects, Sunnism being the majority sect. The master-architect was none other than Shafi’e (767-820), who introduced the doctrine two principal sources, the Quran and the Sunnah/Hadith.
When Prophet Muhammad migrated to Medina, he granted to the community a constitution called the Medina Charter, the first written constitution in the world. It is unfortunate that our present teachers of religion almost never mention this great legal document of Islam (Dato’ Din has kindly published this along with my comments in this blog.) when they endlessly quote the so-called hadiths.
The so-called Hudud law (fixed punishments) is another great mistake. It is nowhere mentioned in the Medina Charter. It is a misinterpretation of some frases in the Quran. The current fashion of headscarf (the tudung) for Muslim women is another. Thirty five years ago Muslim women in Malaysia wear the selendang, a partial headscarf. The simple proof  that a woman’s hair is not ‘aurat (nakedness) is that when she takes ablution she has to wipe her head.
Why all these deviations, when the Quran is with us? Man’s tendency to revert back after the teacher is gone. In own souls, there are two opposite tendencies: one pushing us up, and the other pulling us down.
The wonder is, it is so easy to correct ourselves. Why don’t we do it?
 
KASSIM AHMAD is a Malaysian freelance writer. His website is www.kassimahmad.blogspot.com