Religion and Social Change Debate

Despite the claims of those who say that religion is just status qua-est and always sides with the oppressors being an obstacle to social change, what is most interesting to notice is that almost all of the religious Messengers (or founders) of major religions were against the status-qua order, fought openly with the oppressors liberating the oppressed. Moses against Pharaoh. Hazrat Abraham against Namrood. Prophet Muhammad against Abu Jahal and company. The social changes they brought were perhaps the most stupendous and most enduring that history has ever produced.

Emptiness

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What is all about this emptiness I am hearing these days? I first heard it from a professor at my university who was an atheist and then came back to Islam, or perhaps converted to it. When he was asked why did reverted to islam? He had everything, he studied at oxford, was a Marxist activist and all that. What he said he did not have was peace. He said he felt "emptiness". Then I heard from him the testaments of other converted Muslims who re-uttered the same word: emptiness. Today, I was hearing to Imam Suhaib Webb, the lecturer at Al-Azhar, also himself an Al-Azhari. He says, "I had success, in material terms, but internally i was very "empty". So i was asking to myself, "Why do you feel depressed? Why do you feel sad, if you have girls, the money, the DJ, the clubs, everything is going well but why do you feel internally this "emptiness"?" These are all his words. However, he searched about 'who his Creator was' and came to accept islam.

"Boys will be Boys"

Theory of liberation of women and equality of sexes really needs to be revised today. i become more and more convinced of its fallibility the more i study and analyze the nature of the sexes in the light of scientific and anthropological data, and the aftermaths of the so-called liberation movement of women in West. It seems quite clear to me, the result has been more of another kind of enslavement of the female sex with catastrophic consequences for the society at large, a crisis which humanity may never have witnessed before. Shaykh Abdul-Hakim provides a candid, objective analysis of these issues, while also providing Ummah with the critique of Islam on gender-based issues, which if misunderstood at the hands of Western education/prophets of modern education who are storming the lecture rooms iof our "up-to-date," "INTERNATIONAL STANDARD" universities and colleges, can have severe consequences for Muslim community. Shaykh Abdul-Hakim Murad writes:

"I have been asked to offer some comments on gender identity issues as these impact on Muslims living in post-traditional contexts in the West, and particularly as they affect people who have traded up to the Great Covenant of Islam after an upbringing in Judaism or Christianity. The usual way of doing this is by examining issues in the classical fiqh, and explaining how Islam’s discourse of equality functions globally, not on the micro-level of each fiqh ruling. That method is legitimate enough (although as we shall see the concept of ‘equality’ may raise considerable problems), but in general my experience of Muslim talk on gender is that there is too much apologetic abroad, apologetic, that is, in the sense not only of polemical defence, but also of pleas entered in mitigation. What I want to do today is to bypass this recurrent and often tiresome approach, which reveals so much about the low serotonin levels of its advocates, and suggest how as Western Muslims we can construct a language of gender which offers not a defence or mitigation of current Muslim attitudes and establishments, but a credible strategy for resolving dilemmas which the Western thinkers and commentators around us are now meticulously examining.

Let me begin, then, by trying to capture in a few words the current crisis in Western gender discourse. As good a place as any to do this is Germaine Greer’s book The Whole Woman, released in 1999 to an interesting mix of befuddled anger and encomia from the press."

Read the rest of the article here. Its really interesting and eye-opening.