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Islamic Renaissance – Mahathir MohamadBy Dr. Mahathir MohamadWe cannot fight them through muscles alone. We must use our brains also.ALHAMDULILLAH, All
Praise be to Allah, by whose Grace and Blessings we, the leaders of the
Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) countries are gathered here today
to confer and hopefully to plot a course for the future of Islam and the Muslim
ummah worldwide. On behalf of the Government and the people of many races and
religions of Malaysia, may I extend a warm welcome to all and everyone to this
10th Session of the Islamic Summit Conference in Putrajaya, Malaysia’s
administrative capital. It is indeed a great honour for Malaysia to host this
Session and to assume the chairmanship of the OIC. I thank the members for their
confidence in Malaysia’s chairmanship. May I also take this opportunity to pay a
special tribute to the State of Qatar, in particular His Highness Shaikh Hamad
Bin Khalifa AI-Thani, the Emir of the State of Qatar, for his outstanding
stewardship of our organisation over the past three years. As host, Malaysia is
gratified at the high level of participation from member countries. This clearly
demonstrates our continued and abiding faith in, and commitment to our
organisation and our collective wish and determination to strengthen our role
for the dignity and benefit of the ummah. I would also like to welcome the
leaders and representatives of the many countries who wish to become observers
at this meeting because of their substantial Muslim population. Whether they are
Muslims or not, their presence at this meeting will help towards greater
understanding of Islam and the Muslims, thus helping to disprove the perception
of Islam as a religion of backwardness and terror. The whole world is looking at
us. Certainly 1.3 billion Muslims, one-sixth of the world’s population are
placing their hopes in us, in this meeting, even though they may be cynical
about our will and capacity to even decide to restore the honour of Islam and
the Muslims, much less to free their brothers and sisters from the oppression
and humiliation from which they suffer today. I will not enumerate the instances
of our humiliation and oppression, nor will I once again condemn our detractors
and oppressors. It would be an exercise in futility because they are not going
to change their attitudes just because we condemn them. If we are to recover our
dignity and that of Islam, our religion, it is we who must decide, it is we who
must act. To begin with, the governments of all the Muslim countries can close
ranks and have a common stand if not on all issues, at least on some major ones,
such as on Palestine. We are all Muslims. We are all oppressed. We are all being
humiliated. But we who have been raised by Allah above our fellow Muslims to
rule our countries have never really tried to act in concert in order to exhibit
at our level the brotherhood and unity that Islam enjoins upon us. But not only
are our governments divided, the Muslim ummah is also divided, and divided again
and again. Over the last 1,400 years the interpreters of Islam, the learned
ones, the ulamas have interpreted and reinterpreted the single Islamic religion
brought by Prophet Muhammad S.A.W, so differently that now we have a thousand
religions which are often so much at odds with one another that we often fight
and kill each other. From being a single ummah we have allowed ourselves to be
divided into numerous sects, mazhabs and tarikats, each more concerned with
claiming to be the true Islam than our oneness as the Islamic ummah. We fail to
notice that our detractors and enemies do not care whether we are true Muslims
or not. To them we are all Muslims, followers of a religion and a Prophet whom
they declare promotes terrorism, and we are all their sworn enemies. They will
attack and kill us, invade our lands, bring down our governments whether we are
Sunnis or Syiahs, Alawait or Druse or whatever. And we aid and abet them by
attacking and weakening each other, and sometimes by doing their bidding, acting
as their proxies to attack fellow Muslims. We try to bring down our governments
through violence, succeeding to weaken and impoverish our countries. We ignore
entirely and we continue to ignore the Islamic injunction to unite and to be
brothers to each other, we the governments of the Islamic countries and the
ummah. But this is not all that we ignore about the teachings of Islam. We are
enjoined to Read, Iqraq, i.e. to acquire knowledge. The early Muslims took this
to mean translating and studying the works of the Greeks and other scholars
before Islam. And these Muslim scholars added to the body of knowledge through
their own studies. The early Muslims produced great mathematicians and
scientists, scholars, physicians and astronomers etc. and they excelled in all
the fields of knowledge of their times, besides studying and practising their
own religion of Islam. As a result the Muslims were able to develop and extract
wealth from their lands and through their world trade, able to strengthen their
defences, protect their people and give them the Islamic way of life, Addin, as
prescribed by Islam. At the time the Europeans of the Middle Ages were still
superstitious and backward, the enlightened Muslims had already built a great
Muslim civilisation, respected and powerful, more than able to compete with the
rest of the world and able to protect the ummah from foreign aggression. The
Europeans had to kneel at the feet of Muslim scholars in order to access their
own scholastic heritage. The Muslims were lead by great leaders like Abdul
Rahman III, AI-Mansur, Salah El Din AI Ayubi and others who took to the
battlefields at the head of their forces to protect Muslim land and the ummah.
But halfway through the building of the great Islamic civilisation came new
interpreters of Islam who taught that acquisition of knowledge by Muslims meant
only the study of Islamic theology. The study of science, medicine etc. was
discouraged. Intellectually the Muslims began to regress. With intellectual
regression the great Muslim civilisation began to falter and wither. But for the
emergence of the Ottoman warriors, Muslim civilisation would have disappeared
with the fall of Granada in 1492. The early successes of the Ottomans were not
accompanied by an intellectual renaissance. Instead they became more and more
preoccupied with minor issues such as whether tight trousers and peak caps were
Islamic, whether printing machines should be allowed or electricity used to
light mosques. The Industrial Revolution was totally missed by the Muslims. And
the regression continued until the British and French instigated rebellion
against Turkish rule brought about the downfall of the Ottomans, the last Muslim
world power and replaced it with European colonies and not independent states as
promised. It was only after World War II that these colonies became independent.
Apart from the new nation-states we also accepted the western democratic system.
This also divided us because of the political parties and groups that we form,
some of which claim Islam for themselves, reject the Islam of other parties and
refuse to accept the results of the practice of democracy if they fail to gain
power for themselves. They resort to violence, thus destabilising and weakening
Muslim countries. With all these developments over the centuries the ummah and
the Muslim civilisation became so weak that at one time there was not a single
Muslim country which was not colonised or hegemonised by the Europeans. But
regaining independence did not help to strengthen the Muslims. Their states were
weak and badly administered, constantly in a state of turmoil. The Europeans
could do what they liked with Muslim territories. It is not surprising that they
should excise Muslim land to create the state of Israel to solve their Jewish
problem. Divided, the Muslims could do nothing effective to stop the Balfour and
Zionist transgression. Some would have us believe that, despite all these, our
life is better than that of our detractors. Some believe that poverty is
Islamic, sufferings and being oppressed are Islamic. This world is not for us.
Ours are the joys of heaven in the afterlife. All that we have to do is to
perform certain rituals, wear certain garments and put up a certain appearance.
Our weakness, our backwardness and our inability to help our brothers and
sisters who are being oppressed are part of the Will of Allah, the sufferings
that we must endure before enjoying heaven in the hereafter. We must accept this
fate that befalls us. We need not do anything. We can do nothing against the
Will of Allah. But is it true that it is the Will of Allah and that we can and
should do nothing? Allah has said in Surah Ar-Ra’d verse 11 that He will not
change the fate of a community until the community has tried to change its fate
itself. The early Muslims were as oppressed as we are presently. But after their
sincere and determined efforts to help themselves in accordance with the
teachings of Islam, Allah had helped them to defeat their enemies and to create
a great and powerful Muslim civilisation. But what effort have we made
especially with the resources that He has endowed us with. We are now 1.3
billion strong. We have the biggest oil reserve in the world. We have great
wealth. We are not as ignorant as the Jahilliah who embraced Islam. We are
familiar with the workings of the world’s economy and finances. We control 50
out of the 180 countries in the world. Our votes can make or break international
organisations. Yet we seem more helpless than the small number of Jahilliah
converts who accepted the Prophet as their leader. Why? Is it because of Allah’s
will or is it because we have interpreted our religion wrongly, or failed to
abide by the correct teachings of our religion, or done the wrong things? We are
enjoined by our religion to prepare for the defence of the ummah. Unfortunately
we stress not defence but the weapons of the time of the Prophet. Those weapons
and horses cannot help to defend us any more. We need guns and rockets, bombs
and warplanes, tanks and warships for our defence. But because we discouraged
the learning of science and mathematics etc as giving no merit for the akhirat,
today we have no capacity to produce our own weapons for our defence. We have to
buy our weapons from our detractors and enemies. This is what comes from the
superficial interpretation of the Quran, stressing not the substance of the
Prophet’s sunnah and the Quran’s injunctions but rather the form, the manner and
the means used in the 1st Century of the Hijrah. And it is the same with the
other teachings of Islam. We are more concerned with the forms rather than the
substance of the words of Allah and adhering only to the literal interpretation
of the traditions of the Prophet. We may want to recreate the first century of
the Hijrah, the way of life in those times, in order to practise what we think
to be the true Islamic way of life. But we will not be allowed to do so. Our
detractors and enemies will take advantage of the resulting backwardness and
weakness in order to dominate us. Islam is not just for the 7th Century A.D.
Islam is for all times. And times have changed. Whether we like it or not we
have to change, not by changing our religion but by applying its teachings in
the context of a world that is radically different from that of the first
century of the Hijrah. Islam is not wrong but the interpretations by our
scholars, who are not prophets even though they may be very learned, can be
wrong. We have a need to go back to the fundamental teachings of Islam to find
out whether we are indeed believing in and practising the Islam that the Prophet
preached. It cannot be that we are all practising the correct and true Islam
when our beliefs are so different from one another. Today we, the whole Muslim
ummah are treated with contempt and dishonour. Our religion is denigrated. Our
holy places desecrated. Our countries are occupied. Our people starved and
killed. None of our countries are truly independent. We are under pressure to
conform to our oppressors’ wishes about how we should behave, how we should
govern our lands, how we should think even. Today if they want to raid our
country, kill our people, destroy our villages and towns, there is nothing
substantial that we can do. Is it Islam which has caused all these? Or is it
that we have failed to do our duty according to our religion? Our only reaction
is to become more and more angry. Angry people cannot think properly. And so we
find some of our people reacting irrationally. They launch their own attacks,
killing just about anybody including fellow Muslims to vent their anger and
frustration. Their governments can do nothing to stop them. The enemy retaliates
and puts more pressure on the governments. And the governments have no choice
but to give in, to accept the directions of the enemy, literally to give up
their independence of action. With this their people and the ummah become
angrier and turn against their own governments. Every attempt at a peaceful
solution is sabotaged by more indiscriminate attacks calculated to anger the
enemy and prevent any peaceful settlement. But the attacks solve nothing. The
Muslims simply get more oppressed. There is a feeling of hopelessness among the
Muslim countries and their people. They feel that they can do nothing right.
They believe that things can only get worse. The Muslims will forever be
oppressed and dominated by the Europeans and the Jews. They will forever be
poor, backward and weak. Some believe, as I have said, this is the Will of
Allah, that the proper state of the Muslims is to be poor and oppressed in this
world. But is it true that we should do and can do nothing for ourselves? Is it
true that 1.3 billion people can exert no power to save themselves from the
humiliation and oppression inflicted upon them by a much smaller enemy? Can they
only lash back blindly in anger? Is there no other way than to ask our young
people to blow themselves up and kill people and invite the massacre of more of
our own people? It cannot be that there is no other way. 1.3 billion Muslims
cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only
find a way if we stop to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to
plan, to strategise and then to counter-attack. As Muslims we must seek guidance
from the Al-Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet. Surely the 23 years’ struggle
of the Prophet can provide us with some guidance as to what we can and should
do. We know he and his early followers were oppressed by the Qhuraish. Did he
launch retaliatory strikes? No. He was prepared to make strategic retreats. He
sent his early followers to a Christian country and he himself later migrated to
Madinah. There he gathered followers, built up his defence capability and
ensured the security of his people. At Hudaibiyah he was prepared to accept an
unfair treaty, against the wishes of his companions and followers. During the
peace that followed he consolidated his strength and eventually he was able to
enter Mecca and claim it for Islam. Even then he did not seek revenge. And the
peoples of Mecca accepted Islam and many became his most powerful supporters,
defending the Muslims against all their enemies. That briefly is the story of
the struggle of the Prophet. We talk so much about following the sunnah of the
Prophet. We quote the instances and the traditions profusely. But we actually
ignore all of them. If we use the faculty to think that Allah has given us then
we should know that we are acting irrationally. We fight without any objective,
without any goal other than to hurt the enemy because they hurt us. Naively we
expect them to surrender. We sacrifice lives unnecessarily, achieving nothing
other than to attract more massive retaliation and humiliation. It is surely
time that we pause to think. But will this be wasting time? For well over half a
century we have fought over Palestine. What have we achieved? Nothing. We are
worse off than before. If we had paused to think then we could have devised a
plan, a strategy that can win us final victory. Pausing and thinking calmly is
not a waste of time. We have a need to make a strategic retreat and to calmly
assess our situation. We are actually very strong. 1.3 billion people cannot be
simply wiped out. The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million. But
today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for
them. We may not be able to do that. We may not be able to unite all the 1.3
billion Muslims. We may not be able to get all the Muslim Governments to act in
concert. But even if we can get a third of the ummah and a third of the Muslim
states to act together, we can already do something. Remember that the Prophet
did not have many followers when he went to Madinah. But he united the Ansars
and the Muhajirins and eventually he became strong enough to defend Islam. Apart
from the partial unity that we need, we must take stock of our assets. I have
already mentioned our numbers and our oil wealth. In today’s world we wield a
lot of political, economic and financial clout, enough to make up for our
weakness in military terms. We also know that not all non-Muslims are against
us. Some are well disposed towards us. Some even see our enemies as their
enemies. Even among the Jews there are many who do not approve of what the
Israelis are doing. We must not antagonise everyone. We must win their hearts
and minds. We must win them to our side not by begging for help from them but by
the honourable way that we struggle to help ourselves. We must not strengthen
the enemy by pushing everyone into their camps through irresponsible and
unIslamic acts. Remember Salah El Din and the way he fought against the
so-called Crusaders, King Richard of England in particular. Remember the
considerateness of the Prophet to the enemies of Islam. We must do the same. It
is winning the struggle that is important, not angry retaliation, not revenge.
We must build up our strength in every field, not just in armed might. Our
countries must be stable and well administered, must be economically and
financially strong, industrially competent and technologically advanced. This
will take time, but it can be done and it will be time well spent. We are
enjoined by our religion to be patient. Innallahamaasabirin. Obviously there is
virtue in being patient. But the defence of the ummah, the counter-attack, need
not start only after we have put our houses in order. Even today we have
sufficient assets to deploy against our detractors. It remains for us to
identify them and to work out how to make use of them to stop the carnage caused
by the enemy. This is entirely possible if we stop to think, to plan, to
strategise and to take the first few critical steps. Even these few steps can
yield positive results. We know that the Jahilliah Arabs were given to feuding,
to killing each other simply because they were from different tribes. The
Prophet preached the brotherhood of Islam to them and they were able to overcome
their hatred for each other, become united and helped towards the establishment
of the great Muslim civilisation. Can we say that what the Jahilliah (the
ignorant) could do we, the modern Muslims cannot do? If not all at least some of
us can do. If not the renaissance of our great civilisation, at least ensuring
the security of the ummah. To do the things that are suggested will not even
require all of us to give up our differences with each other. We need only to
call a truce so we can act together in tackling only certain problems of common
interests, the Palestine problem for example. In any struggle, in any war,
nothing is more important than concerted and coordinated action. A degree of
discipline is all that is needed. The Prophet lost in Jabal Uhud because his
forces broke rank. We know that, yet we are unwilling to discipline ourselves
and to give up our irregular and uncoordinated actions. We need to be brave but
not foolhardy. We need to think not just of our reward in the afterlife but also
of the worldly results of our mission. The Quran tells us that when the enemy
sues for peace we must react positively. True the treaty offered is not
favourable to us. But we can negotiate. The Prophet did, at Hudaibiyah. And in
the end he triumphed. I am aware that all these ideas will not be popular. Those
who are angry would want to reject it out of hand. They would even want to
silence anyone who makes or supports this line of action. They would want to
send more young men and women to make the supreme sacrifice. But where will all
these lead to? Certainly not victory. Over the past 50 years of fighting in
Palestine we have not achieved any result. We have in fact worsened our
situation. The enemy will probably welcome these proposals and we will conclude
that the promoters are working for the enemy. But think. We are up against a
people who think. They survived 2000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but
by thinking. They invented and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human
rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they
may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of
the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world
power. We cannot fight them through brawn alone. We must use our brains also. Of
late because of their power and their apparent success they have become
arrogant. And arrogant people, like angry people will make mistakes, will forget
to think. They are already beginning to make mistakes. And they will make more
mistakes. There may be windows of opportunity for us now and in the future. We
must seize these opportunities. But to do so we must get our acts right.
Rhetoric is good. It helps us to expose the wrongs perpetrated against us,
perhaps win us some sympathy and support. It may strengthen our spirit, our will
and resolve, to face the enemy. We can and we should pray to Allah S.W.T. for in
the end it is He who will determine whether we succeed or fail. We need His
blessings and His help in our endeavours, But it is how we act and what we do
which will determine whether He would help us and give us victory or not. He has
already said so in the Quran. Again Surah Ar-Ra’d verse 11. As I said at the
beginning, the whole world is looking at us; the whole Muslim ummah is placing
their hopes in this conference of the leaders of Islamic nations. They expect us
not just to vent our frustrations and anger, through words and gestures, not
just to pray for Allah’s blessings. They expect us to do something, to act. We
cannot say we cannot do anything, we the leaders of the Muslim nations. We
cannot say we cannot unite even when faced with the destruction of our religion
and the ummah. We know we can. There are many things that we can do. There are
many resources that we have at our disposal. What is needed is merely the will
to do it, As Muslims, we must be grateful for the guidance of our religion, we
must do what needs to be done, willingly and with determination. Allah has not
raised us, the leaders, above the others so we may enjoy power for ourselves
only. The power we wield is for our people, for the ummah, for Islam. We must
have the will to make use of this power judiciously, prudently, concertedly.
Insyaallah we will triumph in the end. I pray to Allah that this 10th Conference
of the OIC in Putrajaya, Malaysia, will give a new and positive direction to us,
will be blessed with success by Him, Almighty Allah, Arahman, Arahirn. Source: http://africaradicalvoice.blogspot.com/2006/11/we-cannot-fight-them-through-muscles.html |
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