Obey the messenger - analogy?
-
Many sunnis consistently fall back on 'obey the messenger' as a justification for following other than God.
Most of us will say the messenger was to be obeyed in his role as a messenger and nothing else (IOW his message).
Sunnis/shias etc will then say who was the messenger? Muhammad - therefore we must obey him and thus his hadith.
Having pondered over how to overcome this point with them (assuming they want the truth) I thought maybe we could compare the analogy of following the messenger with following a doctor.
A doctor as an individual (i.e. John Smith) may have many repulsive habits such as smoking etc. and what he does in his free time is separate to the advice he would dispense as a doctor.
This is not to say Muhammad was not a person of the utmost integrity, but a line must be drawn between him and the messenger in the same way that a doctor is separate from the individual who is a doctor.
In other words follow/obey the doctor would not = follow/obey John Smith.
Would this help people? Or is this a rubbish analogy?
-
People need time to look at the evidence on their own, evaluate it and decide if they have the integrity to do the right thing.
Salam Roshan,
Nice words and very true. When in a discussion, people will not look at evidence properly as they quickly jump/try to defend their belief. When it is laid out to them, and they read it in their own time, it begins to sink in. And it becomes much easier to accept!
Regards
Ramzi
-
Salam Roshan,
Nice words and very true. When in a discussion, people will not look at evidence properly as they quickly jump/try to defend their belief. When it is laid out to them, and they read it in their own time, it begins to sink in. And it becomes much easier to accept!
Regards
Ramzi
Peace
On youtube or anywhere I else I post, I always try not to get personal (although I fail sometimes). Just recently I discussed with a Sunni who admitted nowhere does the Quran tell us to follow hadith/sunna and that the Quran tells us not to follow hadith besides it. Of course he will not accept Islam immediately, but maybe later he may look back at that discussion as the start of what got him thinking.
I myself owe a debt of gratitude to Aisha Musa (a religious scholar from Harvard). She seems like an extremely intelligent lady.
Roshan
-
Salam,
Obeying the messenger=obeying the message=the message is the Quran
Salam,
Arnab