Freedom & Islam: Part 1

[Sha]

Peace everyone...

I am still working on this essay. Just thought I'll get some comments, opinions and suggestions from freeminders. So the first draft of the first section of this article is here. Enjoy!

Freedom
& Islam

With Islam came the Scientific-Spiritual Age initiated by Muhammad, the last Prophet of God. It was a time of liberation, enlightenment and reason. Islam had not come as a religion but as a system that unchained man from dogma, economic servitude and social problems. By doing this it nurtured and propelled mankind?s mental, spiritual and material leap in time. This was made possible because ?freedom? happened to be the rallying cry of the Islamic faith. But the concept of freedom in Islam differs from what Western civilization has come to believe. In Islam, freedom is not an unattainable and utopian ideal but a reality based on solid foundations and rationale. As you will discover in the paragraphs to come, Islam was and is the true liberator.

Spiritual emancipation
Intellectual emancipation
Physical emancipation

Spiritual emancipation

We begin by discussing the essence of the Islamic faith. The literal meaning of the word Islam is ?submission? or ?surrender?. The basis of this surrender is ?belief in One God?. In Islam, you believe in the one God and submit to God alone to the dismay of many gods. This concept alone forms the basis of freedom in Islam.

In our search for freedom, there are four choices

Must we surrender?

The first choice is not to surrender. This is the present belief regarding freedom established by the Western civilization. Freedom and surrender, they will claim, contradict each other and therefore cannot co-exist. This argument is fine in refutation of the existence of freedom with surrender. But there is a presupposition Absolute freedom exists and it is possible.

The question to be placed to this machine-age logic is Does absolute freedom exist?

If it can be proven that absolute freedom is impossible and does not exist, would that imply that the next best thing to absolute freedom is maximum freedom? And if maximum freedom is the freedom we should aspire, and not absolute freedom, then what is this maximum freedom and how shall we achieve it?

Let us look at a few examples. When you get up and drink a glass of water, you surrender to your thirst. When you eat food, you surrender to your hunger. When you obey your parents, you surrender to their desires. When you protect your country, you surrender to the King or the Parliament of the nation. Every action has behind it submission to some form of willpower. It could be yourself, your parents, your Parliament or your needs. If there is nothing that you surrender to nothing happens.

So as far as absolute freedom goes, it does not exist. Since it does not exist you cannot achieve it. This is a logical fallacy which you cannot overcome. The best you can do is to aspire for maximum freedom and achieve it. And this is exactly what Islam promises a rational and achievable objective compared to the unachievable and utopian ideal professed by the West today.

Surrender to yourself

Since ?absolute freedom? does not exist, it is this second possibility which the West practically aspires to as their version of ?freedom?. Let us consider the actuality and affects of this kind of freedom.

Before we do that please notice that we are ?surrendering?, even if to ourselves. So freedom, in its most basic, has to exist with surrender. The only question now is what or who to surrender to. Here we observe the bent of mind of a man, and a society, when he submits to his own desires.

Surrendering yourself to your will gives you unlimited possibilities. You have become your own god. The only rule or law that you abide by is the achievement and accomplishment of your desire, through any and all means. Morality has no meaning since morality exists in a social context and you don?t care about the society, only about yourself. You are moral only as long as it fits your purpose. You abide by laws only as long as you fear being caught.

The exhilaration of such freedom is enchanting. You can now lie, deceive, steal, cause pain and indulge at will. Nothing internal stops you from exploiting a dying man, disobeying and hurting your old parents, effecting financial fraud to the loss of many, killing a man for his gold watch, and so on. This is the maximum freedom you desired, the utopia you were promised and this is all you sought.

It seems that you live in a perfect world. Since it is such bliss, let us say that everyone else also wants this kind of maximum freedom and the bliss that comes with it. And they attain with ease because they obviously don?t have to ask you or anyone else. They only have to follow their own desires to achieve it. Just like for you, neither morality nor law will stand in their way.

So if everyone is free to do as their heart desires, what happens? You killed someone for his gold watch; someone will kill you for your gold watch. You organized a swindle to rob people of their wealth; someone will rob your wealth with an even better swindle. You disobeyed and disrespected your old parents; your children will do the same to you. You exploited a dying man; you will also be exploited as a dying man.

Man?s base desires form the basis of all evil committed by man; submission to your own will is the same as surrendering to the devil. In a society of such men hunger prevails, exploitation is rampant, children die and women are raped. And all this is done mercilessly and unrepentantly. There is no end to the destruction caused by man?s submission to himself. Surrendering to himself, man achieves what he set out to achieve the end of civilization.

In his search for freedom, man becomes a slave to his own cravings. If anything, this is slavery and not freedom. Submitting to yourself is definitely not the way to freedom.

Islam, on the other hand, by telling you to surrender to God absolves man from the slavery of his own base instinct.

Surrender to gods

This is the route taken by most man-made religions or present-day distortions of Divine guidance. This is also the route taken by men who feel a moral obligation to their nation, their parents, their family and their friends. This moral obligation builds in them a desire to be ?appropriately inclined? towards most people they meet in life. They thus surrender to a ?higher morality? in their search for human happiness.

The two cases are very different. Submission to gods, in the religious sense, causes you to accept the moral and social authority of Priests, Imams, Pandits and religious leaders by other names. Where a Prophet was involved, as he is in all Devine religions, humans have a tendency of placing their Prophet in the same league as God as far as obeying is concerned. This authority is first bestowed on the Prophet by the clergy, and eventually shared by the clergy along with the Prophet because of their so-called ability to interpret and explain what God requires from man for man?s salvation. The clergy first makes the Prophet, and then themselves, gods alongside God.

Let us say that people surrender to a religious clergy and its interpretation of religion of what is right and what is wrong. This gives rise to competing clergies that want to have their way with your faith. And thus surface the religious sects we are so aware of. Present-day Islam is as much a victim of this same distortion as have been other Devine religions.

When you obey God, the Prophet, the Priests/Imams of a bygone and revered era, and members of your present-day clergy, you are obeying a chaos of opinions and contradictions. You have surrendered to so many gods that it is humanly impossible to discern the truth from the falsehood. Faced with such impossibility, you stop thinking. And this is just what the greedy clerical order requires of you blind obedience to whichever school of thought you belong to. They control the gates of heaven and hell, and they care not what you do with your life as long as you revere them in the name of religion.

Surrendering to many gods (dressed as religious leaders) results in the end of human reason faced with the ?divine truth? championed by the clergy; and it completes the subjugation of the spirit at the hands of forces suppressing light, truth and the right way. While your body is still free, slavery of the soul thus begins.

To people who submit to a higher morality, the question of what this morality is difficult, if not impossible, to answer. What will be the guiding principles of that morality and who defines them is answered by each one according to his level of maturity and comprehension of the Divine principles. In their search for these principles, most of these people will read and refer to philosophers that have searched the secret to human happiness throughout history. The philosophers used reason and logic to discern these eternal principles and these submitters to a higher morality use human reason to discern the ?correct combination of principles? discovered by various philosophers.

Submission to gods, in the philosophical sense, is as close to the concept of one God as you can possibly get, without getting there. Since the end objective is to find out what this ?higher morality? is, the submission to gods (human philosophers) is temporal it is part of the exercise of finding the one true God. The philosophers and their ideas become the means through which you reach to God?s System, the absolutely perfect set of laws available to mankind.

So while this is not the worst kind of slavery, it is still a step behind complete emancipation.

Surrender to God alone

Islam literally means ?surrender? and is an invitation to God?s System, the absolutely perfect set of laws available to mankind. The creed of Abraham is sighted as the one to be followed. God tells us

(2131) - When his Lord said to him ?Surrender?, he said ?I surrender to the Lord of the worlds.?

(2135) - And they said ?Be Jews or Nazarenes so that you may be guided!? Say ?No, rather the creed of Abraham, monotheism; for he was not one of those who set-up partners.?

Surrendering to God alone relieves you of the burdens, the shackles and the dogmas that have been placed by religious distortions of the clergy.

(7157) - ?Those who follow the gentile messenger prophet whom they find written for them in the Torah and the Injeel; he orders them to goodness, and deters them from evil, and he makes lawful for them the good things, and he forbids for them the evil, and he removes their burden and the shackles that are upon them. So those who believe in him, and honour him, and support him, and follow the light that was sent down with him; these are the successful.?

God considers no one but himself as the lawgiver, and no one but himself as the one to be obeyed.

(2163) - And your god is but One god, there is no god but He; the Almighty, the Most Merciful.

Since absolute freedom does not exist, surrendering to many gods leads to chaos and surrendering to yourself leads to slavery of the worst kind ? the only objective alternative is to submit to God alone as God suggests. Submitting to God alone means submitting to God?s System, the perfect system He has bestowed us with.

Agreeing to this basic argument (the Oneness of God Almighty and obeying only His laws) till now, non-Muslims would wonder why they should submit to the God of the Muslims. Language plays tricks with our mind. The word ?Muslim?, even though used as such to depict the followers of various sects and man-made religions, is not a noun. It is an adjective with the meaning ?submitter?. Feel free to call yourself submitter or some similar word in the English language or any other. But we must all still submit to the ?Lord of the worlds?, and please notice that it is not ?Lord of the Muslim world?.

To traditional Muslims would occur two problems at this point Fear of not loving their beloved Prophet enough and fear of not being blindly obedient as the clergy has taught them to be. To them I say if you want to follow hearsay and conjecture, be my guest. But if you want to discover the truth, you will have to think, question, and attempt to comprehend God?s System, its perfection and its universality.

(1124) - The example of the two groups is like the blind and deaf, and the seer and hearer. Are they the same when compared? Do you not take heed?

Surrendering to God alone leads you to true spiritual emancipation. You have no one to fear but He, no one to obey but He and no one to please but He. Focus relieves you of anxiety and ensures your commitment to God?s perfect system.

There is one little condition God will guide you to His perfect system if only you take heed. So in Islam, belief is not blind or deaf. You are not expected to accept what you do not agree with. God reveals His System to you but your mind is perfectly capable of comprehending it and applying it in your lives.

(1644) - With clarity and the Psalms. And We sent down to you the Reminder to make clear to the people what was sent to them, and perhaps they will think.

By requiring you to think, to question and to see the truth Islam relieves you from adherence to dogma and servitude to the beliefs of your forefathers. This freedom becomes the cornerstone of your emancipation. For without it, you would be unable to unravel the mysteries of this universe.

In reference to God?s system, one clarification must be repeated. Islam does not demand compliance to a system you inherently, deeply and intellectually don?t agree with.

(223) - And if you are in doubt as to what We have sent down to Our servant, then bring a chapter like this, and call upon your witnesses other than God if you are truthful.

Now here is the challenge to humanity. God is inviting you to test the validity of His wisdom and allow yourself to be persuaded only by the truth. If Plato, Aristotle and others can attempt to uncover eternal principles by use of the human mind, I am certain we can do much better given some Divine assistance.

Spiritual emancipation in Islam, therefore, has a simple and sound basis belief in God alone.