Before and After Islam
How Islam fixed a backward people
By Sami Zaatari
http://muslim-responses.com/Before_and_After/Before_and_After_
Indeed Islam is the religion of Truth, a religion ordained by God, a religion
that came to fix the people in both their doctrine and way of life, taking them
from Darkness to the Light (The Qur'an 14:1, 57:9). Many anti-Islamics like to
claim otherwise, yet the facts speak for themselves, one of the most
interesting incident we read takes place during the Muslims' stay in Abyssinia,
where they were forced to flee due to pagan oppression in their own homeland. I
shall let the account speak for itself, the story comes from Ibn Ishaque's
Sirat Rasul Allah:
Then he summoned the apostle's companions, and when his messenger came they
gathered together, saying one to another, 'What will you say to the man when
you come to him?' They said, 'We shall say what we know and what our prophet
commanded us, come what may.' When they came into the royal presence they found
that the king had summoned his bishops with their sacred books and exposed
around him. He asked them what was the religion for which they had forsaken
their people, without entering into his religion or any other. Ja'far b. Abu
Talib answered, 'O King, we were an uncivilized people, worshipping idols,
eating corpses, committing abominations, breaking natural ties, treating guests
badly, and our strong devoured our weak. Thus we were until God sent us an
apostle whose lineage, truth, trustworthiness, and clemency we know. He
summoned us to acknowledge God's unity and to worship and to renounce the
stones and images which we and our fathers formerly
worshipped. He commanded us to speak the truth, be faithful to our
engagements, mindful of the ties of kinship and kindly hospitality, and to
refrain from crimes and bloodshed. He forbade us to commit abominations and to
speak lies, and to devour the property of orphans, to vilify chaste women. He
commanded us to worship God alone and not to associate anything with Him, and
he gave us orders about prayer, almsgiving, and fasting (enumerating the
commands of Islam). We confessed his truth and believed in him, and we followed
him in what he had brought from God, and we worshipped God alone without
associating aught with Him. We treated as forbidden what he forbade, and as
lawful what he declared lawful.' (Alfred, Guillaume. The Life of Muhammad, A
Translation of Ibn Ishaq's Sirat Rasu Allah. Oxford University press, 2002. PP.
151-152)
So notice the before and after, from darkness and into the Light, from
backwardness to civilized, from evil to good, from idolatry to monotheism. And
this is the religion and faith in which these Islamophobes want us the Muslims
to forsake? Indeed, if I wanted to go backwards, and leave the light, and go
back into darkness, idolatry, and polytheism, then yes, I would leave Islam.
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My Bangla Blog on Theism-Atheism and Religion:
http://amarblog.com/smraihan
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