Prosecute Islam, but not Unilaterally

A very good idea...!

Raziya

The Muslim Times | Alislam |  Subscribe Prosecute Islam, but not Unilaterally Epigraph: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever." President Thomas Jefferson Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD After the recent bombing in Boston last week, Jenan Moussa, a journalist for Dubai-based Al-Aan TV, retweeted the message "Please don't be a 'Muslim'" and added that the plea was "The thought of every Muslim right now." Moussa's message was forwarded more than 200 times. A large number of the Muslims sympathized and prayed for the deceased and other victims, especially those who lost their limbs.  At the same time most Muslims had another emotion, an emotion of fear, which the non-Muslims did not have to go through. They were afraid of a backlash.  How reasonable is it to keep millions of Muslims living in the West, in this fear of prejudice and backlash, for the crime of a few bad apples, who commit abhor-able acts of terrorism? How wrong it will be to judge all Christians or at least all Catholics by Adolf Hitler, as he was one? Most Muslims, who are well educated and live in the West, consider themselves to be moderate and peace loving.  They have no desire for violence.  They have no dreams of Sharia Law in the West, the strangle hold of which some of them have experienced in their native Muslim countries. Yet, the recent bombings in Boston and for that matter any act of terrorism, gets Islam and the Muslims on trial, in the eyes of the media and as a result in the eyes of a part of the public in the West. The Western system of justice is built carefully on individual responsibility and goes a long way to give the benefit of doubt to the accused. Tribal thinking that if one member of the clan is guilty the whole of the tribe is guilty and should be punished is a thinking of stone age, long discarded with the development of human thought. An Euler diagram illustrating the association fallacy. Although A is within B and is also within C, not all of B is within C. Guilt by association can sometimes also be a type of ad hominem fallacy, if the argument attacks a person because of the similarity between the views of someone making an argument and other proponents of the argument. This form of the argument is as follows: Source S makes claim C. Group G, which is currently viewed negatively by the recipient, also makes claim C. Therefore, source S is viewed by the recipient of the claim as associated to the group G and inherits how negatively viewed it is. An example of this fallacy would be "My opponent for office just received an endorsement from the Puppy Haters Association. Is that the sort of person you would want to vote for?" A terrorist attack creates fear in the public and creates a fertile ground for hate mongering and stereotyping. This gives some of the extreme media a chance to make all Muslims guilty in the eyes of the naive and scared public, by loose association. Guilt by Association is an association fallacy is an inductive informal fallacy of the type hasty generalization or red herring which asserts that qualities of one thing are inherently qualities of another, merely by an irrelevant association. The two types are sometimes referred to as guilt by association and honor by association. Association fallacies are a special case of red herring, and can be based on an appeal to emotion.  It works both in a positive and a negative sense. Public has been long known to elect children or spouses of popular leaders.  Kennedy, Clinton, Bhutto and Gandhi are but a few recent names that sell well in politics of USA, Pakistan and India. Collective punishment has been practiced as recently as last century. In 1906, 167 Black U.S. soldiers stationed in Brownsville, Texas were dishonorably discharged by orders of President Theodore Roosevelt in response to the shooting of two white citizens in the middle of the night of August 13, 1906. One man was killed and the other, a police lieutenant, was injured and it was never discovered who the shooter(s) were, though they were presumed to have been members of the nearby Fort Brown. The soldiers of Companies B, C, and D of the 25th infantry regiment, many of whom served in Cuba and the Philippines, were punished for the crime collectively and they were not entitled to pensions.[2] British forces in the Boer Wars and the Germans in both the Franco-Prussian War and World War I justified such actions as being in accord with the laws of war then in force.[3] During World War II, Nazi troops killed 434 men in three villages near Kragujevac on October 19, 1941 as punishment for previous actions of the Serbian resistance movement. In the next two days, the Nazis also killed more than 13,000 people in Kraljevo, Kragujevac, and Sumarice, including 300 students from Kragujevac First High School. In 1942, the Germans destroyed the village of Lidice, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) killing 340 inhabitants as collective punishment or reprisal for that year's assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by commandos nearby the village (the village of Ležáky was also destroyed in retribution). In the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane 642 of its inhabitants — men, women, and children — were slaughtered by the German Waffen-SS in 1944.[4] In the Dutch village of Putten[5] and the Italian villages of Sant'Anna di Stazzema[6] and Marzabotto,[7] as well as in the Soviet village of Kortelisy[8] (in what is now Ukraine), large scale reprisal killings were carried out by the Germans. Joseph Stalin's mass deportations of many nationalities of the USSR to remote regions (including the Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans and many others) is an example of officially-orchestrated collective punishment. When media puts Islam or the Muslims on trial for the crimes of a few bad apples, or when the right wing politicians start demanding profiling and universal surveillance of all Muslims, it becomes a form of collective punishment.  Such collective punishments may have been necessary and could have some justification,  in the centuries past, but in this day and age of cameras in public places, which could be high definition, and individual email and twitter accounts, profiling and discriminating is totally redundant and unfair. Law enforcement should police terrorism suspects, like they would police suspects of drug trafficking and child pornography.  The society does not need to reinvent wheel to fight terrorism and in the process destroy the wisdom of 'individual responsibility,' which humanity has learnt after centuries of struggle. After unfortunate episodes of terrorism, small or large, media often asks the question, "where are the moderate Muslims or moderate Islam in criticism of such acts of heinous violence."  We are here in the Muslim Times and else where, but our mega-phone is small.  Unless the bigger players with larger meg-phones, like CNN, MSNBC, BBC and Hufffinton Post give us a voice, the larger public does not get to hear us. How can the media stop prosecuting Islam unilaterally? I have a simple suggestion that whenever a news item or a talk show is going to indict Islam or the Muslims by inference or innuendo, let there be spokesperson from moderate Islam as well as for the Islamists or the Muslim fundamentalists or let them refuse the invitation.  Let the public hear different perspectives and let the chips fall, where they may. Unless distinction is made clearly between the Moderate Muslims and Islamists or terrorists, any news coverage, by the media, can be guilty of  promoting hate and suspicion of 1.3 billion Muslims, by creating a paradigm to judge them by the lowest common denominator among them, which in the case of the Christians will be Adolf Hitler, or to pick up more recent examples, Timothy McVeigh or the recent terrorist from Norway,  Anders Behring Breivik. Unless the moderate Muslims are allowed to constantly defend themselves, when they or Islam is prosecuted on the national airways, the media is guilty of slandering and defaming them. Fair and equal treatment as and when extended to the moderate Muslims will become a strong incentive for the Islamists to give up their extreme ideology and move towards moderation. If this simple idea is implemented, the West will stop suspecting the moderate Muslims and they in turn will stop suspecting the media. Click here to read in the Muslim Times. The Muslim Times' Editorial team: If you like what you see, please forward it to friends and family.  To know more about us: click here. 1-800-WHY-ISLAM

Synopsis of Istighfar

A'ouzo billahi min-aash-shaitan-ir-rajeem... Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem

Synopsis of Istighfar

Istighfar means to cover up, protect or suppress. The primary connotation of Istighfar is to supplicate for the suppression of human tendency to fall into error so as to be safeguarded against error or sin.

Its secondary connotation is to supplicate for suppression of consequences of error. Thus Istighfar might connote suppression of a person’s tendency towards falling into sin or error, or his protection against the consequences of such errors or sin, or of the errors and sins of others.

On account of lack of knowledge of Arabic, the true significance of Istighfar has been lost to many. This word is derived from Ghafar, the other infinitive forms being Maghfirat, Ghufran etc. As given in all Arabic dictionaries, the word ghafar means to cover or to protect. Therefore the primary meaning of Istighfar is, seeking protection or a prayer of protection and support. All other meanings usually given to this word are derived or secondary.

To whom is the above prayer addressed?

...and from what is the protection sought?

Since we are discussing this subject from the Islamic point of view, the obvious answer to the first question is to none other than the One God, Allah. The common form of this prayer is Astaghfirullah i.e., I seek the protection of Allah or I pray to Allah for His Protection and this makes it conclusive that the Istighfar is addressed to the One God alone.

The answer to the second question is the most important point to be settled and is the main subject of this discussion. Is the protection sought simply from the punishment of evil which a man has wrought or is it sought primarily from the evil itself and sub the evil has been done? For the correct answer, one has to go to the fundamental question of relation between God and His creatures. The God of Islam is not only the Creator but Supporter as well. Whatever has been made by Divine Hand is also supported by it. If, therefore, man needs the creating Hand of God to come into existence, it is equally true that he needs His supporting hand to be saved from corruption. The Divine attribute of creation required that man should be created in the image of God and the requirement of the Divine attribute of support was that what had been created in Divine image should not be given up to corruption and everlasting destruction. It is to denote these two Divine attributes that the adjectives Al-Hayy, Al-Qayyum are used in the Holy Qur’an regarding Allah, which means, the One Who brings into existence and supports that which He has created.

By nature, man needs support for his existence. This is testified in the Holy Qur’an by the verse: man has been created weak. He is a creature and as such is dependent upon his Creator, resembling an infant that needs the assistance of its mother at every step. Thus we have in God, a supporter and in man, somebody who requires support. Almighty God gives support to man in all matters in abundance without his asking. Yet as an intelligent being he must exercise his own will to avail himself of some gifts. Man is feeble in nature and as such is powerless to resist evil tendencies. If he, therefore, does not use his faculties to ask for aid from the Supporter against evil tendencies, he rejects the gift which he could have claimed by asking, and this leads him into evil. The Holy Qur’an teaches man how to ask for God’s help in the opening chapter of the Book:

Thee alone do we worship and Thee alone do we implore for help. (Ch.1:V.5)

Tthe real significance of Istighfar: – seeking protection of God from evil. Hence the necessity of Istighfar by every person is obvious without any consideration of actual commission of sin by him. In short, existence of sin is not a pre-requisite for Istighfar. There is a craving in the very nature of man to attain perfection. To satisfy this craving, he is guided to say Istighfar and this makes up for the deficiency of human nature by imploring strength from God.

Astaghfirulla-ha rabbi, −  astaghfirullaha rabbi, astaghfirullah rabbi min kulli dhanbiñwwa atubu ilaihi .......... I beg pardon from Allah, my Lord. I beg pardon from  Allah, my Lord. I beg pardon from Allah, my Lord, from all my sins and turn to Him.

Istighfar is also needed for protection from the punishment of the evil that has been done. Hence it is of secondary significance, the primary one being the protection from the evil itself, whether a sin has been committed or not. This leads us to the role of prophets who have been raised from time to time among various people. The primary object of their appearance is to deliver men from evil and not to pardon them the sin they go on committing. In this respect Prophet Muhammad(saw) has an eminence not reached by any other prophet. He was raised at a time when darkness prevailed on the face of the earth and people had gone astray in doctrine and practice. The Arabs whom he addressed directly had sunk deep into vice. From this depth of degradation he raised them to the highest pinnacles of civilization.

But how did he bring about this revolution? Since God alone can support man against the forces of evil, it is obvious that the Prophet must have taught them to pray to God for this protection. It is Istighfar that he taught. Istighfar, as seen in the Holy Qur’an, is the true and only means of drawing strength and support of God, the only course for attaining nearness of God and the only path by walking on which man may attain to sinlessness and salvation. The Holy Qur’an speaks of it as the highest accomplishment of good men. In chapter 51 we read:

But surely the righteous will be in the midst of gardens and fountains receiving what their Lord will give them; for they used to do good before that They used to sleep but a little of the night; and at the dawn of the day they sought forgiveness; (Ch.51:Vs.16-19)

Verily the righteous shall dwell amid gardens and fountains with the blessings which their Lord has given them. This is a reward to them, for, before this they were the greatest doers of good, passed the greater part of the night in devotion to God and when morning came, they resorted to `Istighfar’, i.e., they sought the Divine strength and support. As clearly seen here, Istighfar is described as a deed of righteousness and the effect of which is not that they were saved from the torment of hell fire but Divine blessings and favours were showered upon them in abundance.

The Arabic word Muhsin translated as good man in the fore-quoted Qur’anic verse has been defined by the Holy Prophet(saw) as one who worships God so sincerely as if he actually sees Him or at least the one who deems himself in the presence of God Who sees him. It should be noted that when a person reaches this stage, he cannot sin. Hence his Istighfar is not for the protection from the punishment of hell but is a part of his goodness. Such a man keeps himself in the presence of God during the night, praying for Divine protection and support in the morning to keep him firm in His path and not to let him slip. He feels that without the strength and support of God, he would not be able to overcome the frailties of his nature and, therefore, prays constantly that he might not be deprived of heavenly bliss due to the weakness of his flesh.

Another Qur’anic verse which shows Istighfar as a highly commendable deed for righteousness is: the patient, the truthful, and the lowly and charitable and those who resort to Istighfar at morning times. (Ch.3:V.19)

In this verse, the Istighfar is deemed as a necessity for good together with patience, truth, lowliness and charity. Here Istighfar clearly is indicated not only for saving from punishment but also for drawing blessings and favours of God. Not only is Istighfar described as leading to virtuous deeds, but Maghfirat is also promised as a gift of God to those who lead a virtuous course of life. We read in the Chapter Hud, thus: ..those who are steadfast and do good works. It is they who will have forgiveness and a great reward. (Ch.11:Vs.12)

Here maghfirat is promised as a reward to those who do righteous deeds and does not mean pardon of sins, because the persons to whom it is promised are plainly described as being those who have been doing righteous deeds. In fact man always stands in need of maghfirat and maghfirat of God shall continue even in paradise. The Holy Qur’an attests to this in the words:

..in it (paradise) will they have all kinds of fruits and ‘maghfirat’ from their Lord. (Ch.47:Vs.16)

Here maghfirat is plainly described as a reward which shall be granted to the good in paradise. In chapter Al-Tahrim of the Holy Book we read:

Those (who enter paradise) will pray: Our Lord, perfect our light for us and forgive us. (Ch.66:Vs.9)

This unceasing desire for perfection and maghfirat shows clearly that progress in paradise will be endless. From these two verses, it is plain that even after entry into paradise which will only be possible after obtaining God’s pardon for those who have committed sins, the faithful will still have a continuous desire for maghfirat, or in another words, they will resort to istighfar, even though they shall have been saved from punishment.

What does maghfirat in paradise mean?

As mentioned earlier, Istighfar is a requirement of the nature of man as a creature and of the attribute of God as the Creator and Supporter. The attribute of support of the Creator must remain constantly at work as long as there are creatures. Notwithstanding continual progress in heaven, men will still be creatures and still be dependent upon God. Any degree of perfection they may attain in this world or the next cannot be equivalent to the perfection of the Creator. In paradise, the righteous will ever be ascending upwards and will regard every state as defective in comparison with the higher one to which he will aspire and will, therefore, pray to God for maghfirat. Since progress is endless, the desire for maghfirat will never cease. In spite of the fact that God has granted maghfirat to the Holy Prophet (saw) for short comings, past and future (Ch.48:Vs.2), he has been advised to `resort to Istighfar’ and seek maghfirat from God (Ch.110:Vs.4) even after the assurance of God (Ch.48:Vs.2).

In short, Istighfar is the closest form of communion with God, the highest flight of the spirit of man towards the Divine Being. The man who resorts to Istighfar humiliates himself before God, admitting the weakness of his nature and dreads the Power and Glory of the Creator. His whole delight, his very paradise, is in this fact that he should fly to that rock of strength, without Whoseshelter he cannot live. His own self is annihilated and God alone becomes His objective. The man who constantly reforms to Istighfar, feels his own dependency and turns to God for help and aid and thus gives evidence that he has overcome the weakness of flesh and resisted the evil tendency because the strength of God is with him and His light descending upon him, has suppressed every infirmity of nature which could have led to sin.

Acknowledgments

• The Review of Religions, 1903, From writings of Hadhrat Ahmad(as), the Promised Messiah and Mahdi

• The Qur’an – Preface to the English Translation by Sir Muhammad Zafrullah Khan.

Source: http://www.reviewofreligions.org/download/RR200701.pdf#page=58