For People of Understanding..

The word "Islam" comes from two Arabic words - "As-Salam" and "As-Silm", meaning peace and submission respectively. The essence of Islam lies in the meanings of these two words, and it may be expressed as striving to obtain inner as well as outward peace as a result of submitting your will to the Will of Allah, The Benevolent and Merciful.

A "Muslim" is a person who makes a concious decision to accept Islam as his/her way of life, i.e. he/she decides to submit his/her will to the Will of Allah. To do that, the person requires -

a) a clear understanding of what is meant by "submit".
b) knowledge of what the "Will of Allah" really is.

Submission, in the Islamic context, implies living life and understanding it according to a particular ideology, set of principles, code of conduct etc. defined by someone else, in an absolute manner. Ya'ni accepting someone else's word as the only criterion for creating your definitions of right and wrong. Keeping that in mind, it becomes very obvious that a submission of such kind has to be the most important decision of a person's life. Each and every aspect of his/her life would be affected by it, and it would be foolish to make that decision without -

a) complete knowledge of the "thing" you're submitting to.
b) being completely convinced by it.

Since the "thing" that a Muslim submits to is Islam, he/she must have complete knowledge about the Islamic creed (aqidah) and other basics, and should be completely convinced by it. Here's where the definition of the "Will of Allah" comes in. The Will of Allah is anything and everything that Allah has asked us to do or to not do in His communications with us through the Qur'an and Sunnah.

Most of us are "Muslims by chance", or people who were born into the Islamic faith and accepted it without giving it a lot of thought because that was what we were expected to do; the herd mentality. It is no big secret that most of us do not know even the basics of Islam (understanding of tauheed, atleast at the Aqidah Tahawiyyah level, understanding of the concepts of shirk, sunnah, bid'ah, halal, haram, mustahab, makruh etc.), and a lot of us haven't read the Qur'an (with some understanding of Its meanings) even a single time. We've made the greatest decision of our lives without giving it the amount of thought it deserves.

According to most of our Ulema, this is the biggest of all our problems, and it leads to Muslims doing things that are contrary to Islamic values without them realizing it. The best solution to this problem is to encourage ourselves, our parents, siblings, cousins, relatives, friends and others to become "Muslims by choice", i.e. study Islam and re-accept it completely and entirely once they fulfil the minimum requirements of fardh 'aeyn Islamic knowledge, and are completely convinced about it being the religion chosen by The One True God for all human beings and djinns.

Shaikh Nasir Al-Albani said: "It was from the known rules of the Ulema that they used to say - bring the evidence and then believe; do not believe and then bring the evidence." This is precisely how we should "study" Islam, and accept it or reject it based on whether we're convinced by it or not. If we don't work towards this, I'm afraid our condition will remain similar to that of the monkeys in the previous post.

Islam is a religion that encourages us to think. "Li ulil albab", "La'allakum ta'qilun", "Li ulil absar" - these are phrases we hear frequently in our prayers. Islam is for people of lubbah (intellect/reason), and it is ironical that we Muslims refuse to use it to understand our religion.

May Allah guide me to write about things that please Him. May Allah give me the taufeeq to practise what I preach. May Allah increase us all in our good deeds and efforts, and may Allah accept them from us.

Ameen, Ya Rabb Al-'Alameen.


P.S. - I hope I'm not labeled for quoting Shaikh Al-Albani, Shaikh Nadawi etc. I am not Salafi, Deobandi or anything else.


Part 1