Thousands of different teachings!

Although Muhammad the prophet taught one single teaching, there are maybe thousands of teachings today that are all claiming to be Islam? This division has caused millions of fatalities. In limiting our reading to religious works, we went astray in the world, writes Mahathir bin Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia 1981-2003.

Islam astray in the world
Children often play a game where they sit together in a shape of a circle. One of them whispers something to the child sitting next to him, who repeats the story to the next child and so on until it has made its way all the way around. When the information returns to the first child, its content has changed completely. Something similar has happened within Islam.

Muhammad the prophet preached one single teaching. Yet, today there are maybe a thousand teachings that all claim to be Islam.

Muslims, divided as they are between different interpretations, no longer play the part they once did in the world. The conflict between Sunni and Shia is so deep, that both sides condemn the other as being apostate, kafir. The idea that the faith of the other is not Islam, and its followers not Muslims, has instigated civil wars that have caused the death of millions of people, and still take lives.

Even within Sunni and Shia there are more fractions. The Sunni Muslims have got four imams and the Shia Muslims twelve. They all preach differently. Besides these there are other fractions, the Drusians, Alawis and Wahhabis included. Our Ulama (religious teachers) teaches us that their words are not to be questioned. Islam is a faith. Its rules must be obeyed. Logic and reason has no application.

But what are we to believe when every branch of Islam claims all the others are wrong? After all, the Koran is one book, not two or three or a thousand books.

According to the Koran, a Muslim is a person who testifies that " there is no deity worthy of worship except than Allah and Mohammad is his Rasul (messenger)." But the unity of our faith has been broken since we Muslims like to add conditions coming from other sources than the Koran.

Perhaps the biggest problem after all is the increasing isolation of Islamic savants from the rest of the world today - and from great areas of Islamic life. We live in a time of science, when man can see around corners, hear and see such things as what happens in space and clone animals. All this seems to oppose our faith according to the Koran. This is because those interpreting the Koran are only scholars in a religious sense, and thus lack the ability to understand the miracles of science today.

The fatwa's (verdicts of Islamic law) they proclaim seem unreasonable and unacceptable by those oriented in science. One Islamic scholar, for instance, refused to accept that a human being had landed on the moon.

Others say earth was created 2000 years ago. The age and size of the universe measured in light years are such things impossible to grasp by a solely religiously educated Ulama. This lack is, to a great extent, to blame for the misery of so many Muslims. The murders and the humiliation of Muslims today occur because we are weak, as opposed to in ancient times.

We can consider ourselves victims and criticize the oppressors, but to stop them we will have to reflect upon ourselves. We must change for our own good. We cannot demand of our detractors to change themselves so that we can have it better.

So what do we need to do? A long time ago Muslims were strong because of their knowledge and education. Muhammad's order was to read, but the Koran doesn't specify what to read? In those days there was actually no Muslim knowledge to talk about, so to read meant reading whatever was available.
The first Muslims read the works of the great Greek scientists, mathematicians and philosophers. They also studied the written works of the Persians, the Indians and the Chinese. The result was the flourishing of science and mathematics.

Muslim savants contributed to the general knowledge and developed new subjects like astronomy and geography, and new branches of mathematics. They introduced numbers that made simple and infinite calculations possible.
But around the fifteenth century the Islamic savants began limiting scientific studies. They started studying religion only and steady fasting arguments that only he, who studies religion, Islamic judicial law in particular, will be rewarded in the afterlife.

This resulted in an intellectual degeneration at the same time Europe became interested in science and mathematics. So, when Muslims went backwards from an intellectual point of view, Europeans started their renaissance, developing different methods to satisfy their needs, which included the development of weapons with the help of which they could dominate the world.

The Muslims, on the other hand, weakened their capacity to defend themselves, in a disastrous manner, through turning away from, or even deprecating studies of such profanities as science and mathematics.

This nearsightedness stays one of the main reasons for the oppression that today's Muslims suffer from. Many Muslims still condemn Mustafa Kamal, the modern founder of Turkey, for having tried to modernise his country. But would Turkey be a Muslim country today without Atatürk? The clear vision of Mustafa Kamal saved Islam in Turkey as well as Turkey for Islam.

The inability to understand and interpret the true and fundamental message in the Koran has brought nothing but misery to the Muslims. When limiting our reading to religious works and disregarding modern science, we destroyed the Islamic civilisation and went astray in the world.

The Koran says: "Allah will not change our unhappy situation if we ourselves do not make an effort to change it. " Many Muslims don' t know this still. Instead they only pray to Allah to save us, to give us back our lost splendour.
But the Koran is not a talisman to hang around the neck to protect us against evil. Allah helps those who develop their mind.