From Cordoba to Kabul

Guest · #1

From Cordoba to Kabul By S. A. Abidi ExtractsDawn March 18 2002When I travel from a flourishing Cordoba of 1000AD to the dying Kabul of 2000AD, the comparison tells it all. It is a story of a life-giving fruit of knowledge turning sour because it was not nurtured, but defiled by the selfish. It is a journey through the ruin of a great civilization caused by the brute force of intruders, who took advantage of the weakness created by confusion between the spiritual and the temporal.When the Khwarezm king was advised not to provoke Changez Khan with unjust treatment, his arrogant reply was that nobody could defeat Muslims. When the barbarian ransacked Samarqand, rode into the Grand Mosque on horseback and climbed on the rostrum (Mimber) with his boots on, the faithful who had gathered there were confident that lightening would soon strike the infidel. Little did they know that the laws of nature do not act the way the believers were made to believe by their religious teachers. One of them cried that instead of miracles this man brought God's Anger, Qehar-e-Khuda, to "punish us for going astray" from the path of endeavour and taking to a course of indolence. When Halaku knocked at the gates of the glorious Baghdad, ransacking its libraries and slaughtering its residents, no miracle could save the Caliph who was listening intently to a futile debate of clerics to decide whether harassment was halal or makrooh. The process has since been repeated time and again in Damascus,Istanbul, Cordoba, Delhi and most recently in Kabul. The glory that once belonged to me had been sadly brought to an end by my inept rulers as they fell prey to their own narrow interests, internal conflicts, mal-administration and moral and cultural decadence. To absolve themselves of the responsibility for decline, they found it expedient to reject the doctrine of free-will, only to seek refuge behind the facade of "God's will". Furthermore, reason could always be defeated by miracle if divine grace was invoked through prayers under the guidance of the clerics. The divine exhortation to acquire knowledge (Ilm)was now to be understood as the knowledge of religion only. Ijma could now be practised exclusively by the clerics, who were the true believers. Jihad was only meant for waging wars against the infidels. The doors of Ijtehad were closed for all times, as new interpretation created heresy and divisiveness. This is the legacy of my faith that I have lived with for most of the past millennium. The dominating powers have since added new weapons to their old arsenals, which I do not possess anymore. They are science, technology, economics, diplomacy and social justice based on the solid ground of knowledge and research. Having abdicated the pursuit of knowledge a millennium ago which others carried on, here I stand weak and helpless, in the darkness of ignorance. More than a billion individuals in strength and with vast resources of the earth at my disposal, I cannot defend myself even against a handful of Jews with a state of the size of a small district. The same Jews whom I picked up from the dirt in Spain and gave them dignity, can now give the whole Muslim world a bloody nose and then rub it in the mud, and there is nothing that I can do. There is no body who can rescue me as my rulers have bled me to subjugation in every state. They are occupied with squandering wealth on luxuries, creating and maintaining dynasties and selling my dignity and sovereignty in exchange of their own protection. They carve out their own territories on land and in faith, and fight with each other to satisfy their greed. They will neither learn from history nor from those who flourish at the cost of my misery, because I suffer and they do not. They will not change unless I change them, and that depends on which road do I take beyond Kabul. I could have continued to argue forever, but the events that followed have played out the dialectics of the argument to its ultimate conclusion. There is only one way to survive and to restore my dignity in the world of today, and that is by taking the path of acquiring and developing knowledge with all the energies at my disposal. Only then can I harness the bounties of nature that God promised to me. Only then can I master the material and human resources for the protection and well-being of the humanity that lives in my borders. I have been on this path once before when God was kind to me and there is no reason why I cannot take it again. This is what I should mean when I ask God, "Show us the straight path, the path of those whom thou hast favoured; not of those who earn thine anger nor of those who go astray."

Guest · #2

This illuminatiung article is about Islam & muslims fall from grace to their lowly position of today. Let me cite this excerpt and see if you can detect the lament of the oppressed dawoodi bohras:"There is no body who can rescue me as my rulers have bled me to subjugation in every state. They are occupied with squandering wealth on luxuries, creating and maintaining dynasties and selling my dignity and sovereignty in exchange of their own protection. They carve out their own territories on land and in faith, and fight with each other to satisfy their greed. They will neither learn from history nor from those who flourish at the cost of my misery, because I suffer and they do not. They will not change unless I change them, and that depends on which road do I take beyond Kabul."For BOHRAS & other oppressed muslims there is only one road: The one that travels over the Kothars and the other oppressers.

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