Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. Jyllands-Posten’s cartoon of the Prophet. Qur’an burning by Christian Dove World Outreach Center. The Innocence of Muslims film.<\/p>\n
While unbelievers’ position is understandable, the above-mentioned representative sampling of individuals and institutions are not only ranged against the Prophet Muhammad, but further derided his message and scoffed at all that are sacred in Islam.<\/p>\n
To adherents, religious faith is a very serious matter which underpins ultimate values of human acts. To Muslims, religion refers to all the good which God has implanted in human nature that must not be corrupted.<\/p>\n
As religious truths touch the inner springs of one’s life intimately, religious life is a higher life that must be taken seriously.<\/p>\n
If this weighty personal responsibility is not taken in earnest, false motives, pretence, deception and hypocrisy will flourish, and man will treat religion and faith as a jest.<\/p>\n
Indeed, to such sceptics and unbelievers, religious truths are only a joke. They take religious fundamentals lightly, sneer at God, laugh at the Prophet, and ridicule his followers.<\/p>\n
They not only laugh at him, but they heap blasphemies when God’s teachings are mentioned.<\/p>\n
“They made My messages and My messengers a target of their mockery” as mentioned by God in the Qur’an (18:106).<\/p>\n
Those sceptics and unbelievers give religious truths false names; nay, they call religion a fraud.<\/p>\n
The Christian Dove World Outreach Center’s website states that “Islam is of the Devil” which is “violent and oppressive”.<\/p>\n
Jyllands-Posten’s cartoon depicts the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist, showing his caricature wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a burning fuse.<\/p>\n
The Satanic Verses refers to the Prophet as a conjurer, a magician and a false prophet; it also insults the wives of the Prophet by having whores use their names and vilifies the companions of the Prophet by calling them “bums from Persia”.<\/p>\n
According to Reuters and NBC News, the Innocence of Muslims film depicts the Prophet as “a fool, a womanizer, a homosexual, a child abuser and a religious fake”, while BBC reports that Muslims are portrayed as “savage killers hungry for wealth and bent on killing women and children.”<\/p>\n
No wonder Sky News concludes that the video was “anti-Muslim” and “designed to enrage”.<\/p>\n
It is the same habits of mind throughout history which has been recorded by God thus: “And, indeed, even before your time have messengers been mocked-but those who scoffed at them were in the end overwhelmed by the very thing which they mocked” (the Qur’an 6:10; also, 21:41).<\/p>\n
The above-mentioned verses warn that the logic of events would always turn the tables; evil often brings about its own ruin.<\/p>\n
Sooner or later, the scoffers will find that a derisive rejection of spiritual truths inexorably rebounds on themselves.<\/p>\n
First and foremost, as mocking at the Divine Message implies that the individual is so absorbed in selfish, narrow and material concerns, it has a disastrous long-range effect on their lives after death.<\/p>\n
Secondly, at the social level, if persisted by the majority within a permissive community, such habits of mind also destroy the moral basis of society, their earthly happiness, economic equilibrium, social equalities, and sometimes even their physical existence.<\/p>\n
“But you made them a target of your ridicule,” God cautions against such a haughty attitude, “to the point where it made you forget all remembrance of Me, and you went on and on laughing at them.” (the Qur’an, 23:110)<\/p>\n
God warns that their ridicule of religion and faith made them forget His message while they were laughing at them.<\/p>\n
The secularists’ worldly-minded attitude would become the unconscious cause of their forgetting the warnings declared by God against those who do not treat religious truths earnestly and are heedless of the “end” of life (al-akhirah).<\/p>\n
In the end, Truth will outlast all mockery.<\/p>\n
Major References:<\/p>\n
1. The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an by Abdullah Yusuf Ali<\/p>\n
2. The Message of the Qur’an translated and explained by Muhammad Asad<\/p>\n
3. Ethico-Religious Concepts of the Qur’an by Toshihiko Izutsu<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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