It hasn't been much time I was just one of the typical
teenagers of the society. And like any other human being all of us
intrinsically want attention and appreciation. So did I. Every human needs
appreciation, even Allah has appreciated the momineen and has given them a lot
of glad tidings in the Quran since He the "Al Aleem" knows the human
nature.
As I grew up I unconsciously realized that the two best ways
to get attention were either to side with the most popular trends or be
something different. I also did what every youth does. I listened to rock music,
played music at events, hung out with friends and in short almost experienced
every kind of joy and tasted every colour of pleasure that I could (while being
in some limits of course). For some reason, probably because of my mother I
still had a great regard for religion in my heart though it never got to come
out for a long time.
While I enjoyed all the pleasures of my youth I was still
trying very hard to find what I really was. What was the purpose of life? And in this pursuit I developed a lot of
conclusions, debated and argued with people to prove my conclusions right. As I
went on doing the analysis of myself and the society what I found out was that
we all love to have a sense of belonging to something. A political party, a
country, a personality you like, or even your own thoughts. And once we have
this sense of belonging we feel very good about it and we are not ready to hear
anything wrong about it (even if it IS wrong). A beautiful word for this in Urdu is "ta'sub".
The people who like a certain leader or a group either
reject all the faults in that person or group or else accept their mistakes
thinking "chalo yar jan dos, banda over all acha hai" but they will
not give the same chance to someone they dislike because the disliked person or
group whether over all acha or not does not share the same ideology as theirs.
If someone belongs to a certain religious sect he would defend it no matter
what. As this happens with the things we like the same happens with the things
we dislike. As I was growing up I started seeing a certain divide in the youth.
The religious and the not-so-religious. And slowly and slowly the divide started
growing bigger and bigger. On one hand beards grew longer and on the other the
clothes shorter. (yes the word is mullah ! :P)
However what started happening on both sides was that
because of the "ta'sub" both parties hold they would never really try
to re-think why do they dislike the other group or more importantly what things
they dislike and what might be likeable as well. They just do it because it’s a
certain group which is supposed to be bad with certain characteristics. For the
religious ones all the secular people are "totally" bad and mostly
their characteristics are that they are clean-shaven, don't do purdah, and they
share a lot of western videos and songs.
For the liberals, there's a big group of bearded people and
they are all fundos. Their characteristics are that they have beards, they
share a lot of Quran and Hadith and they bring every argument down to Islam.
They bring religion in everything.
It breaks my heart as much to see "Ali Moeen
Nawazish" side pose spreading with Israel logo on his forehead captioned :
"Jew Agent with one eye" as it does when I see Pakistani people
commenting on a tribune article saying "These terrorists should be taken
out of the country" because the picture shows a rally of people having
beards + shalwar qameez + flags. Without knowing anything about these people,
these "Pakistanis" would give them a name as bad as
"terrorists" just because of their get-up. SubhanAllah! As we can see
this tolerance needs addressing on both sides.
Alhumdolillah I have the honor of being a part of both of
these groups at different times. And I realized that every person has a
different story, and different circumstances and different experiences and his
conclusions are an outcome of that. So is it really possible that all of us would
come to the same conclusion? It would be absurd to think that all the people or
even two people would reach exactly the same right conclusion. It's against
human nature. And if we don't address this fact all these debates and talk
shows will continue till eternity. For example "Socialism vs
Captialism" "Khilafah or secular" "Imran Khan or Nawaz
sharif" "Zaid Hamid or Najam Sethi" :P
These debates cannot and will not stop ever because
everybody is right according to his own limited knowledge and experiences. So
then WHO is the one who has more knowledge than any of the people we follow.
WHO will give us the right standard of judgement? Since we are BOUND to
misjudge because of our limited knowledge. In other words someone should say to
us "Yar tujhe tou kuch pata hi nahi hai." Or something like
"Pehle history parho phir bat karna".
The answer is very simple but unfortunately because of our
hyper-rational upbringing also because of being very cliché becomes strange as
well to us. It doesn’t really ‘click’ to us at all. And that answer is that we must
go to the primary source of knowledge Allah S.W.T. and accept his knowledge and
guidance as supreme and deny our own logics and philosophies as we human beings
are very limited. We don't even know .0001 % of what is out there. Who are we
to give a judgement? While He knows what goes on inside the hearts. And since
Allah knows this aspect of human nature that is why he asked us to Hold tight
to the rope of Allah because there is no OTHER thing ALL of us can belong to or
unite upon. Nothing at all !
If we do not do this, regardless of if we are right or wrong
individually, we are out of the one group which belongs to Quran and to Allah.
And every human being can have a sense of belonging to Allah. A liberal cannot
have a sense of belonging for Jamaat-e-Islami. A PML N follower cannot have a
sense of belonging for Imran Khan. A Sunni cannot have a sense of belonging for
Shia and vice versa. A Pakistani cannot
have a sense of belonging to Sudan. These are all our own made "ta’subs".
But all of the people I mentioned above can share a sense of belonging to Allah
and love and respect each other on the basis of this relationship. And that is
why an amazing thing that is seen today is that a lot of youth nowadays which
is turning religious after studying Quran and Hadith themselves is free of
sectarian conflicts and avoids them.
It is my request to all the people to look inside themselves
and find out their inner qualities which can be used to apply generalized
conclusions and assumptions on them very easily. I'm very sure they will find
them inshaAllah and will stop this stereotyping and labelling. This world is not a boxing ring it's a place with a very limited time to save yourself from the fire. The west does
not need to stereotype us anymore since it has prepared us well enough that we
do it ourselves. And that goes without saying that it's definitely our own
fault not theirs. As Allama Iqbal R.A. had said.
"Mujh ko tou gila tujh se hai Europe se nahi"
All the good that comes from this article is from Allah and
Allah alone and all the mistakes are from my nafs and shaytan.
to be continued inshaAllah…
