Malays are fake Muslims


mt2014-no-holds-barred

Are Malays, therefore, real followers of Prophet Muhammad? I fear the Malays are doing precisely what Prophet Muhammad told them not to do. And some of these people claim to be upholding Islam and are supposedly members of an Islamic party, PAS.

NO HOLDS BARRED

Raja Petra Kamarudin

Associate Professor Dr Azmi Sharom is the last person I would expect to be hauled up and charged for sedition. Instead, I would expect a certain amount of academic freedom allowed to academics.

I mean how can we legislate thought and at the same time expect Malaysians to excel globally? This sounds like Europe of the 1500s when thinking the wrong thing can get you burned alive at the stake.

And is this not what Galileo Galilee, too, suffered? And today it is proven that Galileo was right and the church was wrong. But when thoughts are legislated and free minds are punished, we will end up living in a country with first-world infrastructure but third-world mentality, as Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi once said.

I will be busy over the new four months till about Christmas. This is because I am taking my fifth Oxford course, World Religions, where we are studying all the major religions since the time of the Greeks and Egyptians, Islam included, of course.

I am now in the midst of reading the required textbooks and one of the books I have to read is the biography of Prophet Muhammad. In fact, I just finished reading that book last night and today I will start on the second book.

If I were still back in Malaysia and if I were to write an essay regarding this book I just finished reading last night, I would probably, yet again, get arrested for insulting Islam and, yet again, be sent for religious rehabilitation because my essay will certainly be opposed to ‘mainstream beliefs’.

And you can interpret ‘mainstream beliefs’ any way you wish.

I cannot cover everything I want to say in this article or else it would need to run into 20 or 30 pages. Nevertheless, allow me to touch on just a few salient points to demonstrate what I am trying to say — and that is when you do academic research your views may not quite reconcile with ‘mainstream beliefs’, like in the case of Galileo Galilee.

Hence should I be punished because my beliefs differ from ‘mainstream beliefs’ or should I be denied my right to do academic research and share my thoughts with you just because they do not reconcile with what you believe?

For example, Muslims believe that the Badar battle was a holy war. I do not believe that. What I believe is that caravan raids in the 500s-600s were part of Arabian culture for many generations and that is how the desert tribes or Bedouins earned a living.

It was just like the Europeans such as the English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and so on, of 500-600 years ago. They raided and plundered each other’s ships and brought the bounty back to their own country to enrich their economy. They were not pirates. They were patriots.

Hence the Arabs, too, raided and plundered each other and confiscated the property of their rivals and captured the women and children and sold them into slavery or kept them as slaves for themselves.

We must remember that some of the emigrants from Mekah to Medina were once wealthy people. They owned property, which they had to abandon when they left Mekah to migrate to Medina. Hence they were now very poor.

To survive they needed to participate in caravan raids and this was a decent and honourable way to make a living. It was what the Arabs did and any Arab worth his salt would not shy away from this or else he would be a cowardly and worthless Arab.

Hence for years the Medina Arabs raided the caravans of the Mekah Arabs. And for the Mekah people this was an occupational hazard. So you lost about 3% of your goods in transit but that is the price you pay to transport goods from the north to the south of the Arabian Peninsula.

Another reason why these raids were important, other than for purposes of money, is to weaken the Mekah economy. Mekah was the centre of everything, business as well as religion. For Medina to equal or surpass Mekah, they had to make it unprofitable for people to do business with Mekah.

Not all these raids were successful, though. Sometimes the Medina raiders came home with nothing. And sometimes they came home with nothing after losing some lives. Not always did Prophet Muhammad lead these raids, though.

One day the Medina people heard that one of the largest caravans ever would be making the trip from north to south. So Prophet Muhammad decided to lead a force of about 300 people to lie in ambush in Badar.

The Jewish spies aligned to Mekah sent a message to Mekah informing them about the ambush so Mekah sent a force of 1,000 to meet the Medina force of 300.

Prophet Muhammad was devastated. He knew that he was outnumbered and for three days nothing happened as the Mekah and Medina forces faced each other while Prophet Muhammad prayed to God for guidance.

On the third day, as Prophet Muhammad continued praying, the fighting started and Abu Bakar told Prophet Muhammad that the time for praying has ended and that it was now time to fight.

Somehow the Medina forces won and the Mekah forces surrendered. And the rumour that went around is that Allah had sent angels down to help the 300 Medina people to defeat the 1,000 Mekah people.

And that was how the Badar battle transformed from a caravan raid into a holy war, as many Muslims believe.

As I said, many Muslims will resent my saying this and if I say this back in Malaysia I would get arrested for ‘insulting Islam’. But this is what I believe. And should I be punished for my thoughts even if my thoughts differ from yours?

That is just one point I wish to raise, the Badar battle. In fact, I can talk about dozens of other issues but then I would need to write 20, 30 or more pages to cover them all. So let me stop at just this one issue as an example of how our thoughts need not reconcile with what many may view as ‘mainstream beliefs’.

And in closing allow me to quote what Prophet Muhammad said. He said thus ends the small jihad and now we need to embark on the greater jihad. And the grater jihad meant by Prophet Muhammad is not war but the battle we wage against ourselves.

And this would mean the fight against lust, pride, egotism, greed, arrogance, anger, and so on. And lust is not just sexual lust but lust for wealth, power, etc.

So this is what jihad is all about, as Prophet Muhammad said after the battle of Badar. And is this what Muslims are doing? Jihad is not about bombing, shooting and killing innocent women, children and non-combatants like what is happening in many Muslim countries. But then this is what Muslims do.

And what is the Selangor political cum Menteri Besar crisis all about? It is about lust for power. And this is the jihad we have to wage, the fight against lust for power. Yet, today, Muslims are fighting one another and slandering each other in the pursuit of power contrary to what Prophet Muhammad instructed.

Are Malays, therefore, real followers of Prophet Muhammad? I fear the Malays are doing precisely what Prophet Muhammad told them not to do. And some of these people claim to be upholding Islam and are supposedly members of an Islamic party, PAS.

Actually these Malay-Muslims are no different from the Jews that they condemn. They fight for power and abuse the name of Allah in doing so. Oh, and in the Qur’an these people are referred to as the Hypocrites. Well, at least this is what the Qur’an says unless the Qur’an is a fake.

 



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