Sadness is…seeing Islam being watered down on Tumblr in order to maintain follower counts and appease fans. Finding ways to make Islam more palatable to those that are deliberately looking for loopholes does not invite others towards Islam, but instead invites them to a new permutation of what used to be Islam. This is the slippery slope that got the disbelievers into the position that they’re in. Look around and you’ll quickly notice the trends. The clerical hierarchies, the supposed tolerance for unacceptable behaviour, the contortion of gender roles, the ‘intellectualisation’ of the Sunnah, the formalisation of the acquisition of religious knowledge, the abdication of responsibility in social commitments, and so much more.
There is a huge difference, like night and day, between acknowledging our shortcomings in practising Islam the way it was intended to be practised, and trying to justify our shortcomings by assuming that some interpretations of Islam are incorrect so that we can condone our shortcomings. By the same token, there is an equally huge difference between practising Islam the way it was intended to be practised, and displaying an extremist view of how its rulings should be interpreted out of excessive piety. This is clearly reflected in the current state of scholarly pursuits because everyone feels a need to save Islam from incorrect interpretations but no one is willing to answer the question that begs to know what constitutes excessive questioning in terms of implementing the Sunnah. Something that I often contemplate, without arriving at an answer yet, is whether or not the actions of Rasulullah (SAW) was dissected to the nth degree by the first three generations, or was the dissection a response to the wanton deviance of those that followed?
Determining this has resulted in pursuits that are blindly excessive in most cases, hence the disconnect between the scholars, the wannabe scholars and the layman. In response, the layman, tired of being constantly blasted with rhetoric and condescension for having a deficient Imaan, retaliates by trying to justify why their mediocre efforts are acceptable, if not more meritorious than the wannabe scholars. The wannabe scholars respond by lambasting everyone with labels of deviance, blasphemy and heresy. And so the chasm between the groups widen, and Islam gets bastardised into a flavour-of-the-month for whoever endeavours to justify their view for a misguided audience.
Because of the wisdom of the current generation of ‘scholars’, we now have underdogs in the Ummah that see fit to establish their own institutions that promise to be more accepting and tolerant of the ‘deviants’ and those that are looking for loopholes. There are no loopholes in Allah’s laws. If you think you’ve found one, you’re either innocently ignorant, selectively obtuse, or downright deviant with insufficient sincerity to seek the truth.
Alas, my use of logic in trying to understand simple rules about being a Muslim will attract the venom of those that see logic as being a tool of those inspired by Greek philosophers because they (the accusers) are too blinkered to realise that Islam is logical in its practise, and divine in its faith. Every single ritual ever prescribed for us has a logical and practical purpose that either benefits us individually, or society collectively. And where the rights of society are impacted, such constraints will take precedence over individual liberties. But in the selfish atmosphere that we have engendered, it’s nearly impossible to even determine the rights of society any more simply because our focus is on individual piety only. We’ve lost the balance that Islam fosters, and instead have become obsessed with Islam as being a personal struggle and nothing more.