Mosques of Souad, mosques of Nujoud
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I always make sure to read what my wonderful colleague Souad Al Moajel writes!
Her last article was about the failure to establish the rules and foundations of morality in our societies and how the backwardness in us and in our awareness, and our inability to deal logically and rationally with the conditions for building a human society based on morals, as a result of our excessive focus on the marginal matters until our moral goal became the separation of the sexes and the prohibition of music, singing and the rest of the arts, and even the prohibition of personal pictures.
Our colleague Souad wonders, in the words of the Yemeni brother, about what we have produced or added to human knowledge, and how the West, which we accuse of misguidance because a woman exposes her hair or walks around showing arms while the West is the one who made everything for us even vaccines against epidemics, and this proves that their values and morals are better than ours.
Who is better for humanity, who discovered penicillin and the corona vaccine, or who wrote thousands of pages on ablution, cleansing, and the conditions of cleanliness?
Some people believe that these matters may be important to them, but it is not permissible to use public money to impose them on students and this is not the role of the State neither its responsibility to bring people into Heaven but its mission is limited to providing a dignified and luxurious life for people on earth. And whoever wants to enter Paradise let him spend from his own pocket, not from the pocket of the state.
Souad continues saying that there are more than 300,000 mosques in Yemen but there is not a single scientific research center, and that these mosques have hosted political rivals from the Houthis, the Brotherhood and the Salaf and the state is the one who spends on the arenas of their religious struggle.
The Muslims today have changed as building a mosque in the olden times was an urgent necessity, but it is not necessary today and if we performed a simple calculation in any Islamic country, we will find that the number of mosques far exceeds the need for them while schools, universities, and scientific research centers in the Arab and Islamic worlds are much less than people’s urgent need for them.
The race to build mosques is due to various reasons, including gaining fame, and the one who builds them hands them over to the state to manage them, thus getting rid of the burden of spending on them while they bear their names forever.
Sheikh Abd al-Hamid al-Atrash, former head of the Fatwa Committee at Al-Azhar, says: “Muslims flooded the land with mosques, and from here their word was dispersed and if there is a need for a dispensary, a hospital, or a bridge for people to benefit from, and there is one mosque in the town that suffices the needs of worshippers, then there is no need to build another.
On the other hand, the activist and poet Nujoud Al-Yaqout says on her website in English: There are mosques in Kuwait on every corner of the street, very few churches, and nothing else. Note that there are nearly two million followers of many other religions, but the majority hides their affiliations. There is, for example, a Hindu temple.
Some argue that this is a Muslim country, but they forget that there are for example, purely Christian or Buddhist countries, and yet they allowed Muslims to build mosques in them. Our sisters in the Gulf are much more tolerant than us in this direction and soon we will see churches being built in all Gulf cities without exception, and we need to be more welcoming to followers of other religions, as worship is their right as it is ours.
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By Ahmad alsarraf
This news has been read 12130 times!
