Countries of the Blind (Part 2)

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THE Islamic jurisprudence says the origin of things is the permissiveness not the prohibition, but we have reversed the rule and made almost everything forbidden.

For example, women education is ‘haram’ since previously it was meant to be only for men, possessing books other than religious is haram, reading magazines is haram, consuming food eaten by non-Muslims, living among them and traveling to their countries is haram, drinking water in their homes is haram and wearing western clothes is haram.

What was forbidden also included driving cars, talking on the phone, and using electrical appliances. All clothing is haram, except wearing a cloak (abaya) and loose clothing, and even the white head cover was haram for a long time.

Riding a bicycle was haram and travel by plane was haram, and the use of a room in the intensive care unit in hospitals, perhaps even now is haram. Playing football and wearing what looks like its clothes is haram.

Women’s hairdressing, the microphone of mosques, clapping in debates and parties, eating other than with hands, cinema, personal photography and drawing anything that has life are haram.

The scholars of ancient times denied the use or acquisition of printing machines, and therefore delayed their arrival in Beirut for 300 years, and Kuwait 500 years from the day of their invention. So we can imagine the educational and cultural backwardness.

We have lived, and still some of us continue to live, in our own world. We wanted to be cut off from the rest of the world and others, and acted as if we had no eyes to see the development, the changes and the tremendous scientific progress achieved in every area in the whole world and as if we have no relationship with anything but pray day and night.

But with time the illogical castles of prohibitions began to fall apart one by one, and our eyes gradually began to see so that even democracy, especially Western, was welcomed by the rule of ‘take from your enemies a lesson in the regularity of their situations’.

The clerics, who are scholars, have also called on Muslim countries to follow Western systems and allow women to drive, because they are not religiously forbidden.

Saudi thinker Ibrahim Al-Balihi says the mind is programmed on ignorance, and that man is an automatic being born with empty and open faculties, and these faculties are programmed with ideas, perceptions, customs, values and others based on the environment.

He added the human mind cannot differentiate between right and wrong and ‘halal’ and ‘haram’, between truth and illusion, and the information that reaches him first is the truth, and this is easier for him and more comfortable because if he wants to prove the opposite, he has to seek and study and read and examine, and these strenuous things are burdens for the majority.

He says though man is programmed from the environment or the place where he was born or raised, this emergency event, in which he has nothing to do, becomes his criterion to judge matters and consider them representing the absolute truth.

Thus, man tends to accept things as they are, ignorant. This is more comfortable for the soul, the mind, and society.

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By Ahmad Al Sarraf

To be continued

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