FOR centuries, several groups and individuals have been exploiting religion and investing in it in order to achieve gains, either political or financial, and to control nations and people. Some of them have been able to achieve their goals. Some held their leadership by suggesting that they are able to achieve prosperity for society. Some suppressed others who have different views to assert their strength. This helped in the spread of fake religious phenomena, while the reality is totally different.
A testimony to the above mentioned is the story of a woman who entered a learning session and asked, “Who is the jurist among you?”
The people there pointed to one of them, and she asked him, “How do you eat?”
He replied, “I start with the name of Allah and then I eat with my right hand. I eat what is in front of me, and in the smallest of bites. And I chew properly.”
She then asked, “How do you sleep?”
He said, “I perform ablution, sleep on my right side and recite my Quran supplications.”
She said, “You do not know how to eat and you do not know how to sleep!”
He looked at her in astonishment and asked, “Then how do you eat and sleep?”
She replied, “Eat as you wish as long as you don’t allow anything Haram (forbidden) to enter your stomach. Sleep as you wish as long as your heart does not harbor any hatred towards anyone.”
She continued, “What you told me is the etiquette of eating and sleeping, and what I told you is the essence of eating and sleeping.”
Many of those who trade in religion take appearances and do not work with the call to stay away from lies, hypocrisy and fraud. Rather, they spread their slogans among the mobs to direct the societies according to their whims. Some of them make sectarianism their way of life, tighten the nerves of the people towards it, and seek to establish militias in the defense of the sect and the creeds.
In the past decades, we had seen many of these terrorist groups of all sects and creeds, and religions, that had deceived people. We saw how they caused massacres and failed states in order to market their program based on deluding even the leaders who are working according to the advice of these people.
That is why they ruled some countries, and even made them their private farms. This harmed social relations, and the relations of countries with each other indeed.
These groups have permitted all evils in their terrorist work. It was either in the manufacture, promotion and export of drugs, or the imposition of royalties on people through the slogan of donating to charitable causes.
All this was for the sake of its control. We can take some Arab countries as examples when they succumbed to the command of those criminals disguised in the cloak of religiosity who promote deceptive slogans.
Those people were deceived into believing that any openness to others meant open disbelief. Through that, they were able to lock down several countries, and even ban the media that exposes them. All this had nothing to do with religion.
Almighty Allah said in the Quran, “O people, We have created you all male and female and have made you nations and tribes so that you would recognize each other. The most honorable among you in the sight of God is the most pious of you. Allah is All-knowing and All-aware.”
Some countries were able to get rid of these pests when they acted in line with the correct, tolerant and moderate religion, and began to cleanse their societies from them. This is because the principle behind guiding the nation - any nation - is the leadership that works to protect its state, and make it immune from those gangs that have corrupted the land over the past decades.
Today, there is an awakening in several Arab societies to combat intellectual terrorism, and to expose the fraud of those about whom Almighty Allah said, “Verily, those who purchase a small gain at the cost of Allah’s Covenant and their oaths…”
Here we ask - When will some societies be liberated from the control of those who are still leading them into the abyss?
By Ahmed Al-Jarallah
Editor-in-Chief, the Arab Times
