The Need to Redefine and Reform Islam

We can help this world by helping our Muslim brothers to redefine themselves in ways in parallelism with global world involving blending of cultures and openness to beliefs and lifestyles. More than anything, it will save non-Muslims from hair-raising problems at many levels in future.

Secular theorists should be gagged for some time and allow some real practical talk and do some reality check. We have to find ways to gradually melt paranoid apprehension in Muslim minds regarding anything non-Muslim, be it dress, places of worship, mode of prayer, food, relationships and what not!

We have to ensure that next generation of Muslims is more tolerant to those beyond the Muslim walls having their own distinct ways of life. We have to tell educated next generation of Muslims that touching a Hindu temple’s walls from outside does not mean they have lost their Muslimhood. We Hindus are very lenient in that we accommodate multiple realities linked to inter-religious strains. We hardly have any qualms about entering and even offering prayers in dargahas and mosques. Muslims are conditioned to take any such bravado into others’ shrines as blasphemous. An ultra-modern, educated Muslim colleague of mine in corporate used to openly throw Tuesday prashada into the dustbin. Well it was just a simple ritual by God-abiding Hindu employees to collect money on Tuesday and distribute prashada on the floor. If the educated lot behaves that way, imagine the situation in crammed slum type Muslim neighborhoods!

Islam has to be fundamentally redefined to inculcate mercy at its core philosophy like other world religions. A lady colleague of mine still gets palpitations when she recalls an incident from her childhood in an African country. Her father had taken her to visit his Muslim friend’s house. All went well till she saw the host’s small kid catching a mouse and scooping out its eyes with playful relish. The proud father just looked droolingly. The fundamental philosophy is to kill the softer side in the young ones to make them less tolerant, less humane, aggressive and merciless so as to annihilate the kafirs and non-believers. We have seen the consequences of this fundamental Islamic approach in war-torn and strife-lorn Muslim countries where kid jehadis commit heinous crimes against humanity with the ease of performing something holy!

By sticking to the rigid medieval line, Muslims still think that there are enemies around and they have to stay like a pack of wolves to ward off the danger. This psychology is reflected in crammed, unhygienic, slumish Muslim neighborhoods where the age-old lifestyles are forced to stay alive in semi dark behind closed walls overlooking narrow streets. Even those well-to-do Muslims who can afford to shift to better social environment prefer to stay here. In fact there has been a reverse trend. Upper class Muslim families have shifted to congested predominantly Muslim colonies from the earlier secular kafir-infested locations having better facilities. It does not augur well for a cosmopolitan society.

The governments world over have to devise direct and indirect, covert and overt ways and means to break this fear psychosis in Muslim minds to draw them out of the wolfish packs behind closed walls and redistribute and relocate them as prosperous neighbors of tolerant culture involving people of different religions.

Governments and their institutions have to bring about subtle fundamental changes in the ways Islamists lead their lives so that at least the next generation of Muslims would not look stealthily, apprehensively over the Islamic walls and peer at the world outside as an alien entity. If this is not done then the world inside Muslim neighborhoods and outside will become so different that it will have sky and earth differentials. Such differentials never allow stability. The remedial effort might even involve nurturing modern maulvis who keep Koran and computer together!!