Captive Muslims

human rights and gender equality.

They sound noble enough, but sister-brother do not buy the hype. These bullets are not fit for your barrel, they were manufactured for another, which was itself pointing in another direction. Secondhand shopping and piracy are not befitting for you. This is not a matter of reinventing a wheel, but a matter of sailing on a better breeze.

They are a strange bunch of concepts for a Muslim to swallow. A secularist swallows, then wonders why he is unable to impact any change and why the people he wished to civilise think he is a materialist, loser, and alien and a fool. Another person, perhaps a countryman of the former doesnt swallow, doesn't milk the hegemon's disciplining development cow and carries forward some dignity through his dysfunction. He still has problems to deal with, but at least he didn't take the wrong prescription and kill off his liver.

Another scholar fudges the philosophy of Islamic Law a little apologetically to bring the shape of it nearer to another civilisation's symbolic field. He sets UN declarations of human rights and development speak up as maslaha in the field of practice. His community scratches it's head and wonders 'what a waste of resources'.

Sadly this couple of concepts have become reference points for civility in the Muslim context, they have been manufactured as common sense. There should really be more resistance and supersession of this crazy jive. The secular surrender and capitulation is explainable as our knowledge culture is still captive. Many Muslims who can eat and read have abdicated responsibility and gone for easy fake answers, quick fixes and the approval of some other master. In other cases the Muslims are so desperate, far away from their own tradition and unimaginative that they are 'fast' and 'easy' to 'take'. The confused and confusing effects of this pair's penetration in Islamic society should be thoroughly investigated.

However, all is not well in the trad tent. There are matters which are stuck to with enviable vigour that do not require such commitment. Priorities seem to have been perverted. Redundant imprints persist of what was once thought to be true by a few, but now is better understood, by our own measures. How do such things get conditioned out of the Millat's habitus? They are socially spasticating and infantalising. How do we drum them out of eachother while we polish eachothers' hearts'?

Muhammad Asad critiqued the overblowing of 'consensus of the ulama' lyric, used very often to shut down discussion. It rests on an intelligent take on the 'My Ummah will never unite upon that which is wrong' hadith which has been spun debilitatingly. Yet the salaphicated ones persist. Their petrodollar pumped popularisation of the god-forsaken 'bidah antenna' has really dumbed down the believers.

Stressing fluency with the theory of maqasid al sharia, the higher objectives of the sharia, has never been so desirable. It opens the means, rather than blocks them. Moral imaginations and horizons are enriched at the same time as the synthesising quality of nuronic reception is improved. Perhaps it can play a role in helping us get more things right and discover our mojo.