Part three:
I got the Quran on Christmas as a present from “Santa” how ironic.
And a couple of days later I started reading, it didn’t take more than a page to realize you can’t read this Book without any interpretations, so I got a book with an explanation for every sentence in the Quran.
I can’t stress enough how influential that Book is on the eastern culture. That is, from it, you can find the foundations of the primary Arabic language and many of its traditions.
Surely if you misinterpret it, you’ll find many things wrong with its moral philosophy, but that is because it’s hard to understand and most importantly it had lesser transformations at its core interpretational philosophy over the years (unlike the modern Christian religion which is drastically different from the one it should be according to the Book).
But if we take parts of the Quran, translate it how we like as the media, terrorist and political groups do you’ll find it like this “terrorist syllabus” that it isn’t.
Al Aumran 8:
“He is Who has sent down to thee the Book; in it, some verses are decisive in meaning — they are the basis of the Book — and others are susceptible to different interpretations. But those in whose hearts is perversity pursue such thereof as are susceptible of different interpretations, seeking discord and seeking a wrong understanding of it. And none knows its right interpretation except Allah and those who are firmly grounded in knowledge; they say, ‘We believe in it; the whole is from our Lord.
And none heed except those gifted with understanding.”
The Quran addressed fighting for the first time, permitting Muslims to fight in self-defense. The permission given in Al-Hajj 40-41 to fight was only given to “those against whom war is waged.” And fighting wasn’t just to defend Muslims from persecution – but to defend Christians, Jews, and people of all faiths. All subsequent verses addressing fighting are pre-conditioned on these clearly outlined rules of self-defense. Otherwise, it’s cherry-picking, something the Quran forbids as perverse.
So as you can tell, getting the wrong idea about Islam is very easy these days since this is what all the media talks about, and because getting unbiased translated talks, interpretations, and lectures on the internet aren’t easy.
Often you may find scholars debunking the religion and the Quran as a poison in our world stating their cherry-picked verses and Muslims in all their talks as bad and shouldn’t be even considered as moral.
Still, I’m not the type of person who’d fall victim to those who mastered the art of lecturing and convincing. Hence I always fact-checked the whole story behind their false accusations.
On the other hand, I still find the Quran and the history of early Islam as a mere revelational way to organize the society, and no one can deny it’s effectiveness since it’s still around for more than a thousand years.
And I don’t agree with that as I demonstrated with the Christian religion, because society changes, we evolve, and these ways that they used before to organize their cultures mostly by fear and legends that can’t be proven as the truth is meaningless in our digital age.
Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are three very similar religions “The three Abrahamic religions”;
containing similar tales, rules, and their God is practically the same, all based on the same land and time, which meant a lot of people were murdered at the start to prove that their religion was the right one.
Yet the religion that I would’ve chosen out of all religions would have been the Muslim one, the Sufi in particular.
While it is sometimes misunderstood as a sect of Islam, it is a broader style of worship that transcends values, directing followers’ attention inward.
The Sufi practice focuses on the sacrifice of worldly things, purification of the soul, and the mystical study of God’s nature. Followers try to get closer to God by seeking spiritual learning.
It is nothing more than the spiritual dimension of Islam; It is Islam, but with a focus on meditation and chanting sessions, which enable the Muslim to have his or her heart open. It is one of the foundations of the golden age ear-Arabic literature with emphasis on poetry such as the poems of the famous Rumi. I have read about the history of the Rumi, but one of the things that grasped towards him more was the novel: “The Forty Rules Of Love.” Which opened my mind more or less about what it is to become a Sufi. One of the ideas of Sufism which intrigued me was the one about “Al Mahiyya Wal Wujud” Which states that some things are there “Al Wujud,” some are not but we can give something that isn’t there a description “Al Mahiyya” such as a character from a book.
But that wouldn’t mean that it’s there, and one of the early Sufist priests “Ibn Al Arabi” talked about this idea and tried to show the importance of it in his visions. And he concluded that the cosmos comprises a hierarchy of three distinct worlds or levels: the ‘world of spirits,’ ‘the world of images’ and ‘the world of bodies.’ The second of these – ‘the world of images’ (‘Alam al-amthal), also called ‘the world of imagination’ (‘Alam al-khayal) – plays a vital role because of its intermediate position. It is the land (barzakh) between the world of spirits and the world of bodies, the realm in which souls are corporealized, and bodies are spiritualized. The world of images is existent, but in the waking state, we are generally unaware of it.
In our dreams, when our souls are no longer distracted by sensory input from the world of bodies, we function at this level, conversing with the departed and with those typically separated from us by geographical distances. What ordinary human beings experience only in their dreams; the mystic may experience at other times.
Ibn al-Arabi’s starting point is the observation that we all can create things in our imagination or imagine something happening as we would like it to happen. The ‘perfect man’ is also endowed with extraordinary spiritual energy or “himma,” which enables him to bring the creatures of imagination out of the world of images into the world of bodies, thus giving them existence. But only by the will of God.
In each of these three religions, we have a person sent by God to present to us the perfect way of living, and we as humans will have to try our best to follow him in how he lived his life. in Christianity its Jesus, Judaism it’s Moses and in Islam it Mohamed.
It wasn’t easy for me to know about the Islamic culture, I couldn’t easily find any reliable source on the internet or as a book, lecture, or just any professional.
Most of them were biased in their opinion, and a biased opinion never gets you as close as you need to get to the truth, but I did try my best, tried to get closer to some of my Muslim peers, read both sides of biased opinions in the end. However, the thing that got me into Sufism was Sarah!
“Sarah, our friend?” Said, Sid
“Yeah, we were walking one day, discussing the topic of religions and she mentioned Sufism and how it is this philosophical sect of Islam, now I loved philosophy, and since I was studying Islam, I did get into it pretty quickly, started reading wherever I can find anything about Sufists and practiced their ways of living by meditating.
These three religions weren’t the only ones in the world.
After some time, I decided to move on to the next religion.
And well, what better way to start with Buddhism than it is when you’re already meditating.”
Retroveens 