TO GAIN BACK OUR HONOR, WE NEED TO GO BACK TO THE QURAN AND SUNNAH

If you go on the streets of Cairo and ask an average well-educated young man about the direction that Egypt should take, whether to be more liberal and follow in the footsteps of the West or to be more conservative and follow in the footsteps of the Muslims of the Golden Age, he will most likely reply that Egypt should follow in the footsteps of the West because we live in the 21st century. In fact, that is the response most Muslims will give. We live in 2014, so we can not follow something that is 1400 years old. We need to change it and modify it to fit our times and situations.

I will not try to argue from a religious point of view. I will not quote hadiths or Quranic verses to make my case that the way to move forward as Muslims is to cling to our past. I will simply use the demise of the Ottoman empire and the demise of our Caliphate to make my case. As the Ottoman Empire started leaving the Quran and Sunnah, it became "the sick man of Europe" and eventually diminished along with the Caliphate.

The basis of the Ottoman empire in the 1300s was Sharia (a political system based on the Quran and Sunnah). It prided itself in following the Quran and Sunnah. As it grew in size and might, it eventually assumed the position of defending Islam and the position of the Caliphate. It gave refuge to persecuted Christians and Jews, followed Shariah in giving them their rights and place in Ottoman society. The empire swelled in size and might, conquered half of Europe and controlled most of Muslim lands. It was the ultimate super power of the world.

However, things started to change in the 1800s for the Ottoman Empire. In the face of rising European powers like Spain, England and Germany, many within the government of the Ottomans began to question the direction in which the Empire should head. The influentials amongst the government proposed that in order to be more powerful than the Europeans, the Empire needed to be more European.

Soon, came the Tanzimat reforms that basically abolished Shariah law from the Empire. The ideology at the time was that if you get rid of religion in general, just like the Europeans, you will become more successful. Some of the changes included: government workers wore European-styled uniforms, military troops came only from Turkish descent, secular courts replaced Islamic judges, a finance system based on the French model, legalization of homosexuality, enforcement of an “Ottoman” identity instead of unique cultural identities, and the reform of the educational system to be based on a science/technology curriculum instead of traditional subjects such as Quran, Islamic studies, and poetry. There was an overall attempt to remove Islam from the government and public life.

All of these changes took place in the 19th century leading up to World War I in the early 20th century. And we all know what happened during and shortly after the war. The Caliphate was abolished, Palestine in British/Zionist control, and all of the Middle East divided up by different European nations, while Russia took the Bulkans.

Umar Ibn al-Khattab, the second Rightly Guided Caliph, once said:

“We were the most humiliated people on earth and Allah gave us honor through Islam. If we ever seek honor through anything else, Allah will humiliate us again.”

This is exactly what happened to the Ottomans. They tried to seek glory and power in something other than Islam and in return the entire empire along with the Caliphate (that ran continuously for 1300 years) was abolished. So, to say that we need to keep chasing secularism and leave Islam to gain back our glory as Muslims, is pure insanity. History has proven to us that this approach does not work. And if we do not learn from history, we are nothing but madmen.



Credit: Lost Islamic History, lostislamichistory.com