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An Open Letter to bin Laden

 
Greenhorn
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I think this hits the nail on the head. Don't you?
Consider this remarkable open letter to bin Laden that a Pakistani writer and businessman, Izzat
Majeed, wrote in last Friday's popular Pakistani daily The Nation:
"We Muslims cannot keep blaming the West for all our ills. . . . The embarrassment of wretchedness among us is beyond repair. It is not just the poverty, the illiteracy and the absence of any commonly accepted social contract that define our sense of wretchedness; it is, rather, the increasing awareness among us that we have failed as a civil society by not confronting
the historical, social and political demons within us. . . . Without a reformation in the practice of Islam that makes it move forward and not backward, there is no hope for us Muslims anywhere. We have reduced Islam to the organized hypocrisy of state-sponsored mullahism. For more than a thousand years Islam has stood still because the mullahs, who became de facto clergy instead of genuine scholars, closed the door on `ijtehad'[reinterpreting Islam in light of modernity] and no one came forward with an evolving application of the message of the Holy Quran. All that the mullahs tell you today is how to go back a millennium. We have not been able to evolve a dynamic practice to bring Islam to the people in the language of their own specific era. . . . Oxford and Cambridge were the`madrasas' of Christendom in the 13th century. Look where they are today � among the leading institutions of education in the world. Where are our institutions of learning?"
The Protestant Reformation, melding Christianity with modernity, happened only when wealthy princes came along ready to finance and protect the breakaway reformers. But in the Muslim world today, the wealthiest princes,like Saudi Arabia's, are funding anti-modern schools from Pakistan to Bosnia, while the dictators pay off the anti-modern mullahs (or use them to whack the liberals) rather than reform them. This keeps the soil for bin Ladenism ever fertile.
Addressing bin Laden, Mr. Majeed concluded, "The last thing [Muslims]need is the growing darkness in your caves. . . . Holy Prophet Muhammad, on returning from a battle, said: `We return from little Jihad to greater Jihad.' True Jihad today is not in the hijacking of planes, but in the manufacturing of them."
No truer words were ever spoken.
 
Sheriff
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That's an interesting essay, thanks.
 
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