Opportunistic and idealist Muslims

Submitted by Concerned Buddhist (Lithuania), Sep 20, 2007 at 02:24

Opportunistic Muslims are one category of passive Muslims, and your characterisation of them is pretty correct. Conservative Muslims would be another broad category, their difference from opportunistic Muslims consists in their being more serious with the sharia at personal level and not striving towards "benefits" offered by the modern world. However both groups still practice sharia only on personal and familal level, it means they focus on devotional acts(prayer, fasting, pilgrimage) and family law, however usually have little interest of bringing sharia in other areas of life. The third category could be called "secular Muslims", ie. those who either do not practice at all or strictly circumscribe following Sharia to acts of devotion(prayer etc.)

As for "idealist Muslims" your characteristic is again quite correct, only I would disagree with such demonization of Muhammed. Muhammed was certainly not worse than emperors of Rome and kings of Persia. All rulers of Antiquity and Middle Age comitted lots of treasons, assassinations, plunders etc. However "idealist Muslims" are completely misguided in choosing a medieval politician as example for our age and trying to follow his methods litterally.

Could there be another kind of "idealist Muslims", namely those who reject following the example of Muhammed as statesman, but instead choose to follow Muhammed as "holy man"? I would answer that maybe yes, there could be such people, however as for now, unfortunately, they are depressingly few. An example of such man would be Sudanese Sufi scholar and politician, the martyr Mahmud Muhammed Taha http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Mohamed_Taha . The essense of his message was that the shariatic islam was the "first edition" of islam good maybe for its own age while what the world needs today is the "second edition of Islam" based on the spiritual example of the Prophet Muhammed.

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