Semantic traps - "Western reform" vs "Islamic reform"

Submitted by Ianus (Poland), May 24, 2008 at 06:42

Dear Carol ,

you write : "Good for them, everything must adapt, through reformations, evolutions, cycles of growth, adaption to new and better ways of thinking and believing."

How Western you are, dear friend! How permeated by the ideals of Enlightenment, Science, civilizatory optimism and everything which is so alien to and incompatible with Islam! As a good Westerner you believe in progress, such a prominent feature of our Western civilization. Yet the idea of progress is unknown to Islam and quite illogical within its axiomatic system.

How could anyone improve the self-proclaimed absolute perfection of Islam as confirmed on many occasions by Allah's in his "masterpiece" - the Quran? You can't progress in Islam in the Western sense of inventing a new and better Islam. The ultimate degree of perfection was achieved in the "prophet's" times. If you don't believe it was , you're not a Moselm at all.

Therefore, what you can do within this narrow Moslem framework is just return, regress, backslide to its alleged primordial "virtue" and "absolute perfection". I don't know if you have noticed that practically every change, every "reformation" within Islam is in fact a move backwards, an attempt at regression, at coming back to a more primitive state. It has nothing to do with the Western notion of progress and reform as moving frowards.

Consider what Ismail Hakki Unal of Ankara University says : "The Koran is our basic guide. Anything that conflicts with that, we are trying to eliminate." In other words - Allah's book - the Quran- is perfect. We Moslems are coming back to its perfection by getting rid of all the imperfections of the later ages. Like most Western notions Moslems apply there is also here another glaring example of abuse and a semantic trap set for the naive kafirs to get hoodwinked with.Western-style reform within Islam is a daydream. Islam will remain what it has always been - the malignant metastasizing cancer of this world.

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