(Peaceful) Islam Scares The West(?)■

(Peaceful) Islam Scares The West(?)■

Both in one go. Amazing! But there is no dearth of such amazing ideas. Everything is messed up, literally. When we talk about Islam and peace we stop scaring the West. As soon as we start scaring the West, we forget about “Islam for peace (amn, taraqqi aur najaat)”. “Islam is for peace” is a very nice sentence. I would only reiterate here that Islam doesn’t merely stand for peace. It goes one step ahead and establishes that peace, too  So whenever we hear that “Islam is for peace” we should unmistakably ask how it is going to realize this peace for everyone including the West. We should not stop after hearing “Islam is for peace”.

When we say that Islam really scares the West (or any other observations similar to this for any other parts of the world) I wonder what we mean by it. If we really mean what we say then it raises very serious questions about our own understanding and perception of Islam. We need to stop here and evaluate our own concept of Islam before we evaluate how others look at it. How others perceive Islam and how much they are loving or phobic to it is a completely different matter. We should deal with this question separately and afterwards.

If the upholders of Islam themselves start believing and propagating that Islam truly scares certain areas of the world and its people then why not those areas and its inhabitants should really be scared of it? If they get actually scared they are completely justified. It only indicates that a very good product doesn’t have very good salespersons. If, however, we do not mean that Islam “really scares the West” then it is extremely dangerous to utter these words and stop after uttering them. Besides deafening, the silence after such sentences has serious consequences as it reconfirms the notion that Islam certainly frightens. (Does it!?)

If later we argue that “The West does not like the empowerment of the Muslim world and its empowerment scares it. The trends are only like that.” and again stop there then again it raises many questions. For instance, “Why the ‘un-empowered Islam’ is NOT a threat but as soon as it gets ‘empowered’ it will scare a reasonable part of the world?” To put it in perspective, I am prompted to ask how the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) would have reacted to such assertions? What would have been his world-view? How would he have reacted to the dreading full stop (■) and the silence of the highly educated among his Ummah!

It occurs to me that such full stops (■) are our enemy. Such ‘punctuations’ and grammatically correct sentences as the ones above are not allowing us to pause and ponder. We repeat the same sentences which we have heard a thousand times from others – the educated and the uneducated alike. This is why we are the greatest supporters of peaceful Islam and scare a huge part of the world from the same peaceful Islam. (The fact that Islam does not require any adjectives before it is yet another matter.) Please help me understand this situation and let me know what I should conclude from this phenomenon.

Thanks and salaam.

Wasim