Secularism/Paganism Vs Religions esp Islam.

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http://wrfnet.org/resources/2008/09/paganism-step-child-secularism

Paganism the step child of secularism:

by

Peter Jones, Ph.D.


I.Introduction

Preparing for this lecture, the title of an article caught my attention because it contains within it the very thesis of this paper:ACan Darwin Save Dartmouth from Derrida?Dartmouth was formed with a charter from the Dutchman, King William, as a Christian institution for the preparation of young men to convert the American Indian. Only recently the student president was reprimanded for mentioning Jesus in his speech to the incoming freshmen.


According to the article, this secular humanist school, now wallowing in ideological fragmentation by Derridian deconstruction, will be brought back to some semblance of a university by the integrating power of a neo-pagan reprise of Darwinian evolution. My own title also requires some explanation. A stepchild represents the next generation, though without any obvious organic relationship with its parents and their generation. A stepchild is a seemingly unrelated and often quite unexpected progeny. That is perhaps a useful way of describing the relationship between secular humanism and neo-paganism. What were we expecting as the progeny of the Enlightenment Project?



II.The Life and Death of Secularism


A.Life:


Humanism emerged in Europe between 1200 and 1400 as the studia humanitatisAhumanistic studies.It came to represent an established intellectual and cultural curriculum focused on grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy. From the 18th to the 20th centuries we have observed the great success of secular humanism. The Enlightenment project, based on faith in human reason as the norm of truth and the source of salvation began with Descartes=s (1596-1650) cogito. Its victory is for ever associated with the French revolution, when the Paris revolutionaries in 1789 built an altar to the Goddess Reason right in the middle of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, and declared in Article 10 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man that "No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law." The law was Secularism, which legally was set in French institutions with the law of 9 December 1905, when the Socialist Deputy Aristide Briand, got the Assembly to vote in favor of the separation of Church and State, placing the political powers above the Catholic Church specifically in issues of public education.



Such an enthusiastic faith in humanity brought a great sense of optimism to human affairs and produced all the wonders of modern, technological Western civilization. This state of affairs hardly needs documentation. Secularism represented the advance of humanism to ideological autonomy, a radical shift of psychological allegiance from God to man, from dependence to independence, from otherworldliness to this world, from the transcendent to the empirical, from myth and belief to reason. Man, human reason, became the measure of all things. Its dominance in modern culture is to be seen in a series of victorious mega movements that produce the demise of Christendom: Darwinianism, biblical criticism, laicization, psycho-analysis and pluralism. Christendom contributed to its own demise by its almost complete identification with power. In America, as the beginning of the 20th century, according to J. Gresham Machen,AChristianity was becoming a means to an end of Americanization and social improvement.


Indeed the measure of secular humanism=s self-confidence is to be seen in the prediction by serious social observers and philosophers of the final victory of secularism and the disappearance of religion altogether. The philosopheVoltaire, delivered the bone-chilling statement about Christianity, AEcrasez l=infame literally,Acrush that vile, unspeakable thing.Ludwig Feuerbach (b.1804), called Christianity a delusion and God a human projection.


Karl Marx, in the middle of the nineteenth century, dismissed religion as the opiate of the people, nd his contemporary, the French philosopher, Auguste Comte (1798-1857) argued that secularization was the inevitable result of human maturity and that mankind would progress toward a superior state of civilization by means of the science of sociology.Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov of Pavlovian conditioned reflex fame, was a true son of the nineteenth century, believing in the omni-competence of science as an expression of the truth of 19th century materialistic philosophy. Born in 1849, he trained for the priesthood but was disaffected with Christianity under the influence of Darwin.He came to believe that science would answer all questions pertaining to life and would replace religion.


Sigmund Freud, in his book, The Future of an Illusion (1927), saw in secularism the tool in the new age of scientific enquiry to bring about the demise of a primitive illusion. Freud, who referred to himself as a Godless Jew, went on to argue that religion is a mass delusion which formally enshrines our infantile longing for an all-powerful protective (but also threatening) father figure. For Freudian psychology, religion was a pathological condition, the great obstacle to mental health, from which the future utopian world would be healed.



These predictions have come true in the demise of the Christian religion as the dominant social force in Western civilization.In 1967 the sociologist Peter Berger noted theAoverall decline in the plausibility of Christianity, due, in his opinion, to the rise of theAage of revolution.No longer submission to the will of God but history and human action serve to explain the great questions of theodicy.He sees the great effect of secularism as creating a crisis of credibility for religion in general and Christianity in particular.What few saw, including Berger,[9]*was the*demise of secular humanism.


B.Death


The inevitable triumph of atheistic secularism and demise of religion did not happen. Andre Malraux in the middle of the twentieth century, at the high-point of the achievements of secularism, predicted that the 21st century would be religious. The Postmodern deconstructionist, Mark C. Taylor, professor at Williams College, observes that the 21st century will be dominated by religion in ways that were inconceivable just a few years ago.Just a few years ago it was difficult to think that a movement whose triumphant success began with the fall of the Bastille in 1789 would effectively end 200 years later with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.


The fact is, secular humanism is dying, much to the disgust of Harvard geneticist, Richard Lewontin. Lewontin believes that the reason for opposition to scientific accounts of our origins, is not that people are ignorant of facts, but that they have not learned to think from the right starting pointY[that] science is the only begetter of truth." What the public needs to learn is that, like it or not, "We exist as material beings in a material world, all of whose phenomena are the consequences of material relations among material entities."



British sociologist Steve Bruce predicts the continuous victorious march of secularism. He sees no valid religious alternative on the horizon. He dismisses the increasing presence of Eastern religious ideas in the West as no evidence against secularization, since most of it is shallow.He believes that the New Age movement is eclectic to an unprecedented degreeY[thus] I cannot see how a shared faith can be created from aYworld of pick-and-mix religion.Another critic dismisses this spirituality as an exotic egotistical focus on the spiritual well-being of the self and asks pointedly:where are the New Age schools, nurseries, communes, colleges, ecological housing associations, subsistence farming centers, criminal resettlement houses, women=s refuges, practical anti-racism projects and urban renewal programs?



Much of the contemporary rejection of religion is still the Christian religion. Richard M. Price, who was once a born-again Christian argues that the notion of a personal God conflicts with our morally neutral universe, creating an unhealthy, superstitious approach to life. The God of the Bible, according to Price, is a Frankenstein Monster, a divine bully, and an obsessive stalker.The endorsements on the back include those of John Shelby Spong, Don Cupitt, and Clark H. Pinnock.

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Much of the present visibility of atheism attacks the God of the Bible. The well-known Oxford evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins,The God Delusion (London: Houghton Mifflin, 2006 also has Christianity in his sights. For him, the biblical Yahweh is psychotic, Aquinas's proofs of God's existence fatuous and religion generally nonsense. Faith is a form of irrationality, a "virus of the mind."Daniel Dennett, Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy Tufts University, compares belief in God to belief in the Easter Bunny.Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason and Letter to a Christian Nation, is amazed that hundreds of millions of people worldwide profess religious beliefs when there is no rational evidence for any of those beliefs.



If religion was supposed to disappear, why, asks Alister McGrath, is Richard Dawkins=s four hundred page book,The God DelusionTurkish philosopher Harun Yahya believes that "Atheism, which people have tried to for hundreds of years as 'the ways of reason and science,' is proving to be mere irrationality and ignorance."
Wolfhart Pannenberg states: "Atheism as a theoretical position is in decline worldwide.McGrath says that atheism is now seen by many as an embarrassing link with a largely discredited past. He believes atheism's "future seems increasingly to lie in the private beliefs of individuals rather than in the great public domain it once regarded as its habitat."


As proof of the cracking foundations, the greatest atheist of the twentieth century, philosopher Anthony Flew, recently rejected atheism. In January 2004, Flew informed the Christian apologist, Gary Habermas that he had indeed become a theist. While still rejecting the concept of special revelation, whether Christian, Jewish or Islamic, he had concluded that theism was true. He embraced the notion of intelligent design, believing it impossible for evolution to account for the fact than one single cell can carry more data than all the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica put together. In Flew=s words, he simply had to go where the evidence leads.



Mark Driscoll, a young Emergent pastor of a 6000 member church, mentioned a church that thirty years ago had 9000 members but today has 100 because they are answering yesterday=s questions. As proof, for an outreach, they organized at great expense a debate between an atheist and a Christian. No one from the community attended. Why?



Ythe church did not know that atheism, popular a generation ago, is virtually dead today. This church believed that people are either Christians or atheistsYactually their neighbors were very spiritual people who spent great amounts of time praying but had no idea to whom.


In the political realm, the cracking foundations can be seen in the fall of so many Marxist regimes, the political form of secular humanism. Presidential candidate, Barack Obama, in a speech in 2006 criticized liberals who dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant.In academia, the title of a secular literature conference in 2006 suggests something is afoot:God is Undead: Post-Secular Notions in Contemporary Literature and Theory. In this conference a professor of comparative religions gives a course entitled The End of the Modern World.
Jacques Berlinerblau, associate professor at Georgetown University, and author of The Secular Bible: Why Non-Believers Must Take Religion Seriously (Cambridge, 2005), writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education (June, 2007) a provocative article entitled, Secularism in the Elimination Round,where he denounces the embarrassingly offensive and simplistic arguments of the new atheists.

Long article contiues...

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http://www.deoband.net/blogs/modern-culture-an-illusion

Modern Culture : An illusion.


By Mufti Mohammad Anwar Khan.

The champions of the modern culture vociferously babble that only the modern things may be accepted in the scheme of life. They reject all that is old, traditional which they call as a symbol of radicalism and conservativeness. This bunch of modern individuals has devised a set of beautiful words to describe their ideas, feelings, sentiments, and expressions. But this is a fact that nothing relating to modernity is good or wholesome for humanity.

The modern culture wants that women should be made devoid of dresses so that they revel in seeking after their unbridled lusts. Dance, music, film, coeducation, dating, friendship, exhibitionism are all but means for them to satisfy their uncontrolled emotions. These modern champions are unable to understand that they, while advocating modernity, are inviting the whole human race towards utter misery and irreparable damage.

Those who oppose modernity and all that the new globalizing culture offers to humanity are called as radical, extremist, fundamentalist, and conservative. On the other hand, those who support their viewpoints are dubbed as modern, up-to-date, contemporary, enlightened, broad-minded, cosmopolitan, charismatic, and, in brief, complete human beings.

All this is taking place for no reason but to satisfy their base desires, to copy the modern civilization. You may cross no road, street, park, public place or office and institution without noticing a half-naked woman trying to allure the unlucky onlookers, which often make them a regular sufferer of hypertension and other psychological problems.

We may put the simple question before the ardent supporters of modernity and free living societies: Why have murder, incest, rape, kidnapping, eve-teasing, sexual harassment, date-raping, drug abuse, trafficking and a number of other serious issues started to take deep roots in the lives of the human brings? Wickedness, injustice, grief, pessimism, trouble, loneliness, fear, stress, frustration, distrust, unscrupulousness, anxiety, rage, jealousy, resentment, drug addiction, immorality, gambling, prostitution, hunger, poverty, social corruption, theft, war, struggle, violence, oppression, fear of death… News about these issues appear in the newspapers and on TV every day. Who is, at last, responsible for these curses? Why is the modern generation so fascinated with committing bestial crimes, a latest series of felonies that make the sensitive among the humanity shudder to even think about them? All these phenomena clearly indicate that something is terribly wrong with the lifestyle of the modern man.*

The story of 74 year old Austrian building engineer is before us to think. This incestuous man locked his daughter in a rat-infested dungeon for 24 years and even he fathered seven children by her. There is found intense global criticism over cases like that. Our country India is also likely to be riveted by the newly revealed case of an outwardly respectable Guajarati businessman in Mumbai who allegedly has been raping his daughter for nine long years. In 2008, Maria Monica Susairaj and her boyfriend killed Neeraj Grover, hacked him into pieces, stuffed them into plastic bags, and later set fire to them. Why do sordid tales of rape, incest, and unimaginable cruelties to children attract so much attraction? Is it prurient interest or revulsion that drives public fascination? We can only guess.

In fact, the main problem lies in the modern mindset that has generated a strange kind of social fabric to live in. The traditional values have been trample over. Parents are not obeyed. Incestuous relations are very often reported. Drug abuse and alcoholism have become the order of the day. Cheating and swindling have become a norm in the human society. Brutalism has exceeded all the limits in a way that it resembles the bestialities of the animals let loose in a jungle. Murder and kidnapping are reported on a daily basis. Fraud and embezzlement have been included as part of the modern politics. Social integrity, national cohesion, and communal harmony find their place in the back stage. Affection with the juniors and the respect of the elders is the talk of the bygone era. Morality has been marginalized. Dirty politics has been made as the part of the modern national and international agenda.

Until the world does not revert to its original course of living, we can never dream a world full of peace and satisfaction. Only making agendas cannot work unless we make an effective step towards changing the modern course that is in fact leading the world towards its final decay. Raising hollow slogans has diminished the hope of people in true democracy.

Time and again, the world has witnessed a number of policies, agendas and memorandums to be imposed for the betterment of humanity. Conferences, seminars, programs, and projects are organized but with no utility or effectiveness. The people must think about the future of humanity and chart out a plan that ensures full security and total safety for them. In order to crystallize these outlines, they will need a program that might revolutionize this planet. The solution lies nowhere but in Islam, which if objectively analyzed, has the potential and power to guarantee what the humanity is waiting for a long time: that is life, liberty, and the pursuit of real happiness.*

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http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=coHf5UEFUl8

Bill gates baffled about eugenics...another gift of secularism.

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The Paradox of Secular Scientism

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2007/05/the_paradox_of_secular_scienti.html

It has become an accepted tenet of conventional wisdom to begin all discussions about science and nature with the understanding that religion has no place in such debates and that, in fact, faith is diametrically opposed to reason and scientific thought.* To this end the concept of classical education, including any mention of God has been thoroughly removed from all Western public schools and replaced with a rather drab and mundane scientism.

When the Godless, humanist political movements ascendant in the eighteenth century, which already lacked a firm moral foundation, were seemingly confirmed by the theories of agnostic science and augmented by an equally amoral pursuit of scientific knowledge, the results were truly horrifying.* With the clarity of hind-sight we see what should have been predictable: that however unintentional, the ‘progress' begun by these secular scientists inevitably led to the practical efforts of people like Margaret Sanger and Adolf Hitler.* After all, what are abortion, eugenics, the creation of a master race, and the final solution if not an acceleration of Darwin's principle of natural selection?* Is this not Social Darwinism writ large?** *****


The dogmatic pursuit of scientific knowledge artificially divorced from the reality of a Creator is a corruption of the scientific method as practiced by men of science since the Christian Scholastics founded the world's first universities in the Middle Ages.* When scientific progress began to be viewed as its own end rather than as a means to achieve some higher moral purpose, it became corrupted not by religion but by hostility to it.* History's greatest scientists such as Galileo, Newton, and Copernicus were all faithful Christians.* Newton spent more time studying the Bible than the cosmos.* And Darwin, arguably the founder of the secular scientific movement, only lost his own faith in Christ after his ten year old daughter died in 1851.* It is entirely possible that his motivation in pursuing his hypothesis was, for the grieving father, more a bitterly personal quest to disprove the existence of God then a dispassionate pursuit of truth.


When science lost its moral foundation through hostility to religion, it became preyed upon by another corrupting influence: politics.* And once infected thus, science slowly transmogrified into*scientism, or the religious advocacy (by elites within the scientific, academic, journalistic, and government communities) of consensus-based theories whereby a majority-rule mentality takes the place of the traditional scientific method.* Under this system theories need not be proven, only agreed upon, and once agreed upon, these dogmatic beliefs become the stuff of enforced orthodoxy and woe to anyone who dissents from the majority.


This new scientism is then*used as a means to justify extreme and dangerous political orthodoxies.* It is how the dubious and scientifically unsupported claims (namely that the use of pesticides to control mosquito populations have a catastrophic ripple effect across the food chain) of an obscure writer named Rachel Carson led to the ban on the use of DDT as an insecticide, which in turn resulted in the loss of tens of millions of lives to a disease (malaria) which had been all but eradicated by Western science.* The human cost, particularly in Africa, was disregarded by a preening elite of self-satisfied Western secularists who abused science to institute a new and infinitely more insidious form of imperialism affecting mostly poor, third world people.* One wonders how long the ban would have lasted had it been Europeans dropping dead by the thousands daily.


Similarly dubious scientific claims are made to oppose such things as over-population, man-made climate change, the use of bio-engineered foods, and nuclear power.* These are clearly political movements dressed up as science and have had some truly bizarre results.* For example, some proponents of secular scientism are in the weird position of rejecting the consumption by humans of bio-engineered foods while supporting efforts (through cloning, selective abortion, euthanasia, DNA manipulation, embryonic stem-cell cultivation, etc.) to bio-engineer human beings themselves!* They then propose to mitigate the unproven harmful effects of the consumption of bio-engineered foods by increasing the malnutrition and starvation which inevitably result from its ban.


They seek to save the planet from the scourge of global, ‘man-made' climate catastrophe, but rather than applying their collective genius to the task of learning how mankind can best cope with the realities of a warming planet, they seek instead to prove that man himself, through capitalism is to blame for the phenomenon.* They do this in spite of the similar warming (and cooling) trends throughout geological history and on several other planets in our solar system uninhabited by man - a clear indication that the phenomenon is solar, not man-made.*


They then seek, in spite of the potential cost of millions of lives through the likely increase in poverty caused by the implementation of such radical eco-political policies as the Kyoto Protocols, to limit the potential for global economic growth through their opposition to the use of such technologies as nuclear power and the burning of fossil fuels needed by modern economies by overstating their harmful effects.* These restrictions will impact worst those in the developing world least able to withstand the economic repercussions.* This is not a magnanimous or moral application of science for the betterment of mankind, this is raw power politics.* The cosmopolitan proponents of centralized, global power here seek to use science not to serve, but to control.* Coincidence or not, Earth Day is celebrated on the anniversary of the birth of Communist pioneer Vladimir Lenin.* It appears green is the new red. ******


This is the terrible paradox in which the secular scientific community finds itself: because they cannot acknowledge that God created the Universe and gave man dominion over the earth they must often advocate public policy positions which adversely affect mankind in favor of other species or the planet itself.* They are presumably in the curious position of preferring poor Africans have less access to clean water, adequate sanitation, and economic opportunity so that polar bears can have more glacial ice on which to hunt.


Secular scientists are afflicted with a sort of tunnel vision: they see only that which is directly in front of their face; anything on the periphery is ignored or rejected.* The existence of a Creator is the most prominent example and is the most reasonable assumption one can make to account for the universe.*

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Moving from creation to evolution, it is Darwin's contention that man was not created by a loving God but developed, perhaps in some mystical primordial soup - growing and shedding, through the process of natural selection, limbs and organs along the way.If this is true then the conduct of all earth's creatures, including man, must be ruled by what is merely individually expedient to ensure survival so that one might pass on favorable genes to the next generation.This process, if true, would also mean such virtuous but self-defeating human instincts as altruism, mercy, tolerance, and self-sacrifice would have been bred out of existence many thousands of generations ago.In the place of such virtues, Darwinism gives an intellectual stamp of approval to such vices as selfishness, cruelty, and intolerance as mere physical survival becomes the main concern of all men rather than worries about the salvation or damnation of the eternal soul.This is the slippery-slope of secular scientism.


On a more technical level, the unreasonable and almost religious adherence to Darwin's evolutionary theory and the concomitant nature worship it inspires in the secular scientific community and its supporters is quite problematic: one hundred fifty years after his theory was first postulated enough unresolved issues (The problem of spontaneous generation of life, a complete absence of transitional species in the fossil record, the Cambrian explosion, lack of evidence to support macro-evolution, the concept of irreducible complexity, etc.) remain to render his theory just that - a theory.These problems include issues Darwin himself anticipated and hoped future scientists would resolve.Yet in spite of the unsettled status of the theory, skeptics and dissenters are routinely dismissed, mocked, and black-listed so quickly by believers it makes the inquisition seem positively tolerant and open-minded by comparison.It is indeed an ironic twist that to the extent the prospect of being labeled a heretic by the Church was among the reasons for the birth of this peculiar movement it has itself tolerated no dissent from its often unsupported consensus beliefs.Like the Rwandan Hutus turning the tables on the Tutsi, the oppressed have become the oppressor.Why?Because to question evolution is to put God back into the picture and this is simply unacceptable to those whose religion is secular scientism.Like the pagans of old their god is creation, not its Creator; thus to question their theories is akin to denying the resurrection of Christ to a Christian or the prophet-hood of Mohammad to a Muslim.


On the question of evolution there is no clear consensus among believing Christians, however the Catholic Church, for its part, while taking no official position on the subject is nevertheless open to the concept of Theistic evolution - the theory that if Darwin's evolving species' were dominoes, then it was God's hand that set them up and toppled the first one.Since I myself am not a scientist the details of the scientific debate here are beyond both my capacity and the purposes of this essay; however from my (layman) point of view, I would say that believing mankind and this wonderful and orderly universe of ours ‘just happened' through a series of accidents is akin to suggesting that random chunks over time fell from a block of marble to reveal the form of the Blessed Mother cradling the lifeless body of our Lord Jesus rather than crediting the vision, inspiration, talent, and genius of Michelangelo for creating the Pieta.Likewise one simply cannot fully understand or explain nature without an acknowledgement of and appreciation for its Creator.


Clearly faith in God need not and should not be a disqualifier when discussing scientific questions.A proper foundation in the moral as well as the physical laws of God's glorious creation should be a requirement of a well-rounded educational curriculum. And the moral restraints placed upon science by faith need not be a hindrance to discovery and progress, but merely a rudder to help point progress in the proper direction.And if this means that certain core beliefs of the secular scientific community need to be re-evaluated this does not mean mankind is regressing to a past mired in superstition and unreason. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, if we have made a wrong turn somewhere along the line we will be no nearer our destination by stubbornly continuing on; it is truly progressive at such times to double back to where you veered off track and find the proper path.

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How secularism reached muslim lands:

1.Secularism is defined in the Webster dictionary as: "A system of doctrines and practices that rejects any form of religious faith and worship" or "The belief that religion and ecclesiastical affairs should not enter into the function of the state especially into public education."
There is no doubt that secularism contradicts Islam in every aspect. They are two different paths that never meet; choosing one means rejecting the other. Hence, whoever chooses Islam has to reject secularism. In the following, we go in the details of explaining why.

1- First, secularism makes lawful what Allah has made unlawful.
The Rule of Allah (Shari`ah) is compulsory and has basic laws and regulations that cannot be changed. Some of these laws are concerned with the acts of worship, the relations between men and women, etc.
What is the position with regard to these laws?

Secularism makes adultery lawful if the male and the female are consenting adults.
As for Riba (interest on money), it is the basis of all financial transactions in secular economies. On the contrary, Allah says (s.2 A. 278):
"O you who believe, fear Allah and leave what comes from Riba if you are believers. If you do not do so, then wait for a war from Allah and His Messenger."
As for alcohol, all secular systems allow the consumption of alcohol and make selling it a lawful business.

2- Second, secularism is clear unbelief (Kufr).
Secularism is based on separating religion from all the affairs of this life and hence, it rules by law and regulations other than Allah's laws. Hence, secularism rejects Allah's rules with no exception and prefers regulations other than Allah's and His Messenger's. In fact, many secularists claim that Allah's laws might have been suitable for the time they were revealed but are now outdated.

As a result, most of the laws governing the daily affairs of life in the countries ruled by secular systems contradict Islam. Allah says (S.5 A.50): "Do they seek a judgment of Ignorance? But, who, for a people whose faith is assured, can give better judgment than Allah?"

Ibn Katheer said in the Tafseer of this verse that Allah is denouncing those who reject His ruling and accept other rulings that are not based on the Shari`ah of Allah. Whoever does so is indeed a non-believer. Indeed, belief in Allah can never go with the acceptance of other than His rulings in one's heart. Allah says (S.5 A.44): "If any do fail to judge by what Allah has revealed, they are non-believers."
From the above, the status of secularism and its relation to Islam are clear.

But the ignorance about the Islamic truth is still dominating the Muslim's mind. Most secular systems repeat slogans like "no religion in politics and no politics in religion" or "religion is for Allah, and the state is for the people." Such sayings portray their view of Islam as a religion to be practiced in the mosque only, and that it should not be allowed to rule life outside the mosque. Furthermore, they try to deceive people with democratic slogans like "personal freedom" and "people governing people." That means that people come first and no place is made for the ruling of Allah.
This is why secularism is clear Kufr, this is why secular systems have no legality and authority and should be rejected by Muslims.

*

Courtesy: AlJumuah [The Friday Report], vol III, no. 10.
Compiled, edited and adapted by Khalid Latif, e-tabigue
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2)*Modernism in Islam:

WHAT IS MODERNISM AND WHERE DID IT COME FROM?

We can relate, ideologically, the modernist movement spreading these days to one sect in the past. This sect is called the Muta'zila, which is dated back to the third Islamic century. Although those people accepted the Qur'an and Sunna they made ta'weel (their own interpretation of the Qur'an) and said 'aql (intelligence) takes precedence over naql (guidance of the Prophet). However, this school died out. The modernist movement did not evolve from them, but they are very similar to them. The modernist movement actually originated in Europe (middle-ages).

At the time when the scientific method came about in Spain, it was seen that what the church was teaching was not true. This led to a slow revolt.*
The basic view of modernism (in all religions) is that: the religion should change according to the circumstances, and that it is not fixed.
There is no such thing as absolute truth. The Jewish and Christian modernist responce in Europe tried to explain how the religion was still relevant for the people. They made innovations to keep people interested in the religion (such as singing in church, introduced only in the 1900's).They tried to say the divine and the human is mixed in the Bible and that the parts that are true must be the ones that are not out of date. Also, the religion is improving over time and there is no absolute truth in the Bible.*

This is the time in history when many Muslims were looking to Europe. This led to three choices for those Muslims: accept the West; reject the West; or mix the two (reform Islam). Those who followed the third (the modernist) developed in, and focused on: Turkey - because it was under British influence; and Egypt - because Al-Azhar was the seat of Islamic knowledge.*
The people of this modernist movement judge Islam according to their 'aql. Some of their faults in regards to it are:
1) use it for things which it can't comprehend;
2) refer everything to it: accept what agrees with it, reject what does not;
3) judge the revelation by it. However, Ahl As-Sunna Wal Jamaa' believes that using the sound 'aql should lead one to the conclusion that the Qur'an and the Prophet are true and that their teachings should take precedence over pure 'aql.

THE INFLUENCE OF MODERNISM IN AMERICA
Modernist are saying that the West and the world has changed, and that Islam must become "civilized". Modernism has spread the most in the U.S. because:
1) there are no scholars available to refute them, or they won't refute them because people don't want to criticize them;
2) it allows Muslims from overseas to become part of American society and they do not have to be recognized as Muslim. Also, new American Muslims will not have to change their old lifestyle;
3) much of the literature, scholars, and institutions in the U.S. reflect the modernist thinking.

In tafseer, Yusuf Ali is the most popular translator of the meaning of the Qur'an, even though he denies what the 'aql can't see (of the unseen). In Seerah, one book is saying the Prophet is like anyone else. Another tries to say the sunna is not for the Shariah and that sometimes we have to throw away the hadith because Allah did not correct the Prophet's mistakes when he made ijtihaad.*

In Fiqh, modernists say interest is permissible, menstruation women can pray, and Muslim women can marry kaafir men. They say the face of women was not covered until 150 years after the time of the Prophet, even though it existed in his time, and that women should always pray in the mosque, even though hadith only show women in the mosque at Ishaa and Fajr because they could not be recognized in the dark.
They also say the hadith that a people with a woman ruler will not succeed is not true today and polygamy is forbidden except under certain conditions (which do not exist). Finally, it should be mentioned that this movement is organized and has resources such as magazines, television, conventions, and literature.

SOME OF THEIR VIEWS
Modernists influence the thinking of people, and that person spreads their views on unknowingly. Their way of thinking is the most dangerous thing about them. None discuss aqeedah (belief) because it is not important to them ('aql judges naqal). They are also trying to remove the sunna and say that the system of the old muhadditheen is insufficient. Most say (as do critics of the Bible) that we need a "higher criticism" of hadith and the earlier conclusions (ijmaa) of scholars are not sufficient, yet they give no new way to judge hadith. However, we as Muslims understand that the Prophet was guided by Allah and that we may not be able to understand everything in the hadith with our 'aql.*

It is common for the modernists to question the role of the sunna in the shariah. One said all of the sunna is of this world and not deen, even in the Prophet's time, therefore it is all a matter of shoora (consultation) and ijtihaad (therefore changeable). Another says we need to make ijtihaad for what is to be followed, and changes of time and place make sunna difficult to use. All of this is mentioned to weaken the view of the sunna. The Jews and Christians tried to differ the human from the divine. Modernists try to point out the differences between the Messenger as a human and as a Prophet.

They also avoid following the sunna by dividing his life into parts (imam, judge, military leader, prophet, etc.), saying some are not divine teachings and not law. Some say everyone is free to make ijtihaad, and later restrictions on it were imposed by the people. Another said a ruling may change even if it is from the Qur'an and Sunna.

HOW DO MODERNISTS GO ASTRAY?
The observer can easily point out the following points as the driving force for this trend:
1) Their premises and assumptions are wrong. Modernists look to the West and try to reinterpret the "old religion" with modern science and modern times. They assume that:
a) the present situation is advanced or different (i.e. "this is not the Prophet's time!"). However, the idea of progress and that things are better now is Marxian and Hegelian. It is against the hadith, as the Prophet said each generation is getting worse.
They must prove that there has been progression (no definition of it given). Islamically the advanced society is the one that comes closer to Allah, and understands and applies Islam better (such as the sahaaba). In fact, the current societies have the things of the old societies (such as homosexuality, etc.) as mentioned in the Qur'an;
b) religion is relative to time and place (i.e. "therefore we need to judge Islam in light of modern science"). Modernists are "people of science" and judge Islam according to modern science. They think that the West is based on science, but they fail to notice that not all science is based on fact. In reality, much of science is only hypothesis (not a fact). Also, every science has its own philosophy, which will lead to its own conclusions;
c) the way of thinking of a society is based on (is a product of) its enviroment. Modernists say most of religion is from the people and their environment and it can be judged by later times, and hadith are related to that time only. However, there is no proof for the modernist hypothesis that religious truth is relative. Allah says the Qur'an is Haq (truth). Modernists are saying (by inference) that if the Qur'an is not true now, then it was never true.
2) The methodology they use is wrong. The methodology of the modernists is the way they mislead people to the wrong conclusions. They claim to be scientific, but they are usually inconsistent or have no proof or foundation for their beliefs. Some of the means and principles they use include:
a) Sunna and Hadith. They claim the Qur'an is authentic and they only follow "authentic" hadith. This implies that they have a way to judge hadith (different from that of the traditional scholars), yet most give no new way to judge hadith, and are using their 'aql (intelligence) to determine this (like the female ruler hadith). Modernists especially dislike hadith which have specific meanings and prefer ones which only have general principles.
b) Use of weak hadith to help their points and arguments (while they are calling for the use of authentic hadith). For example, in the area of women in Islam (the two areas the modernists try to change the most are the sunna and women) they like to quote two stories from the time of Umar ra:

1) when Umar was giving a Khutbah he tried to restrict the amount of dowry, a woman opposed, and Umar corrected himself and thanked the woman, and
2) Umar ra appointed Umma Shifaa as a market-regulator (used by modernist to say women can work in the government). However, both of these stories are not authentic.
c) Use vague terms without defining them. Modernists use terms like democracy, freedom, and equality, but they do not define what they mean by them. The danger in using vague terms is that a knowledgeable person will pass over the word or concept, thinking they meant the Islamic or acceptable definition while in fact they did not, while others may believe what they are saying is true.
d) Do not present all of the relevant information that is available on the subject. That is, from Qur'an, sunna, etc. They only present that which will support their views. This tactic is used to avoid unliked beliefs, so they just do not mention them.
e) Force their interpretation onto the text. This is what the Muta'zilla did, when they said 'aql takes precedence over what is from the Prophet. Many modernists say Islam is the "rational" religion. This is true if you mean everything is from Allah and there is no contradiction, but to say that we can study everything in Islam by judging it with only our intellect is unacceptable and there is also no proof for this. To avoid implementing what the Qur'an and sunna says, the modernists say we need to follow the "spirit" of Islam and not worry about the laws specifically. But it is clear from the Qur'an and Sunna that we are to take both. They will argue that the text of the Qur'an only says for women to dress modestly and they do not like to talk about the specific details of hijaab and say we only need to follow the "spirit" of the law.
f) They tend to oppose scholars by saying they meant something else.
They say that the door to ijtihaad is open, which is something accepted by the Ahl As-Sunna Wal Jamaa'. However, it is not open to everybody on any subject. Modernists claim that anyone would make ijtihaad until Imam Shaffie narrowed the qualifications (not true), and today anyone can do it. In one magazine, on the question of polygamy and divorce, some said that these two can be restricted by ijtihaad. They often misquote scholars and give their own meanings for what they said.
g) Often follow strange and rejected opinions. They try to revive some of the old opinions because they like it and say that this writer said it in the past.Modernists try to open the door to these opinions and choose what is the most suitable and easy to follow. However, we are supposed to look for the fiqh opinions that are the closest to the truth. They usually bring bad hadith such as "The differences in my Ummah is a mercy" or reject authentic hadith such as the one about the breakup of the Ummah into 73 sects.
h) Follow their desires. They often make rulings and fatawa without permissible daleel (evidence). One said music is permissible because he did not see something wrong with it, so it is halal. But he did not check what the Qur'an and the sunna say about this subject.
ISLAM AND MODERNISM
Ahl As-Sunna Wal Jamaa' believes that there is only one true Islam. This is proven in Qur'an and Hadith. One hadith shows the straight line as leading to Allah, and branching paths leading off it with a devil at each one calling to it. Also, the umma will break into 73 sects, and the true way is the one who follows Muhammad and his companions. Modernists are differing from Ahl As-Sunna Wal-Jamaa' in:
1) everything in accordance with Qur'an and Sunna is Haq (truth) and what disagrees with it is false (some modernists disagree with this). Also, statements consistent with the Qur'an and Sunna are accepted;
2) Ijmaa (consensus) of the sahaaba (and early generations) is a hujja (proof) for all Muslims. Modernists say sahaaba are men and we are men, and even matters agreed on by them are open to ijtihaad;
3) anything in the Qur'an and Sunna cannot be opposed by 'aql, rational thought, opinion, or qiysas. This is supported in the Qur'an and is not open to discussion or vote. One modernists said the cutting of the hand of the thief is a "Khomeni Islam" and is unethical;
4) there are constants in Islam related to belief, worship, etc. and these are good, sound, proper, and correct for all places and times. This view is accepted by the Ahl Sunna, but not by many of the modernists, saying that all truth is relative and there is no constants. However, these constant principles are basic aspects of the Ahl Sunna and are traced to the Qur'an and Sunna and Sahaaba. They are not questionable or changeable things. In many of these things, modernists say we need ijtihaad and tajdeed.

DANGERS

1) Many are influenced by it and do not know it. Also, their views are unacceptable and should be refuted.
2) Many people do not recognize it as a movement of munkar or bida' and do not evaluate its writings and speeches, so they try to defend it. Many of their writings are from rationalization (which has no end or conclusion), and the effects of this are seen in the Christian church (that is, they now have no relationship to their religion, and it has no practical value or purpose).
3) This group is also playing into the hands of the kuffar. They are happy with it because their effort is to bring the Muslim women out of the home to change them. The last 200 years has been a colonialist and orientalist attack on the position of the woman in Islam (to destroy her and the society).

CONCLUSIONS

1) The modernists movement as a whole (what it is based on) is from Bida' (innovation). They have their own principles and ways, which contradicts that of Ahl-Sunna. They say we want ijtihaad in the basic principles of the deen (religion) which are constant.
2) They are very willing to reject and contradict the ijmaa of the sahaaba on clear points (such as stoning of the adulterer and the apostate is to be killed) and hadith are dealt with as if they are not important (women ruler hadith is common).
3) One of the main points of modernism is to change the role of women. They say it is permissible to mix men and women and to not wear hijaab. The modernists are impressed by the West and their conclusions always seem to agree with the views of the West.