UI – Part 442 – The Islamic World needs a Leader Devoted to Education

Progress Thru Education

Progress was made throughout the world as leaders embraced learning and education, not for themselves only, but for all the people. The impact was revolutionary. In time the results produced outcomes that benefited the whole of society. Hidden in the heads of a Bedouin, a Pakistani, a Syrian, Iraqi, Iranian, Saudi and so on,   is an intellectual fountain that when found will spring forth a wealth of suppressed ideas. Stimulated from a base of learning these desert travelers will find fertile soil that can yield life support systems for the millions of inhabitants. They will delight in the possibilities that arise when their culture is complimented with world knowhow applied, embraced and utilized for the benefit of those living in this temporal world.

Inspired Education-Centric Leadership

Needed is a Charlemagne. A revivalist, having the authority to expand the curriculum of the madrassas to include liberal arts, the trivium and quadrivium. So much could be gained as the Middle East, south Asian, Egypt, African and Maghreb Muslim nations would have the least of their citizenry emerge as contributors and new blooms in a paradise in the present. The Mullahs and Imams can concern themselves with salvation.  The civil authorities, the government officials, can concern themselves with the material, temporal, environs. The Islamists need to look to Córdoba and reflect on the value added from the cortex of the Umayyads. It was a period of harmony among the Arabs, but also those of other heritage and religion. It was a society of mutual respect and desire for learning and knowledge, feeding off one another to continuously improve where they live and how they live. Reasoning was permitted. There was a climate of tolerance.

There is a global climate challenge today much greater than global warming and considerably more needed. It is based under the clear blue cloudless skies of a medieval world that has access to great libraries but does not permit them to be built and filled with texts that would remove the scales the current ulema and autocrats prefer remain over the eyes of the women and impoverished under their rule. It is their law, manmade, and not common law that prevails. It is the challenge of making a Nation literate, educated and skilled. Those that do gain insight can well become dissidents threatening the hierarchy, subject to extirpation.  But if there is a leader that wants their people to learn, the Muslims under their thumb, that can be a joy, a wonderful, fruitful and rewarded joy. In fact it would provide hope to those they oversee.  It could change a Nation overnight. Those that might be dissidents today would be supporters tomorrow.

The Shackled Mind

While the good Muslim is to avoid questioning the Quran and source data from Hadiths or Hell awaits, this shackle on the intellect of humans given by God, is not of God’s doing. If it is of Allah’s doing, as provided via the angel Gabriel to the brain of the illiterate Muhammad, then Allah is not God. The mirror reflection in the Scripture of Islam is less of the divine and more of the mortal, less of the spiritual and more of the temporal. It is a distortion of truth. It is not the image of man. We know, or need be aware, as the Bible tells us so, we are created in God’s image. Inherent in God’s image is free will. Free will leads to the freedom to explore, to expand your base knowledge and to grow from baby to child to teen to adult and see the world as a whole, not as a piece, not as a walled-in city, not as a prison for the desert cultures born and enforced in the example of a warrior monotheistic control freak.

Al Gazali, a leading Islamic theologian from the 11th century, had an anti-humanist philosophy. He discouraged reason as a route to the rule of law or ethics. I would say he was backwards; today archaic and biased. Reason is a necessity, as water, to make life a reality, framed in a canvas that allows you as the artist to paint the picture with new brush strokes every day. The final object of art is your knowledge of the world. The frame is the world and your canvas is what  you learned about it and from it. The Islamists encouraged by the close-minded Al Gazali limits your canvas to a print, repeated and the same, with the rendering prepared in advance of your birth and to remain as your sole view to life. This is not life, but death on earth, as if hell itself. The picture upon which you are forced to gaze and recall is that of hell on earth.

An Escape from Hades for Muslims

You need not concern yourself of hell, you are already in it. But escape is possible. Through the stacks in the corners of uncensored libraries you can discover far off lands, explore islands and mountainous terrain, experience the dress and cultures of unknown nations and cities, you can travel by air, sea and land, and you can observe how women, children, the needy, the handicapped, the homosexual, the single and the married are treated by others, some fair, some not.  You can discover laws promulgated and applied from one nation to another, the fair, reasoned or the demonic application of the rule of law, whether sourced from god or from autocrats, a matter of man over the divine.  From this textural base you can form an opinion, a photograph and depiction of where and how you would prefer to live and/or be treated as a person.

Most of the Muslim majority nations are stagnant intellectually.  Their minds are wasted, never challenged, and never given the opportunity to develop.  The reaction to an intelligent mind would be too much for those in charge. The Islamist’s only way of thinking comes from the pages of the Quran and the over 100 verses that encourage fighting, war and hatred, condemning Christians, Jews, atheists, infidels, hypocrites, heretics and on and on and on. Commit to memory, they are told, that which says conquer new territory for Allah, emigrate into non-Islamic areas to make them Islamic, have enmity and hatred towards Jews and Christians forever, as a superior person, not a race, but as a result of being Muslim. Make slaves of infidels, take pleasure in pawing and raping non-Muslim women, same for non-Muslim boys. Collect protection money, the jizya, from non-Muslims, but react if they express concerns about your ideology.  If persecuted, then respond with your sword.  Those who stop your progress are not a friend.  They are the aggressor and you can defend yourself, even if others see you on the offense.  Better your interpretation from the pages of the Quran than their civil discourse, their objection, towards those that would disrupt and invade a peaceful society.  Kill those that persecute you, even if it is only words.  If they call your religion violent, kill them too. This is the limits of the education of the Islamists.  You are to be but clone-like warriors for an autocratic society, kept at the base of the food chain, to be sacrificed, martyred by suicide, for the good of your homeland – so you are told.  You are told this not by anyone who themselves would pack explosives around their bodies and with the push of a button splatter their entrails and flesh and organ matter into a crowd of unknowns, innocents and even other Muslims. You are told this by the leadership, past and present, the Azzams, Zarqawi’s, Baghdadi’s, Zawahiri’s, Arafats, Rhohani’s, Bin Ladens, ul Haqs, Morsis, al Bannas, Sauds, Assads, Husseins, Ghadafis, and more.  These are not the ones that want to educate the Muslim world.  They want a fight.

Be a Muslim Revolutionary for Education and Freedom

But as a Muslim, you want freedom.  So be a revolutionary for freedom. Seek to put in power those that embrace education for all the people.  Elect the person that wants women in schools, children in schools, jobs for men and women, an educated public, and an informed citizenry.  With that progress will occur.  The possibility even that apostasy laws, death for the adulterer and apostate, would be seen as barbaric, uncivilized and incompatible with the world today might well lead to the death penalty ending. When death for the apostate is no longer the rule of law, freedom will rise to the surface as cream on milk and be as sweet as one can possibly imagine.  Imagine that.  What you will imagine is the image God has of you. You are to be a contributor to creation, subduing the earth, the animals, for the betterment of every living human.  God will be the judge.  You will be the asset that makes life on earth bearable, livable, beautiful, full of joy and hope.  You will be a part of God’s plan, not that of an Islamist king whose example Muhammad wants only to use people. Be of use, not used.  Be free, not imprisoned. Be educated, not sequestered from resources for learning.  Have the power of your free will to be brave enough to insist that you have access to books, instruction, and media beyond that which your local Imams limit you to. This is what God wants for you.

A Leader That Know God’s Purpose for Mankind

A person that knows God will know all his people need to be educated.  Their jihad will be to find a way to have you learn, to think, and to make your local area, city, state and nation better for you and everyone in it.  The jihad will not use weapons, but it will use books.  It will not kill, but instill knowledge and understanding.  Emigration will not be necessary, because the freedoms you seek will be found where you live. Free to learn, then you are free to live. Where there is learning there is freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom to exercise your God given gift of discernment.  What you must know is what you do not know can cause you to be less confident and less successful. So be a learner.  Use the internet.  Study at night, under the covers with a flashlight if necessary.  Find a library.  Make it a haven.  Build upon what you learn and grow and learn more.  Your contributions to yourself, your culture and the future for the Islamic world will reveal a truth that is being hidden.  Help others escape from the cages, the prisons, the walled enclaves, the battlefields, the no-go zones, and the dark rooms of mosques and madrassas that spew hatred and death, to see the light of the world.  It shines for you if you let it.

Grace and Peace