Mullahs and their shadow on Islam!

Ahmed Maajid

Soon after the Islamic state became a kingdom Islamic scholars began to strengthen their position as guardians of the faith. Political leaders in the state became less and less interested in religious aspects of the state and the scholars gained more and more control over the religious affairs. At the beginning this trend was for good and it resulted in an unprecedented advancement in the intellectual arena and knowledge was gained and spread everywhere in the state.

However, after the Golden Age of Islam, things began to take a different turn. I don’t see a need in going through the details of the political and intellectual downturn of the Muslims during the time referred. Instead, I want my dear readers to throw a glimpse on the position where we have fallen, and some possible causes, as the ultimate consequence of the said downturn.

Muslims are now intolerant, confused, irrational, primitive, poor, suspicious, nonintellectual, barren and extremely unproductive as a nation in scientific, social, and other fields of knowledge. As a result we happen to be arguably the most insignificant people on earth today. Muslim nations are suffering suppression and ill-treatment from world powers constantly. I think one should ask the real reason for this.

Definitely there is more than one cause for the said condition of the Muslims. However, I would like to say something about one, which I think is the main reason, of these causes. It is, as you should have guessed from the heading, about the mullahs who are now controlling the religious sphere of the Islamic world. They are having such a power that, even though there preaching are hardly implemented or practiced officially in the Islamic world, everyone believe that what they say about Islam is what Islam really is. It is on the basis of the teachings of such mullahs that a particular online Islamic website in the Maldives recently read a headline saying “Another storm approaches the US, Allah Akbar!” They apparently think that when a storm hits the US and hundreds or thousands of people are killed, it is a glory for God! It is not! Indeed, it is the mullahs who spread such vile, heartless and utterly un-Islamic ideas among the common people who are kept away from true knowledge.

These mullahs say, at the beginning, that dictating prohibitions and obligations is a right solely and wholly enjoyed by God and that no man has that power. However, after saying this they come up with tens of prohibitions and enjoinments that are never to be found in the religious sources of Islam. They prohibit anything that they happen to dislike based on unreasonable interpretations of the Holy Qur’an and the traditions of the Holy Prophet.

The mullahs have done great harm to the Muslim society over the last century by effectively and decisively obstructing and hampering free thinking and intellectual development among the Muslims. They insist that the common people should depart from thinking and should always follow them and refer to them and believe in whatever they decide blindly. After a long period of centuries of this crime against rational thinking, even the educated among the Muslims now strongly believe that religion is a property of the mullahs, and that if one has to follow religion he must follow them.

The fact that the mullahs have failed to do their job as real scholars is to be clearly seen from what happens a daily basis in different places of the Islamic world. There are hundreds of guerilla organizations that are following their teachings and are waging war on occupying and terrorizing colonial powers. None of these groups are achieving their objectives and the situation of the Muslims is getting worse and worse day by day, as hundreds of Muslim youth go on sacrificed like sheep for a cause that has nothing to do with Islam. The Taliban ruled in Afghanistan few years ago and forced all kinds of obligations on the Afghans but as soon as they were sacked, the people openly criticized them and undid whatever was done by them. I wonder why! If the Taliban were able to reach the hearts of the people would that have happened?

It is a sad thing that the mullahs believe that human hearts can be won by strict enforcement of rules and regulations that do not have any soul or mind in them. Indeed, a man cannot be won except by his own choices. So if we want to get a man into the fold of God, the only way we have is to convince him the truth of it by way of reason. We have heard the scholars of Islam saying that God has promised victory for the Muslims if they practice Islam as it should be practiced. Definitely, there is a sign for those who think in the events that are happening in the Islamic world.

There is a long way to go if we are to get rid of the mullahs in order to protect Islam and the Muslims, but this is to be done at any cost, no matter how long a time it will take. The most alarming fact is that almost the whole of the Islamic world is in the belief that what the mullahs say is all that Islam has to offer. The reality is quite different from this belief and we have to wage a real struggle to save Islam from these unworthy mullahs when there is yet time!