Ghazi
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Got this from another forum good read!
Analysing Apathy: Why Muslims Couldn’t Care Less
Really good article mashallah. Was written almost 2 years ago but still applicable today.
07/06/2004
By Umm Rashid
Written for Cageprisoners.com
Let’s take a poll. Show Muslims pictures of the Guantanamo detainees and ask them what they feel. Tick the appropriate reaction:
• Ho-hum (yawn)…So, what else is new?
• Tch-tch. This is so sad. Hey, did you hear there’s a sale on at M&S?
• (Eloquent shrug) These people shouldn’t have been in Afghanistan/Pakistan/or wherever else they were picked up from, in the first place.
• (Lowering voice to a whisper) Look, this is none of my business, and if you know what’s good for you, you shouldn’t make it yours either.
• Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un. From Allah we come and to Him is the return. I’ll pray for these poor people insha’Allah.
• (Wringing hands) It’s the end of the world. These are signs that the Anti-Christ is coming.
Or one billion permutations of the above.
Coming from an Ummah that was once likened to a human body by the Prophet (sallAllahu ‘alayhi was-sallam), in that if one part of the body was injured the rest would surely feel the same pain, these reactions are symptomatic of a deep malaise.
The Prophet (sallAllahu ‘alayhi was-sallam) said: ”The example of the believers in their affection and compassion and benevolence is like the body; If one part of it becomes ill the whole body comes to its aid with fever and sleeplessness.” [Sahih Bukhari and Muslim]
Today, the Muslim Ummah is behaving like a body alright, but it’s a body that is lobotomised, anaesthetised, paralysed – there is no co-ordination, no sensation, no movement – not even an inclination to acknowledge the inertia.
To give our ailing Ummah credit, we do have sporadic outbursts of activity. But these are usually for venting, breast beating, vilifying the anonymous ‘Other’, trading barbs and takfeer; activities which have earned Muslim discourse the derisive reference, “Muslim radical noise”, in the media. This is usually followed by long periods of somnolence - the proverbial “deafening Muslim silence”.
Muslim activists for Islamic causes have permanently pock-marked furniture – testimony to frustrated punches at the refusal of a majority of their brethren in faith to respond to resuscitation.
Community calls and e-mail alerts for a show of unity – be it at demonstrations, pickets or even a simple letter-to-the-editor campaign– are often ignored, except by a committed few. Most Muslim activists lament that non-Muslims show more interest and support for Islamic causes than ‘devoted’ Muslims.
Why has apathy to the suffering of our brethren in faith become second nature to us? Why do we refuse to allow ourselves to feel enough for them to do something?
- Read the middle part of the article here inshallah. Its too long to post it all here. -
Two things changed me.
One was a TV programme on herd behaviour of animals that I was watching with my children. It showed how animals protect others in their herd, sometimes at the cost of their own lives. I was forced to think of a parallel with the Muslim Ummah. If animals could be inspired to exhibit self-sacrifice and bear injury to protect a member of the herd, how much more protection the Islamic ideal of a universal brotherhood should provide to its members.
How did this ideal, of universal kinship based on faith alone, regress into the chaos of every-man-for-himself?
The second was a report on the family of Shaker Abdur Raheem Aamer, a Saudi national, resident in Britain, who is being held in Guantanamo. The part where his son clamours for his father to come home and take them on a trip to the Masjid al-Haram in Makkah really hit home.
I have made enough road trips with my family to be transported by those words. Nothing brings out a sense of family and togetherness than travelling in a car, one family against the world and its elements; children sleeping in the back seat, secure in the knowledge that as long as Abba is in the driver’s seat and Allah is watching over them from Up Above, all’s well with the world.
When that child was reminiscing about and longing for his father to come home and take them on a trip to Makkah and Madinah, he was really asking for his sense of security and his family to be restored to him, I realised.
That was the first time that I wished I had known the families of the people detained in Guantanamo personally. To tell them that there are people who pray for them as fervently as if they were members of their own family, who say Amen to every prayer and every wish that they wish for themselves.
The Ummah may be lobotomised, anaesthetised and paralysed, but it’s still breathing. And as the doctors say, while there’s breath, there’s still hope .
