What the knowledge of God’s existence meant.
Our ability to lead by example or not, and more importantly:
whether we can follow the rules of Islam or not will depend on whether we truly
believe in God.
If our webcam is turned on, we act accordingly. We stop
scratching our noses and cover our mouths when we yawn. Yet, it is because we
have yet to have true knowledge of God, and heaven and hell, that we seem to
come up against this deficiency.
For instance, to get into college, you have to have a certain
SAT score, a certain GPA, we stress about these things, because they are real
and tangible to us. If heaven and hell are tangible places, and we know that
ourselves, would that not impact our actions?
The fact of the matter is that we cannot content ourselves to
make Islam a label to put on our blog about sections so that we can chime in on
certain issues, we should not restrict our Islam to ritualistic stroking of our
egos, we need to know God’s existence and that knowledge should push us towards
actual action, otherwise, where is the proof of our Shahadah?
We need to remove ourselves from simply saying Islamic phrases
and to ensure that we realize that Islamic actions are what define the Muslim,
and this means that we should hold ourselves to higher standards of conduct for
ourselves not just higher standards of behavior to encourage or discourse in
others. We must realize that we need to stop reducing our Islam to our
superficial identity or restrict Islam to ritualistic practice, for Imam
Al-Ghazali said that when we simply say pious phrases without acting upon them
that:
“Satan laughs at such pious [exclamations]. Those who utter them
are like a man who should meet a lion in a desert, while there is a fort at no
great distance, and when he sees the evil beast, should stand exclaiming, ‘I
take refuge in that fortress,’ without moving a step towards it. What will such
an [exclamation] profit him? In the same way the mere exclamation, ‘I take
refuge in God,’ will not protect thee from the terrors of His judgment unless
thou really take refuge in Him.”
I believe that knowledge of God is central towards us moving
forward, because we need to have the ideational foundation to ensure that we can
come together as a unified community. Since our grouping is defined not by
culture, ethnicity, or nationality, but religion, seeing as we are talking
about the Muslim Ummah, it would follow, in my mind, that our foundation: the
Shahadah and therefore God, must be known and understood to an unquestionable
degree before any other solutions are offered, because without God we have lost
our unity of purpose, and absent that unity of purpose, we will not be able to
offer effective solutions in the first place.
It all begins though by asking ourselves: if we know God exists,
what would we do?
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