by Zan Azlee (@fatbidin)
By denying the use of reason and logic, religion curbs its own advances.
What happens when you apply reason and logic to Islam? You would be eternally damned to hell. Or so many would want you to believe.
And why would they want you to believe that? It makes it easier for them to control how you practise Islam.
And so they would have you believe that religion requires blind faith and involves no logic whatsoever. Or what many would like to call a “leap of faith.”
I can’t accept that because it basically means that if you were to believe in Islam, it meant that you had to just accept things as-is for no reason but because God says so.
I truly believe that Islam is a religion that promotes and encourages reason as the Quran has stated in Surah al-Jathiyah (The Crouching) [45:5]:
And in the succession of night and day, and in the means of subsistence which God sends down from the skies, giving life thereby to the earth after it had been lifeless, and in the change of the winds: in all this there are messages for people who use their reason.
Although mankind is moving forward in terms of technology, health and whatever else, it seems that everything is the opposite when it comes to religious progress.
It is as if Muslims are trying to be overly religious, probably overcompensating for a lack of something in the practise of their belief.
So much so that everything about the religion is taken literally and no debate is ever allowed because everything becomes too sacred, hence the killing of logic and reason.
In the 8th century, a group of Muslims known as the Mutazilites emerged, and they promoted the concept of reason in the understanding of the religion.
The movement believed that God’s orders should be understood using rational thought and inquiry and that knowledge should be obtained using reason.
Mutazilites believed in the need for interaction between intellectual reasoning and the divine revelations of God.
Some of the more famous Mutazilites who have played a major role in the development of Islam as a way of life include Ibnu Sina, Ibnu Rushd and Al Farabi.
When I believe in something, I need it to have a definite answer and reason rather than just have blind faith and throw myself into it hoping for a positive outcome.
It’s like gambling on which religion to believe in and hoping that at the end of the day, the dice you threw lands at the right slot.
It is a danger when people feel that to have faith means to believe without reason and to have trust in that faith without knowing if it is true or not.
The Quran states in Surah al-A’raf (The Heights) [7:179]:
And we have created hell for many. They have hearts with which they do not use for comprehension, they have eyes with which they do not see, and they have ears with which they do not hear. Those are like livestock; rather, they are more astray. It is they who are the heedless.
So if someone who has a nice sounding religious title (i.e. Mufti, Imam, Ustaz, Ulama, Syeikh, Syed, Tun, Tan Sri, Datuk, etc) tells you something, think before accepting it.
How logical is it to declare the harmless poco-poco dance haram just because the movements are similar to a dance by Jamaicans who were Christians a long time ago?
[Editor's note: Poco-poco has no connection at all with neither Jamaicans nor Christianity, as we've discovered]
What kind of rational thought is being used when yoga, as a form of exercise, is pronounced as haram because it has its roots in Hindu culture?
If that’s the case, let’s just declare the Malay language haram since it was spoken by Malays, who were Hindus, way before Islam came to the Malay archipelago.
Unfortunately, the Mutazilite movement died out in the 15th century due to strong objection from many quarters who probably felt that it was a threat to their positions.
Maybe I’m just fighting a lost cause. Or maybe I should just have some blind faith that everything might turn out all right.
