'Idea of the day' trading in and out for profit

[Ike Latif]

Bard .. note the date, this fight was going on with me for
long..

http://www.iranian.com/Opinion/2001/August/Islam/index.html

Rise and fall
Islamic apathy vs 400 years of forgotten renaissance

By Iqbal Latif, Paris
August 28, 2001
The Iranian



Failed Islamic revolutions in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan have bewildered the Islamic world which is going through a shock therapy at its fringes with fragmentation process and failed nation states, foremost amongst mentioned is Afghanistan, hypocritically representing a model of "successful" welfare state; implementing true Islam, where women are let to die during breached pregnancies in the absence of female doctors (which are very few), as male doctors are prohibited to perform caesarian sections on female patients.

Such aggressive portrayal of Islam has even found its negative implications in orthodox Iran, where public flogging, according to the Islamic government there, depicts a poor image of Iran globally. Is Islam about public flogging, or hand chopping, denial of basic human rights to women and all human beings, and above all, denial of inquiry into human thought processes? Certainly not. The extremist fringe has mutilated the true picture of Islam and its historical benevolence and patronage of culture and science. The Islamic revolutions, with Shiacentric and Sunnicentric governments in Tehran and Kabul, are at each other's throats accusing each other of revisionism with both proclaiming to be the standard-bearers of Islam.


A true Islamic society would be a successful Islamic state. A state, which is unable to provide its masses with basic necessities; a state, where its citizens en masse hijack its own domestic flights to demand asylum in the West, is a state that has failed its citizens. It is ironic that in the Golden Age of Islam, it was the persecuted Jews and Christians who would seek refuge in Islamic states.

A failed state has no right to call itself an Islamic state if it has failed vis a vis its citizens. Prosperity, health and well-being, freedom of thought and expression (Ijtihad and Ijtima) and building of consensus are all denied in the so-called Islamic states. The ecclesiastically-dominated nations are out on a vendetta against mankind in the name of Islam, much like the Spanish Inquisition, devouring and deflowering the basic moral fabric and purity of Islamic thought process.

Here we make an attempt to discover the underlying reasons on how, from ashes of failed backward regions emerged a great civilization, which bestowed the world with major contributions in science, architecture and culture.




Iqbal Latif