Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Make this Islam more common

A friend shared an abridged version of this a few days ago on our Whatsapp chat. I hunted down the full version this morning and it really deserve a place here.



Iman Tawhidi is a rare voice representing the majority of Muslims that are not deviant radicals, which is getting all the attention in recent times. So it is worth spending twenty minutes or so to hear him out. There is another way to look at Islam and there was a time a similar view was dominant in Islam when they were promoters of peace and not violence. Jihad is about peace which violence was never the means.

Not sure how off the mark I am but the way I understand the majority of moderate and peaceful Muslims are they are populated by not all but large numbers of believers who do not know well enough what they believe in. I got this from LKY who shared that when he was a kid, he had many Muslim Malay friends. Their Islam was syncretic and they were often nominal. Fast forward to our times, for the last few decades, Saudi Wahhabism have gone around trying to fix all these wrong ideas about Islam with the "correct" idea with tragic results. As they gained market share, LKY noted they also grew more separate from mainstream society. In other words, moderate and especially nominal Muslims are rich fishing ground for deviant radical Islamists. Iman Tawhidi is I hope among a growing number of religious teachers who would bring common sense and peace to their religion. He should be supported and encouraged in the ideological struggle against deviant salafism.

Now Christianity is probably as vulnerable. In fact every major religion is vulnerable to radicalisation because each one is richly populated by adherents who are often nominal and do not really know what they believe in. The struggle going on in Islam is a lesson for other faiths as well.

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