What the Hell is Wrong With Us? A Muslim Response to America’s Failure to Change

 In more instances than I can remember, I’ve needed to ascend the minbar and cope with a Friday congregation reeling. Many Imams will do the equal painful paintings this week. But for lots of American Muslims, Buffalo and Uvalde strike in different ways. But each upward thrust and fall on how we assume the paintings. 

In latest years, many Muslim groups had via way of means of fringe agencies that hijacked public discourse—they didn’t recognize what Islam turned into, or the way it labored, and, as such, they inflicted chaos and bloodshed anyplace they took root. And this, I fear, is what’s occurring in America: Instead of seeing their society as a living, dynamic ethical challenge, which adjusts and adapts to the converting situations of the world, too many Americans see our kingdom as an inflexible challenge whose changelessness is a mark of glory. 

And irrespective of what number of need to die—even children—they may now no longer admit otherwise. All it sounds particularly familiar.  

Last week, I turned in a live, call-in episode of Radio Times,  approximately my Muslim religion and its future.  He concluded that my plea for an Islam impartial presidency turned into wrong: Islam, he believed, in reality, laid out an in-depth blueprint for a way to run a society, including, for example, guidelines of taxation. Of course, any cursory survey of the Qur’an might screen how unfaithful this is.I hadn’t heard such an absurd opinion in an extended time; I had was hoping such fanciful, delusional wondering had died out. 

Most of Islam’s greatest sacred scripture at our character, our piety, our Creator, and ourlocation in creation. But what bothers me even extra approximately such juvenile,         uninformed evaluations approximately Islam is how even extra ridiculous they emergeas upon any degree of reflection. It is a middle Muslim perception that Islam to be well known; , that the message of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, to apply to everybody and all places, as much as and till the quit of our species. 

 If the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, becomes the final Prophet—and Islam without a doubt insists on as much—then the whole lot he communicated must be well-known enough to be significant but bendy enough to mirror the nuances and traits of various experiences. This is one factor a variety of humans don’t apprehend approximately Islam.

Faith shouldn’t spell out a political agenda. It does but cultivate values and virtues that help us discover moral means to moral ends. Too many Muslims, in recent decades, religious narratives that left no room for prioritization, no space for reflection, and no possibility for course correction. The result was a rigid, brittle faith, which began by suffocating human agency and ended by producing mass violence, political chaos, and widespread spiritual disillusionment.Something comparable is taking place in America. 

Have you visible a hard and fast piece struggle from the Colonial Era?

A dangerous society is rigid, connected to what went before, not able to assume that the world’s situations and opportunities extrude and, with them, we have to extrude, now no longer due to the fact, that our largest values extrude—but due to the fact the methods to be had to stay out the values of the one extrude. 

When America turned into formed, withinside the past due 18th century, existence turned into greater precarious. More human beings lived on farms or close to the wilderness. Many human beings needed to hunt for food, or in any other case complement their diets on their own. There had been no prepared police forces able to speedy response. Weapons had been slow, useless, and imprecise; I mean, have you ever visible a hard and fast piece struggle recreated from the Colonial Era? 

Security, prosperity—even primary nutrition—required that many human beings had to get the right of entry to weapons. 

We do now no longer stay in 1776.

At hazard aren't best for the lives of harmless Americans (and people are, on their own)—but, the very concept of America itself, of a peaceful, rich democracy, that human beings need to stay in, can stay in, and might thrive in. Thoughts and prayers, yes. But I agree that God does now no longer alternate the situation of human beings till they alternate what’s in themselves. 

And if they do now no longer? Those folks who're inclined to study different histories, different communities, and different contexts could research a nervous lesson. We’ve already paid an excessive rate for our heartless rigidity. But as painful as it's far to imagine, there can be a way worse to come. That is something all religious leaders need to bear in mind after they stand earlier than their congregations, thinking about what they want to hear.