Islamic modernity

What is the issue?

Retrospective views among few Muslims make them into images of violence and gender oppression, such views need to be modernised.

What Islam actually preach?

• From its earliest days Islam is a vigorous part of the universal civilisation of many books.
• Its actual essence is a brotherhood, not a nationhood.
• Islam spread through regional battlefields, but its true consolidation came only when Muslim communities sought and reached the forefront of knowledge.
• Islam never promotes war for the sake of war, it only validates war as self-defence.
• It is a humanitarian philosophy, not a tool of self-destructive fantasists.

What are the regressive thinking among few Muslims?

• Many Muslim communities are still following various internal doctrinaires which has laced regressive thinking.
• The doctrine of faith supremacy leads to pseudo-intellectual assault that stereotypes all.
• It spreads havoc to security and promotes gender oppression with barbaric overtones of violence.
• Such regressive thinking grievously wounds the very essence of Islam, which is as its name itself, a mission of peace.

On what basis this retrospective views can be modernised?

• The principle of modernity is the acquisition of knowledge, most urgently democratisation of secular knowledge.
• Freedom, knowledge and gender equality need to be the pillars modernity.
• Freedom is top priority of modernity, which must be political, individual and cultural right.
• Modernity must be a right to live without fear of suppression by the state or oppression by vested interests.
• It should also be the right to wear whatever one want and not what some regressive person wants.

Way forward

• The world is in the midst of a revolution of ideas that will make the 21st century into the golden age of individual freedom and collective achievement.
• It is the moment to address a malevolent and dangerous phenomenon that has arisen among some Muslim communities.
• Some regressive schools manipulate the law to suppress women, it’s time to fight against such retrospective laws.
• Gender equality is non-negotiable, women must be in the frontline of cultural advance and economic growth.

Source: Indian Express