Monday, November 22, 2010

One Billion Strong and NOT One Worthy

According to the latest reports there are currently about 1.6 billion muslims on this planet. But ask a person off the street if he knows any famous muslims, there are huge chances that he might reply Osama Bin Laden aka Hitler of our times. It is saddening that Islam being the religion of peace and prosperity, being a highly progressive religion and having about 1.6 billion followers has no one to represent it. Why are there no famous Muslim authors, scientists, artists or even politicians in our times? Why isn't there a Muslim country in the first world? Lets not blame the WEST as most of the 1.6 billion Muslims live in the West but still we lag behind. In order to answer my own questions I have a few theories which will help me in understanding why we have not yet reached our potential. 


1. Lazy Syndrome
The first reason would sadly be that we are lazy. Yes, we will never agree to this but we lack the courage to stand up and change what we need too. We do not want to take actions to better our future instead we want to complain about all the conspiracies which are going on against us and how it is undermining our potential and is not letting us reach to where we want to go. For example, I doubt there would be a single Pakistani who would not like better education, better economy, more jobs and overall a better country to live in, but sadly how many people do we see complaining and how many people do we see actually trying to work for this cause. There are just a limited amount of people trying to work and there are way many people who are providing intrusions in this noble task. We are all blaming how the West is doing all these atrocities against the Muslims but how many of us are trying to solve these problems in a logical and reasonable manner. (Suicide bombing your own country men and killing people is not a logical, reasonable or even a human solution to this problem). Why do we not have Muslims speak against these actions in a debate form in which all parties can present their points and have a solution which would make both the parties happy. Reason. We are too lazy to come out of our comfort zone and work for a cause without pay. If the best interest of Muslims would be our only criteria, there is no reason why our countries will not excel and why we would not excel but for that we will have to work way harder than we do and perform tasks which we do not want too. 

2. White Supremacy
Most of the Muslims come from a background in which their ancestors were under the White Man's rule. Even though they have been free, their spirit is still oppressed. They may be under the colonial rule or even the African American Muslims from the Nation of Islam who were fighting for justice and freedom. Our thoughts are still enslaved and thus after the rule of the Gorra Sahab (White Sir) we have now turned into the Brown Sahab (Brown Sir). In the rush to follow the White Man we have lost our own identity, culture, traditions, science, art, language, history etc. Nowadays Mohammad is Moe and Jaffar is Jeff. We have not only lost our identity is following the White Man blindly, we have lost everything we have ever been proud of or anything which we have or will achieve. We do not follow the White Man in how he has developed science and technology or how he has stepped on the moon. In fact is the past century it is hard to find any new scientific research or invention crucial to the mankind developed by a Muslim. We have distorted our language and now we commonly speak Minglish (Mixture of Urdu and English. My Arab friends have told me that they do the same and have a language which is a mixture of Arabic and English). We have lost our culture and traditions to a great extent. To top it all currently the best Islamic History books available are written by non-Muslim white authors. We are so far behind at this point that we cannot even write our own history. Those of us who are even slightly famous have either adopted the western structure of such an extent that they are not even capable of being called a Muslim or have gone to such an extreme that they have lost the meaning of Islam by their fanatic, fundamentalist thinking and actions. 

3. Unappreciated Talent
It would be wrong to say that there is not a single worthy Muslim living on this planet. Undoubtly, we have no Stephan Hawkings, Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg among us but we do have some Muslims who have made their name in this era. We do have Riz Khan who was an outstanding journalist in CNN and now works for Al-Jazera. We also have authors like Reza Aslan who has even appeared in the American Daily shows. But there are not enough professionals excelling in their fields when we are 1 billion strong. We tend to not appreciate in what we have when we start running after others praising what they have. For example, Waris Shah's poetries were no where less than the works of Shakespeare but because we have not read or tried to understand the work of Waris Shah, we do not even know what we have and what we are losing. Sadquain's and Gulgee's art was exceptional but we have not yet even tried to know or see what a treasure their paintings were but we know the work of Leonardo De Vinci and Michaelangelo. We all know Tiger Woods but Imran Khan is losing his fanfare. Even comparing Micheal Jackson with Rafat Fateh Ali Khan seems funny. While running away from what we have, we are stepping on the toes of any Muslim who wants to achieve something. We do not trust our fellow brothers in Islam and in some way we are justified not to trust them because of our actions. When Muslims turn out to be like Zardari or even the Arab Sheikhs who are ruling over half of the Muslim World but have not increased the standards of living in their own countries, why should we trust them but then we are the ones who are losing no one else. 

Basically, we need to help ourselves. We need to trust each other and make ourselves trustworthy. If not for anyone lets not let a quarter of this world's population not have a single worthy person among them. Lets have great scholars, scientists, artists and authors so that we can give our future generation a better future than we have in front of us. 

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