Chapters
Striving with the Truth
Striving - The Door to Paradise · Ahmed Alhasan
Striving with the Truth
Striving to uphold the word of God is not just permitted, as has already been shown, it is a duty in every divine religion known on the earth. Yet there will always be those who try to mix truth with falsehood, producing a distorted version and calling it striving to uphold the word of God. For that reason, every rational person who respects his own intellect must carefully observe the bounds of God’s supreme word, which God wills to establish on this earth, lest that person join the ranks of those deceived into blindly imitating scholars who fail to act on what they know and whom God likens to donkeys:[90]
We Muslims have the Quran and the sayings of the Messenger Muhammad and his pure family. Yet among Muslims there are those who bear the Quran and their sayings, then fail to live by them. Their likeness is that of a donkey carrying books. In the Noble Quran, God also makes clear that the voice of the dysfunctional scholars (the donkeys) is loud and heard by the blind imitators (the deceived), yet at the same time it is harsh and ugly: “Surely the harshest of sounds is the braying of donkeys.”[91]
Whenever a prophet or successor was sent to a people, the ones who stood against him were the dysfunctional scholars and the imitators who followed them without reflection or thought, but with ridicule and contempt. Their plea on the Day of Resurrection will be: “When those who were followed disown their followers, and they all see the suffering, all bonds between them will be severed.”[92]
In any case, this is not a doctrinal discussion intended to prove who stands on the truth. My aim is only to alert everyone whom misguided scholars have deceived, whether Muslim, Christian, or Jew, to the fact that God Almighty created the human being to be His servant: “I did not create jinn and mankind except that they worship Me.”[93] He did not create people to be servants of misguided scholars who do not act by what they know: “They have taken their rabbis and monks as lords besides God.”[94]