Saudi Arabia - Conscience takes a back seat � by Tariq Al-Maeena

Conscience takes a back seat | WorldMuslimCongress.com

As an American Muslim, I appreciate this piece. Stereotyping is one of the things I have been fighting all my life for people to rid their prejudices.

Pieces like this are eye openers, particularly for American Muslims, so many are prejudiced towards Saudi�s without realizing that there are individuals alike everywhere. Saudi bashing is fairly common, and I always remind them the man they adore, admire and call Rahmatul Aalameen comes from that region. 

 The white majority who mistreated the Black people in America are the very same people who supported them to have full rights as equal citizens.  

Not all Saudi�s are Wahhabis, and I don�t have any problem with Wahhabism, provided,  they keep their tradition to themselves and not push it on others.  

Let the followers of Islam spread peace through friendships and caring for others, and not creating chaos through fanaticism, extremism and violence.  If we sincerely believe Islam is the religion of peace, our talks, acts and behavior should express peace and nothing but peace.  The non-Muslims should see that we are for peace and building cohesive societies with freedom and not compulsion and chaos.

Your piece opens the eyes to the people � hey the Saudis are like us, with their conscience governing them and constantly struggling between right and wrong.  Likewise, don�t judge us Americans by Trump but by Bernie Sanders.
 

Conscience takes a back seat � by Tariq Al-Maeena
http://saudigazette.com.sa/opinion/conscience-takes-a-back-seat/#comment-23739

Tariq A. Al-Maeena

As children, most of us were taught the difference between right and wrong and good and evil, and how one path would take us toward righteousness while the other would led to damnation.  And we held on tightly to that childhood creed in order to make us better human beings.

But along the way as we got older, wires seem to have got crossed, and the solid line between right and wrong became a little blurry to some people.  They remain good people, but as I see it, their conscience has taken a back seat.

I was at Farid�s office when he received a call from his son.  I could only hear one side of the conversation, but the gist of it seemed to be that some rental contract was needed.  When he hung up, Farid looked perplexed.  I asked him if all was okay.  �Yes, it�s just that my son needs a house rental contract from me and I don�t know if a real estate office will provide one.�

�Your son is living in the duplex you built for him in the back of your residence.  Is he paying you rent?�

�No, but he needs a rental contract to avoid paying the SR3,500 university fees as an external student.  You see, if he has a rental contract, the university foregoes the fee requirement to alleviate additional financial burdens,� Farid explained.

�Wait a minute, Farid.  Your son has a good paying job, he is living at home for free, and you want to get him a fake rental contract?  Isn�t that cheating?  The university�s intent is to help students with financial burdens and not someone like your son.  He should not ask for an exception and neither should you provide him with a contract,� I admonished.

Looking at me with a wry smile, Farid replied: �Tariq, the system teaches everybody to do it.  So why shouldn�t I?�  I left before I blew a fuse.

Every year prior to the month of Ramadan there is a huge demand for household help.  Ads are everywhere as desperate housewives seek helping hands for the month of fasting when more food is prepared and served than at any other time of the year.  Not to mention that most food is probably thrown away during the holiest of all Islamic months.  Many domestic workers also take advantage of the situation by leaving their sponsors unannounced and searching for the highest bidder.

I had been invited to Mohamed�s house for an Iftar (breaking the fast) gathering last Ramadan.  His household was in disarray a few weeks earlier when his two housemaids decided to quit and left the country.  Looking at the wide array of dishes prepared for the guests, I remarked to Mohamed that his domestic help issue must have been resolved and that he must have recruited and received new help from overseas.

�No, I haven�t yet.  The visas are with the recruitment agency, but it is taking a long time.  That is why we had to hire locally at exorbitant wages.  We were lucky to find two women, one a Sri Lankan and  the other an Indonesian who agreed to work for us.  Thank God, otherwise my wife would have gone crazy.�

�Are these workers on legal work visas,� I asked.  �Have you checked and verified their documents?  Are they legal?  They could have run away from their previous sponsors.�

�Who cares, Tariq?  They are here right now and they are being paid.  They are providing us a service that we are desperately in need of.  You know the household demands during this month with family and friends dropping by.  We needed help.�

�Mohamed, did you ever stop to wonder if these workers left another home in dire straits by disappearing without notice?  Perhaps there is hardship in a home that desperately needed them.  It could have been an elderly lady they worked for, or a young divorced mother with children who needed to be looked after while she was at work.  Not all sponsors are bad.  You and I know that greed has caused many domestic workers to desert their lawful sponsors, especially prior to Ramadan.�

I wanted to ask him how he and his family could sit there and enjoy food prepared by someone who could by her presence in their home have been the source of anguish to the household she left behind.  How can we justify such actions and satiate our hunger while others somewhere else may be suffering?

My thoughts were quickly interrupted by Mohamed.  �Dive into your food Tariq before it gets cold.  Besides, if we didn�t hire them, believe me there are thousands who would.  Now enjoy yourself.�

How could I?  The line between right and wrong has not been blurred to that degree.

 � The author can be reached at talmaeena@aol.com. Follow him on Twitter@talmaeena

How Nazism Explains �Moderate� and �Radical� Islam

Were non-violent Nazis the "real" Nazis? 

by Raymond Ibrahim, PJ Media � August 16, 2015

If Islamic doctrines are inherently violent, why isn�t every single Muslim in the world�that is, approximately 1.5 billion people�violent?

This question represents one of Islam�s most popular apologetics: because not all Muslims are violent, intolerant, or sponsor terrorism�a true statement�Islam itself must be innocent.

Let�s briefly consider this logic.

First, there are, in fact, many people who identify themselves as Muslims but who do not necessarily adhere to or support Islam�s more supremacist and intolerant doctrines.  If you have lived in a Muslim majority nation, you would know this to be true.

The all-important question is, what do such Muslims represent?  Are they following a legitimate, �moderate,� version of Islam�one more authentic than the terrorist variety?  That�s what the media, politicians, and academics would have us believe.

The best way to answer this question is by analogy:

German Nazism is a widely condemned ideology, due to its (�Aryan/white�) supremacist element.  But the fact is, many Germans who were members or supporters of the Nazi party were �good� people.  They did not believe in persecuting Jews and other �non-Aryans,� and some even helped such �undesirables� escape, at no small risk to themselves.

Was Oskar Schindler practicing a
"moderate" form of Nazism?

Consider Oskar Schindler.  An ethnic German and formal member of the Nazi party, he went to great lengths to save Jews from slaughter.

How do we reconcile his good deed with his bad creed?

Was Schindler practicing a legitimate,  �moderate,� form of Nazism?  Or is it more reasonable to say that he subscribed to some tenets of National Socialism, but when it came to killing fellow humans in the name of racial supremacy, his humanity rose above his allegiance to Nazism?

Indeed, many Germans joined or supported the National Socialist Party more because it was the �winning� party, one that offered hope, and less because of its racial theories.

That said, other Germans joined the Nazi party precisely because of its racial supremacist theories and were only too happy to see �sub-humans� incinerated.

Now consider how this analogy applies to Islam and Muslims: first, unlike most Germans who chose to join or support the Nazi party, the overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world were simply born into Islam; they had no choice.  Many of these Muslims know the bare minimum about Islam�the Five Pillars�and are ignorant of Islam�s supremacist theories.

Add Islam�s apostasy law to the mix�leaving Islam can earn the death penalty�and it becomes clear that there are many nominal �Muslims� who seek not to rock the boat.

That said, there are also a great many Muslims who know exactly what Islam teaches�including violence, plunder, and enslavement of the kafir, or infidel�and who happily follow it precisely because of its supremacism.

In both Nazism and Islam, we have a supremacist ideology on the one hand, and people who find themselves associated with this ideology for a number of reasons on the other hand: from those born into it, to those who join it for its temporal boons, to those who are sincere and ardent believers.

The all-important difference is this: when it comes to Nazism, the world is agreed that it is a supremacist ideology.  Those who followed it to the core were �bad guys��such as Adolf Hitler.  As for the �good Nazis,� who helped shelter persecuted Jews and performed other altruistic deeds, the world acknowledges that they were not following a �moderate� form of Nazism, but that their commitment to Nazism was nonchalant at best.

This is the correct paradigm to view Islam and Muslims with: Islam does contain violent and supremacist doctrines.  This is a simple fact.  Those who follow it to the core were and are �bad guys��for example, Osama bin Laden.  Still, there are �good Muslims.�  Yet they are good not because they follow a good, or �moderate,� Islam, but because they are not thoroughly committed to Islam in the first place.

Put differently, was Schindler�s altruism a product of �moderate Nazism� or was it done in spite of Nazism altogether?  Clearly the latter.  In the same manner, if a Muslim treats a non-Muslim with dignity and equality, is he doing so because he follows a legitimate brand of �moderate Islam,� or is he doing so in spite of Islam, because his own sense of decency compels him?

Considering that Islamic law is unequivocally clear that non-Muslims are to be subjugated and live as third-class �citizens��the Islamic State�s many human rights abuses vis-�-vis non-Muslims are a direct byproduct of these teachings�clearly any Muslim who treats �infidels� with equality is behaving against Islam.

So why is the West unable to apply the Nazi paradigm to the question of Islam and Muslims?  Why is it unable to acknowledge that Islamic teachings are inherently supremacist, though obviously not all Muslims are literally following these teachings�just like not all members of any religion are literally following the teachings of their faith?

This question becomes more pressing when one realizes that, for over a millennium, the West deemed Islam an inherently violent and intolerant cult.  Peruse the writings of non-Muslims from the dawn of Islam up until recently�from Theophanes the Confessor (d. 818) to  Winston Churchill (d. 1965)�and witness how they all depicted Islam as a violent creed that thrives on conquering, plundering, and subjugating the �other.�  (Here are Marco Polo�s thoughts).

The problem today is that the politically correct establishment�academia, mainstream media, politicians, and all other talking heads�not ones to be bothered with reality or history, have made it an established �fact� that Islam is �one of the world�s great religions.�  Therefore, the religion itself�not just some of its practitioners �is inviolable to criticism.

The point here is that identifying the negative elements of an ideology and condemning it accordingly is not so difficult.  We have already done so, with Nazism and other ideologies and cults.  And we know the difference between those who follow such supremacist ideologies (�bad� people), and those who find themselves as casual, uncommitted members (good or neutral people).

In saner times when common sense could vent and breathe, this analogy would have been deemed superfluous.  In our times, however, where lots of nonsensical noise is disseminated far and wide by the media�and tragically treated as serious �analysis��common sense must be methodically spelled out: Yes, an ideology/religion can be accepted as violent or even evil, and no, many of its adherents need not be violent or evil�they can even be good�for the reasons discussed above.

This is the most objective way to understand the relationship between Islam as a body of teachings and Muslims as individual people.

Breaking News: Ottawa Gunman a Recent Convert to Islam

Terrorist shooting attack is the second fatal Muslim Jihad Attack this week in Canada. See here for more.

Alleged Ottawa Gunman Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, recent convert to Islam

And it seems that these Muslims were acting in direct response to calls from the Islamic State Caliphate for Muslims to attack sites in North America (see here and here).  These are not "lone wolf" attacks. They are a direct result of an increasingly emboldened Islam, and the ideology which commands such attacks comes directly from the Quran and the example of Muhammad (see my post on the 'Jerusalem' Omnimax film here.)

With 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide, if only 1% are motivated to obey the Quran's commands to wage jihad against non-Muslims, that means there are 16 million radicalized Muslim jihadists out there. If the ratio is 10%, the Muslim jihad army jumps to 160 million.

As I wrote in an article in May 2013 (Message to Muslims: Time for Some Serious Questions) after the broad daylight murder and near beheading of British soldier Lee Rigby by a Muslim:

This is gravely concerning, and should prompt us to pose the following questions to all Muslims everywhere: 

1. Do you subscribe to this same "theologically determined logic" which spawns acts of violence and terrorism by Muslims in every country of the world, and drives an Islamic supremacism which seeks to establish a global caliphate to bring Islam to world dominance? In other words, do you feel in your heart, as a Muslim, that you are at war with non-Muslims?

2. If you say you do not subscribe to this worldview, how do you support your position from Islam's sacred texts? Because � as you should know � all Islamic supremacists and jihadists fully support their actions using the Quran and the example of Muhammad and the consistent teaching of Islamic jurisprudence, and they say your religion commands you to support them in the global jihad.

3. In your heart of hearts, when you continue to see such horrific acts being perpetrated in the name of Islam by men and women who claim to be devout Muslims and use your own sacred texts to back up their actions, do you question the validity of your Islamic faith, your Muslim identity? In other words, "Are you finally reaching a crisis point in your faith?"

In short, it's time to ask Muslims everywhere, "Why do you remain a Muslim?"

It's time for Muslims to ask themselves, "Why do I remain a Muslim?"

As an Orthodox Christian, I believe we offer the Way, the Truth and the Life through the Orthodox Gospel of Jesus Christ. To all Muslims everywhere I offer this challenge: If you claim to be striving to live in truth and in a way pleasing to God, "come and see" what the Orthodox Christian Faith is all about. You will find a Light and Life you never knew existed.

But there is another aspect to this "crisis of faith" you should by now be going through.

We believe that the human conscience is a divine gift from God placed in every human heart. If your conscience is nagging at you, telling you that there has to be something terribly wrong with Islam if so many of its most devout adherents are committing murder in the name of God, then you simply must obey your conscience and seek answers. You are obligated to that small voice telling you to "get out." Your religion places a huge stigma on apostasy, and as you probably know, even prescribes death for those who leave Islam or insult Muhammad. Why is that? That should even further prove its falsity to you.

Do you not know that even according to the Quran, Jesus (Isa) is bestowed with greater honor from God than Muhammad? Jesus worked miracles, raised the dead, and ascended bodily into heaven, whereas Muhammad did none of these things.


It's time to leave falsehood and turn to truth. It's time to learn about Jesus Christ as His Church has always known Him and proclaimed Him, "full of grace and truth."


This is the same Church which your religion and forbears have relentlessly persecuted since Islam expanded out of the Arabian peninsula and began waging jihad against the world. Yet this same Church, by the grace of God, stands ready to embrace and receive you as a friend and brother or sister, if you repent of Islam, turn away from it, and turn to Jesus Christ.

It's time for all you Muslims of good conscience to show real courage, bravery, integrity and repentance, leave your former religion, which you know in your heart is false, and turn to Jesus Christ in the Orthodox Church, who offers you the true Way of Light and Life.