This brings me on to the next thing - innovations. Innovations specifically in religion are expressly forbidden in Islam and "all innovation lead to misguidance and all misguidance leads to the Hellfire" (Hadith). We should not EVER just blindly follow as a famous scholar of Islam once said (paraphrasing)- you dont respect what you just blindly follow, and something you don't respect means you Eman (faith) will be lacking, so we should all question our beliefs and see if they are actually authentic according to Islamic traditions of Qur'an and hadith. As the Quraysh said and all the misguided people said "our forefathers did this" thus we should too - what a specious argument! The obvious assumption here is that the parents were right...how do they know this? They don't. The sad thing is that these verses in the Qur'an could apply to any one of us Muslims today, as we have also lost our link with real Islamic knowledge and are currently running on an empty tank with just patchy unsettled knowledge that we can gather in passing from different people.
Why this slothfulness in educating ourselves about our very way of life? the answer is painful but needs to be said: we are all hypocrites to varying degrees. We need to realise this now and theres even a hadith that states to the effect that the hypocrite is he who thinks himself not a hypocrite, and the true believer always thinks he has hypocrisy in him and tries to get rid of it. Even Umar (rah) the person promised paradise by the Prophet (PBUH), he asked Hudaifa Bin al Yaman(rah), who was the sahabi intrusted with the names of the hypocrites, about whether or not he was on the list, such was his concern about himself! And this from a person who took part in all the Battles, was promised Jannah and was the second righteous Khalifah!
We have to sit down and take in introspective look at ourselves and look at the way we for example commit sins, every time we commit a sin this is proof that our Eman is weak, as think about it - if I were to tell you that you would be burnt for this sin , would you still do it? not likely. We don't have that belief anymore and this is leading to the endless cycle of lack of education and hence belief ,sin, more lack of belief, more sin etc.
How can we change? well lets look at the sahaba again. Why were they the great leaders they were? because the best leader is one who can govern himself. We need to start right at the basics and build it up inshAllah. For example we should try and weed out the hypocrisy in our hearts in Salah by concentrating on the meanings, and if we don't know them, then by learning them first. This will inshAllah have a huge impact on our lives, as consider 5 times a day we are unhypocritically stnading infront of our creator, meditating on the true purpose of life - to worship Allah, will we then commit more or less sins? The answer is the answer to our initial and extensive problems. Only when we actively work to stamp out this malaise of hypocrisy can we as Muslims become strong again. Lets start out with the Salah and build steadily.
Anything good is from Allah, and all mistakes are from me.
