I got this file from one of my friends and I don’t know where did he get from. So please, make dua for those who had spent their time to scan this book and made it available in PDF format.
(right click) Download or read PDF here: Aap kay masaail aur un ka hal (volume 10)
by Mufti Muhammad Yusuf Ludhianvi (رحمة الله عليه)
By Khalid Baig
It happened at an international inter-faith conference. The organizers decided to end the conference with readings from the scriptures of major religions, done by followers of other religions. As it happened, an Arab Christian read a passage from the Qur’an. He was a good reciter. Every one seemed to be moved by his heart-rending reading, including the reciter himself. Immediately afterward, prominent Muslim thinker and writer, Maulana Waheeduddin Khan, who narrated this story, asked him: “Do you think Qur’an is the Word of God?” In a moment of truth he said: “Yes.” But, then, he had second thoughts so he added: “But only for the Arabs.”
Actually not only the Qur’anic message keeps attracting people all over the world, its words also move people who may not know a word of Arabic language. Famous Egyptian reciter Qari Abdul Basit reportedly once accompanied then President Gamal Abdul Nasir to a meeting with the Soviet leaders. During a break in the meeting, Nasir asked him to recite the Qur’an before the top Soviet leaders. When he finished the recitation, Qari Abdul Basit saw four of them shedding tears. “We don’t know what it was,” they later explained. But there was some thing touching in those Words!
Ironically at that time Qur’an was the forbidden tree for the Muslims in the Soviet Union. Reading, teaching, or even possessing a copy of the Qur’an resulted in the most severe punishments. The KGB was always on the lookout. Its agents could enter any house, any time, if they suspected anyone inside of reading Qur’an or offering prayers. Religious leaders were drafted for compulsory labor. Mosques and Islamic schools were closed down and turned into cinema houses, factories and offices. One could not find a copy of the Qur’an anywhere. The ruthless state machinery did everything within its power to extinguish the flame of Qur’an from the empire. Yet during those seventy dark years Muslims kept the flame burning. They developed elaborate camouflage mechanisms, at tremendous risks, to teach Qur’an to their children. Little children had to stay away from their parents for months at a time as they retired to secret hujras (rooms) where they memorized Qur’an and received religious instructions without ever having looked at a printed page. Their stories remain a neglected but extremely bright part of our recent history.
What kind of Book can command such devotion and sacrifices? Only the Book that begins by asserting:
“This is the Book; in it is guidance sure, without doubt, to those who fear Allah.” (Al-Baqarah 2:2).
And then each and every line of it attests to that assertion. It declares:
“The Most Gracious! It is He Who has taught the Qur’an.” (Al-Rahman 55:1-2).
It challenges:
“Say If the whole of mankind and Jinn were to gather together to produce the like of this Qur’an, they could not produce the like thereof, even if they backed up each other with help and support.” (Bani Israel 17:88).
It claims:
“Verily it is We Who revealed the Remembrance and verily We are its guardians.” (Al-Hijr, 15:9).
Qur’an is the first document in the Arabic language. There is no other language of the world that has withstood the passage of fourteen centuries. Over the centuries, rivers change courses, civilizations rise and fall, and languages become extinct and new ones develop. Consider the expression “faeder ure on heofonum” from Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6 from a Bible of 900 C.E. We are told it means: “Our father in heaven.” It also means that any writing from that time cannot be read by an English speaker today. But any Arabic speaker can open the Qur’an today and understand its message. As did all the people in the intervening centuries!
Prominent scholar Dr. Hamidullah tells of an effort in Germany by the Christian scholars to gather all the Greek manuscripts of Bible as the original Bible in Aramaic is extinct. They gathered all manuscripts in the world and after examining them reported: “Some two hundred thousand contradictory narrations have been found… of these one-eighth are of an important nature.” When the report was published, some people established an Institute for Qur’anic Research in Munich with the goal of examining Qur’an the same way. A gigantic research project was started that continued for three generations. By 1933, 43000 photocopies of Qur’anic manuscripts had been collected. A report published shortly before World War II showed the results of the examination of these manuscripts. While some minor mistakes of calligraphy were found, not a single discrepancy in the text had been discovered!
Of course the love, devotion and care that Muslim showed toward the Qur’an, and that became the immediate cause of its miraculous preservation, was inspired by the Prophet Muhammad, Salla-Allahu alayhi wa sallam. On one occasion he asked the companions in Suffa: Which of you would like to go out every morning to Buthan or Al- Aqiq (two markets near Medina) and bring two large she-camels without being guilty of sin or without severing the ties of kinship? Camels were the valuable commodity of the time, she-camels even more so. Its equivalent today may be a brand new automobile. As they showed their interest, Prophet Muhammad, Salla-Allahu alayhi wa sallam, explained: To teach or recite two verses of the Qur’an is better than getting two she-camels. And three verses are better than three she-camels. (Muslim).
And so, for centuries this ummah displayed an unprecedented love and devotion for the Book of Allah. It began the education of its children by teaching them how to read Qur’an. It began its day by reciting from the Qur’an. Qur’an was divided into seven parts, each called a manzil, so it could be read completely every week. It was divided into thirty parts, each called a juz, so it could be read completely every month. Qur’an is the most read and memorized book in the world!
Today, though, we see a change. Thanks to the twin scourges of a colonial education system and the television, today we find millions of Muslim children for whom learning to read the Qur’an is not part of their education. We find millions of Muslim homes where Qur’an is read only on special occasions. When someone dies, for example. This despite the fact that in most parts of the world today, unlike the Soviet Union of yesterday, reading the Qur’an is no longer a high risk proposition. How unfortunate is the person who should die of thirst while holding the refreshing glass of water in his hands! How unfortunate the person who should die of disease while holding the perfect medicine in his hands!
Of course we must read it, understand it, and put it into practice. But we must also remember that reading with full deference and proper etiquettes is a pre-requisite for understanding the Qur’an, just as understanding its message is a pre-requisite for practicing it. Our goal must be to live by the Qur’an. For only then we truly live. Otherwise we only pretend to live.
American economist Robert Samuelson recently made an interesting observation about the American society in his Newsweek column: “America’s glories and evils are tightly fused together.” Quoting sociologist Seymour Lipset, he asserts that America’s economic vitality and progress come from the same source as do crime, family breakdown, inequality, and vulgarity. Freedom and individualism have fired economic advance, yet have also inhibited social control. But why the qualities that bring the best in a nation also should bring the worst in it? Is humanity doomed by having its vices and virtues so intricately mixed?
Samuelson does not probe the issue. Instead he seems to be happily resigned to it. “We are burdened as well as blessed by our beliefs,” he says. Economics, we may be reminded, is the dismal science.
Actually the world is not doomed by design. Samuelson comes very close to the truth but he confuses approaches or tools with attributes. A tool that works great in one area is also being used in another for which it was never designed. The problem lies with the user who keeps on insisting on its use in the second area citing its success in the first. To put matters simply, it’s the free use of reason and intellect that is behind most of America’s (and West’s in general) phenomenal scientific and material progress. It’s the use of the same tool in moral, and religious life that has caused its equally phenomenal moral degeneration!
Every tool has a designated area of application. Outside, it will fail to work. A 4 bit computer is good for some elementary math involving whole numbers. It may multiply 2 by 20 and give the correct answer instantly. But burdened with complex calculations involving several decimal digits, it will give the WRONG answers. A weighing scale meant for gold will not work for iron and vice versa. Their resolution and capacity are inappropriate for those applications.
Same with the tools we use for learning about the world. Our senses and intellect are wonderful things. Science and technology are all about their use. Certainly it was free inquiry driven by reason that led to so many of the discoveries of science. It happened at an accelerated pace during the past four centuries and the results are everywhere around us to be seen.
But a tool that is so great in one area may be totally useless, even dangerous, in another. Pure Reason, uninformed by Divine Guidance, is a defective tool for deciding purpose of life or suggesting its values. What is Right and what is Wrong? These questions require knowledge beyond what we can acquire by using our senses and reasoned analysis. As a direct result, everyone’s reasoning is different. That is why philosophers have never been able to agree upon what should be the goal of life. Happiness? Survival? Pleasure? Love? Self-fulfillment? You name it. In addition, it is impossible for us to separate our reasoning in these matters from our feelings. Pure or uninformed reason becomes just a tool to justify what we desire.
Today West’s problem is that it has accepted the wrong tool for developing its moral compass. Probably the majority of its people abhor homosexuality. They may know that it is an abomination and evil. Yet today same-sex marriages are getting legal sanction in the West. And they are helpless in trying to stop its advances. Why? Because they cannot argue that it is wrong based on pure reason. It is easier to make a case against smoking in public places, then against the worst forms of immorality. Such is the result when pure reason becomes the accepted arbiter of right and wrong.
There is nothing modern about this either. Several centuries ago, Obaidullah Hasan Qirwani, a leader of the renegade batani cult declared it foolish for a brother to marry his beautiful sister to a total stranger, while trying to be content with a less qualified wife — another stranger. She would be much more suited to be wife of her own brother, with whom she may be a lot more compatible, he argued. His argument is, no doubt, sickening. But is there a counter argument based on pure reason?
Certainly mankind needs a superior tool for determining the values and purpose of life. A source of guidance that is based on certain knowledge, not conjecture. One that can inform our desires rather than being subservient to them. This is what Prophets, Alayhim assalam, came with. They claimed to have access to the higher source of knowledge, the Divine Revelation. Those who accepted them used reason and observation to verify their authenticity and character. But they accepted Divine Revelation as a SUPERIOR source of knowledge! That is why a son can tell his father:
![[Image]](http://www.albalagh.net/_images/reason.jpg)
“O my father! To me has come knowledge that had not reached you. So follow me. I will guide you to a Way that is even and straight.” (Maryam, 19:43).
All this is obvious, except in implications. We accept this is Right and that is Wrong because the Revelation TOLD us, not because it PROVED it to us. What is wrong with riba? Gambling? Pork? Alcohol? Revelation told us that they were wrong. Why is hijab necessary? Allah and His Prophet, Salla-Allahu alayhi wa sallam, ordered that. What are the rights of men and women? Those given to them by Allah and His Prophet, Salla-Allahu alayhi wa sallam. The attribute of the Muslims is that they “listened and followed” (Al-Baqarah, 2:285). It is not that they listened and questioned, and argued, and investigated and then if they felt like it, they followed. That is also THE message of Prophet Ibrahim, alayhi assalm’s, sacrifice, a defining event for Islam. For the Qur’an describes the moment when the father and son were ready for the ultimate sacrifice by saying: “When they surrendered” (Al-Saffat, 37:103). Literally it can also be translated: “When they accepted Islam.” For pure reason could have raised a million questions about the command for that sacrifice.
Normally it is difficult for us to say “I don’t know.” It is even more difficult for nations to admit a weakness in their celebrated tools of inquiry. That is the dilemma of the modern world, which sees so much wrong with itself but cannot bring itself to admitting the problem with its basic approach. But a Muslim is the person who has both the wisdom and the courage to surrender before the higher source of knowledge and guidance. For him Revelation informs his reason and his reason controls his emotions. Such is the person who is blessed, but not burdened, by his beliefs.
Investments worth £800bn are made through Islamic finance products.
Experts in Islamic finance believe their way of doing business has shielded them from the global credit crisis.
But how does it differ from conventional Western finance?
A former executive director of the International Monetary Fund, Dr Abbas Mirakhor, says wider Islamic economics relies on God’s guidance, handed down almost 1,400 years ago.
There is a “consciousness of a supreme creator and a system that he has provided”, he says.
What we know as the conventional Western way does not have that, which is “really the major difference between the two”, he adds.
In practical terms, the most significant difference is that charging interest is not allowed in Islamic finance.
Neither are most forms of speculative investment permitted, such as hedging or derivatives trading.
“We don’t recognise the concept of interest… to look for some profit from trading money,” explains Dr Bambang Brodjonegoro from the Islamic Development Bank.
“In the Islamic concept, money is strictly for the purpose of exchange or storing value, but not for the transaction of looking for excessive profit,” he says.
Sharing risks
How then, does an Islamic bank, and a customer who puts money in that bank, make a profit?
The system is asset-based, with tangible assets or commodities at the heart of it. There are buyers and sellers, not borrowers and lenders.
Here is a comparison.
In Los Angeles a customer who wants to borrow money to buy a car would go to a conventional bank and agree a loan. The bank would hand over the money.
There would be regular repayments, which include interest accrued on the loan.
In Lahore a customer could go to an Islamic bank and sign a contract with the bank to buy a car from them.
The bank would not loan the money but buy the car itself. Then it would sell it to the customer at a mark up.
The customer would agree to pay back the cost in instalments over a regular period.
One of the core principles at the heart of Islamic economics is risk sharing. The bank and the people who put their money in it share any profit, or loss, from investments.
“In Islam we appreciate merit, so if someone works harder in a business…they (the bank) will get the sharing benefit,” explains Dr Brodjonegoro.
“The more important thing is that there will be no bank that rules everything. It will be bank and borrowers at the same level and they share the risk and benefit.”
Alternative way
This sense of equality is important. It is one of the defining characteristics which proponents of Islamic economics say make it different from the conventional western way.
Islamic economics also highlights a belief in benefitting the wider Muslim community.
The former IMF Executive Director Dr Mirakhor says that it chimes with “a movement toward becoming more ‘other conscious’…having consciousness about the other fellow, about the general public interest.”
This contrasts with what he described as the “simple narrow basis of self interest which motivates, supposedly, the economic agents in the liberal economic system.”
Some see the Islamic model as an alternative. Others see it as complimentary to the system which has dominated the western world.
“I don think that this Islamic banking system is the alternative, that we have one or the other. I think this is a complimentary service, a way of doing service,” says Prof Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Countries.
“It needs to be an option there where people can find different ways of doing the same thing.”
Compromising principles
Islamic economics is not the exclusive preserve of Muslims.
London is emerging as a major financial centre for Islamic finance. Islamic banking products are also widely used by non Muslims in Malaysia.
UK has 8th largest Islamic finance sector according to the DTI
“This is an alternative system that can be applied to everybody. Everybody can use it regardless of their religion,” says Dr Brodjonegoro from the Islamic Development Bank.
Major banks like Britain’s HSBC and Citi of the US have set up Islamic banking subsidiaries that are flourishing. Some of the champions of the Islamic way want to see business expand beyond the natural market of Muslim countries.
They believe that now, more than ever, there is a market for non Muslims who share in the values espoused in Islamic economics.
But there are some who fear that by expanding the Islamic way is becoming less Islamic.
Time to reflect
“Unfortunately what is happening is that Islamic finance in some ways is moving more and more closely to the conventional finance,” says Prof Habib Ahmed, a world authority on Islamic finance.
“If you look at the development in the past few years, Islamic finance appears to be mimicking most of the products of conventional finance.”
There has never been a better time to champion an economic model which is different to the one laying in shreds on Wall Street, says Prof Ahmed. But he believes that the Islamic concept is being diluted.
“As people after this crisis are looking for solutions…the Islamic finance industry is moving towards that very system,” he says.
“I think it is time for Islamic finance to pause and think of the direction it is taking”.
Ref: {BBC News – By Robin Brant – Malaysia correspondent
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8025410.stm }
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has called on Islamic banks to take a leadership role in the global economy, amid the financial crisis.
He was speaking at the opening of the World Islamic Economic Forum in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta.
The forum has brought together political and business leaders from 38 countries to discuss the global economic slowdown.
They will also discuss ways to achieve energy and food security.
Mr Yudhoyono said it was time for Islamic banks to do some missionary work in the West.
Islamic financial institutions, he said, had not been hit as hard as their western counterparts because they did not invest in toxic assets.
Banks run in accordance with Muslims laws on interest payments and the sharing of credit risks are seen by many as fairer than traditional banks, less focused on profit and kinder to the communities they work in.
Demand for Islamic financial products has been growing in the Muslim world for years but Mr Yudhoyono said that many in the West were now ready to learn from them.
Islamic law prohibits the payment and collection of interest, which is seen as a form of gambling.
Transactions must be backed by real assets, and because risk is shared between the bank and the depositor, there is added incentive for the institutions to ensure deals are sound.
Ref: [BBC News - Asia Pacific;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7918129.stm ]
Click HERE to read the entire article written by Yvonne Ridley (Convert to Islam)
by: Yvonne Ridley
Sunday, October 22, 2006; Page B01
LONDON
I used to look at veiled women as quiet, oppressed creatures — until I was captured by the Taliban.
In September 2001, just 15 days after the terrorist attacks on the United States, I snuck into Afghanistan, clad in a head-to-toe blue burqa, intending to write a newspaper account of life under the repressive regime. Instead, I was discovered, arrested and detained for 10 days. I spat and swore at my captors; they called me a “bad” woman but let me go after I promised to read the Quran and study Islam. (Frankly, I’m not sure who was happier when I was freed — they or I.)
Back home in London, I kept my word about studying Islam — and was amazed by what I discovered. I’d been expecting Quran chapters on how to beat your wife and oppress your daughters; instead, I found passages promoting the liberation of women. Two-and-a-half years after my capture, I converted to Islam, provoking a mixture of astonishment, disappointment and encouragement among friends and relatives.
Now, it is with disgust and dismay that I watch here in Britain as former foreign secretary Jack Straw describes the Muslim nikab — a face veil that reveals only the eyes — as an unwelcome barrier to integration, with Prime Minister Tony Blair, writer Salman Rushdie and even Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi leaping to his defense.
Having been on both sides of the veil, I can tell you that most Western male politicians and journalists who lament the oppression of women in the Islamic world have no idea what they are talking about. They go on about veils, child brides, female circumcision, honor killings and forced marriages, and they wrongly blame Islam for all this — their arrogance surpassed only by their ignorance.
These cultural issues and customs have nothing to do with Islam. A careful reading of the Quran shows that just about everything that Western feminists fought for in the 1970s was available to Muslim women 1,400 years ago. Women in Islam are considered equal to men in spirituality, education and worth, and a woman’s gift for childbirth and child-rearing is regarded as a positive attribute.
When Islam offers women so much, why are Western men so obsessed with Muslim women’s attire? Even British government ministers Gordon Brown and John Reid have made disparaging remarks about the nikab — and they hail from across the Scottish border, where men wear skirts.
When I converted to Islam and began wearing a headscarf, the repercussions were enormous. All I did was cover my head and hair — but I instantly became a second-class citizen. I knew I’d hear from the odd Islamophobe, but I didn’t expect so much open hostility from strangers. Cabs passed me by at night, their “for hire” lights glowing. One cabbie, after dropping off a white passenger right in front of me, glared at me when I rapped on his window, then drove off. Another said, “Don’t leave a bomb in the back seat” and asked, “Where’s bin Laden hiding?”
Yes, it is a religious obligation for Muslim women to dress modestly, but the majority of Muslim women I know like wearing the hijab, which leaves the face uncovered, though a few prefer the nikab. It is a personal statement: My dress tells you that I am a Muslim and that I expect to be treated respectfully, much as a Wall Street banker would say that a business suit defines him as an executive to be taken seriously. And, especially among converts to the faith like me, the attention of men who confront women with inappropriate, leering behavior is not tolerable.
I was a Western feminist for many years, but I’ve discovered that Muslim feminists are more radical than their secular counterparts. We hate those ghastly beauty pageants, and tried to stop laughing in 2003 when judges of the Miss Earth competition hailed the emergence of a bikini-clad Miss Afghanistan, Vida Samadzai, as a giant leap for women’s liberation. They even gave Samadzai a special award for “representing the victory of women’s rights.”
Some young Muslim feminists consider the hijab and the nikab political symbols, too, a way of rejecting Western excesses such as binge drinking, casual sex and drug use. What is more liberating: being judged on the length of your skirt and the size of your surgically enhanced breasts, or being judged on your character and intelligence? In Islam, superiority is achieved through piety — not beauty, wealth, power, position or sex.
I didn’t know whether to scream or laugh when Italy’s Prodi joined the debate last week by declaring that it is “common sense” not to wear the nikab because it makes social relations “more difficult.” Nonsense. If this is the case, then why are cellphones, landlines, e-mail, text messaging and fax machines in daily use? And no one switches off the radio because they can’t see the presenter’s face.
Under Islam, I am respected. It tells me that I have a right to an education and that it is my duty to seek out knowledge, regardless of whether I am single or married. Nowhere in the framework of Islam are we told that women must wash, clean or cook for men. As for how Muslim men are allowed to beat their wives — it’s simply not true. Critics of Islam will quote random Quranic verses or Hadith, but usually out of context. If a man does raise a finger against his wife, he is not allowed to leave a mark on her body, which is the Quran’s way of saying, “Don’t beat your wife, stupid.”
It is not just Muslim men who must reevaluate the place and treatment of women. According to a recent National Domestic Violence Hotline survey, 4 million American women experience a serious assault by a partner during an average 12-month period. More than three women are killed by their husbands and boyfriends every day — that is nearly 5,500 since 9/11.
Violent men don’t come from any particular religious or cultural category; one in three women around the world has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime, according to the hotline survey. This is a global problem that transcends religion, wealth, class, race and culture.
But it is also true that in the West, men still believe that they are superior to women, despite protests to the contrary. They still receive better pay for equal work — whether in the mailroom or the boardroom — and women are still treated as sexualized commodities whose power and influence flow directly from their appearance.
And for those who are still trying to claim that Islam oppresses women, recall this 1992 statement from the Rev. Pat Robertson, offering his views on empowered women: Feminism is a “socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”
Now you tell me who is civilized and who is not.
Yvonne Ridley is political editor of Islam Channel TV in London, UK &
coauthor of “In the Hands of the Taliban: Her Extraordinary Story” (Robson Books).
First time ever: Interview of Retired Cheif Justice Shari’at Court, Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani by Dr. Shahid Masood on the Truth behind the recently approved bill by National Assembly of Pakistan entitled “Protection of Women (Criminal Laws Amendment) Act, 2006” or should I say fake “Women Protection Bill”.
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