At the dawn of Islam, religion was a victory for truth and a strong voice in the face of injustice and tyranny, while in later eras it turned into a tool for taming peoples, teaching them how to kneel before tyrannical rulers and kiss their “honorable” hands.
With the beginning of the rule of the Umayyad state (41 AH / 661 AD – 132 AH / 750 AD), jurisprudence became a tool used by the political authority to consolidate its rule. Then this trend continued during the Abbasid era (132 AH / 750 AD – 656 AH / 1258 AD), where the use of jurisprudence expanded to serve the political agendas of the state, thus taking a prominent role in shaping and directing authority.
Mosques have become ivory towers, in which sheikhs are busy with fruitless discussions about issues that neither advance nor delay.
This is the same religion that gave birth to the greatest civilizations, as it illuminated the Islamic world with thinkers and scientists who surpassed their era, such as Ibn Khaldun, who founded sociology, Al-Khwarizmi, who developed algorithms that became the basis of modern technology, and Ibn Sina, who laid the foundations of modern medicine and left a scientific legacy that lasted for centuries. These and other scholars were the fruit of a religion that sanctifies science and stimulates critical thinking, and this religion was the first engine of a wonderful Islamic renaissance that contributed to the progress of humanity.
Those who raise the banner of religion to assassinate innocence and sow destruction are the product of a distorted understanding that has nothing to do with Islam, which laid the foundations of a great civilization. Either the nation returns to reviving this true religion that created great people, or it remains captive to a sick thought that produces only ruin and destruction.
It was a religion that was not practiced in empty rituals, but rather it was an earthquake that upended the throne of colonialism, and produced men who were true to what they promised God.
