مقالة باللغة الإنجليزية حول إسلام مريم جميلة
From: Wajahat Husain
whus@khi.compol.com
Bismillah Walhamdulillah Was
Salaatu Was Salaam 'ala Rasulillah
Brothers and Sisters Assalam o
Alaikum:
Here I have narrated the
reflections of one of the first American Jewish women to accept Islam. This
narration below in her own words is not just a story, but the beginning of her
literary mission to combat modernism inflicted on Islam by so called reformers.
Brothers and Sisters we all have to be very careful to save us and other
Muslims from this menace. Maryam Jameelah has written a great number of books
to combat this, the list is at the end of this post.
The depth of the writer's faith
is demonstrated by one of the significant events of her life that when she grew
certain that her future as a muslim was hopelessly bleak in 1961 she migrated
to Pakistan under the responsibility of Sayyid Maulana Maududi where she has
taken up permanent residence at the home of her husband's family in Lahore.
As she has quoted the Hadith on
the very first page of her book "Islam and Orientalism"
" Ahwas bin hakim reported
from his father that a man asked the Messenger of Allah about evils. He replied
: Don't ask me evils but ask me regarding good ( saying it thrice ). Then he
said ; Beware ! Surely the worst of evils is the evil of the learned and surely
the best of good is the good of the learned. "
May Allah give me and everyone
hidaya Ameen
Wassalam Wajahat Husain
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Quoted from her book "Islam and Modernism"
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Why
I embraced Islam
MARYUM
JAMEELAH
(formerly
Margret Marcus)
I trace the beginning of my
interest in Islam when as a child of ten , while attending a reformed Jewish
"Sunday School" , I became fascinated with the historical
relationship between the Jews an the Arabs. From my Jewish textbooks, I learned
that Abraham was the father of the Arabs as well as the Jews. I read how
centuries later when in medieval Europe, Christian persecution made their lives
intolerable, the Jews were welcomed in Muslim Spain and that it was the
magnanimity if this same Arabic-Islamic civilization which stimulated Hebrew
culture to reach its highest peak of achievement. Totally unaware of the true
nature of Zionism, i naively thought that Jews were returning to Palestine to
strengthen their close ties of kinship in religion and culture with their
semitic cousins. Together i believed that the Jews and Arabs would cooperate to
attain another Golden Age of culture in the Middle East.
Despite my fascination with the
study of Jewish history, I was extremely unhappy at the "Sunday
School". At this time i identified strongly with the Jewish people in
Europe, then suffering a horrible fate under the Nazis and I was shocked that
none of my class-fellows nor their parents took their religion seriously.
During the services at the synagogue, the children used to read comic strips
hidden in their prayer books and laugh to scorn at the rituals. The children
were so noisy and disorderly that the teachers couldn't discipline them and
found it very difficult to conduct the classes. At home the atmosphere for
religious observance was scarcely more congenial. My elder sister detested the
"Sunday School" so much that my mother literally had to drag her out
of bed in the mornings and she never went without the struggle of tears and hot
words. Finally my parents were exhausted and let her quit. On the Jewish holy
days instead of attending Synagogues and fasting on Yum Kipper, my sister and i
were taken out of school to picnics and gay parties in fine restaurants. When
my sister and i were convinced our parents how miserable we were both at the
Sunday School they joined agnostic, humanist organization known as the ETHICAL
CULTURE MOVEMENT.
The Ethical Culture Movement was
founded late in the 19th century by Felix Adler. While studying for the
rabbinate, Felix Adler grew convinced that devotion to ethical values as
relative and man-made, regarding and supernaturalism or theology as irrelevant,
constituted the only religion fit for the modern world. I attended the Ethical
Culture "Sunday School" each week from the age of eleven until i
graduated at fifteen. Here i grew into complete accord with the ideas of the
movement ad regarded all traditional, organized religions with scorn.
Throughout my adolescence i
remained under the influence of humanistic philosophy until, after i began to
mature intellectually and atheism no longer satisfied me, I began a renewed
search for my identity. For a time i joined a bahai group in New York called
the "The caravan of East and West" under the leadership of a persian
by the name of Mirza Ahmed Sohrab (D.1958) who told me that he had been the
secretary of Abdul Baha, one of the founders of the Bahai. Initially i was
attracted to the Bahai because of its Islamic origin and its preaching about
the oneness of the mankind, but when I discovered how miserably they had failed
to implement this ideal, I left them a year later bitterly disillusioned. When
i was eighteen years old, I became a member of the local branch of the
religious Zionist youth movement known as the Mizrachi Hatzair, but when i
found out what the real nature of Zionism was, which made hostility between
Jews and Arabs irreconcilable, I left several months later in disgust. When I
was twenty and a student in New York University , one of my elective courses
was "Judaism in Islam". My professor, Rabbi Abraham Issac Katsh, the
head of the Department of Hebrew Studies there, he spared no efforts to convince
his students -- all Jews many of whom aspired to become Rabbis-- that Islam was
derived from Judaism. Our textbook, written by him * took each verse from the
Quran , painstakingly tracing it to its alleged Jewish source. Although his
real aim was to prove to his students the superiority of Judaism over Islam, he
convinced me diametrically the opposite. I was repelled by the sub-ordination
of the Hereafter, so vividly ported in the Holy Quran, to the alleged divine
right of the Jews to Palestine. The Jewish God in the Old Testament and in the
Jewish prayer book appeared to me distorted and degraded into some kind of real
estate agent ! The fusion of Parochial nationalism with religion, I thought had
spiritually impoverished Judaism beyond redemption. The rigid exclusiveness of
Judaism I felt had a great deal of connection with the persecutions the Jews
have suffered throughout their history. I reflected that perhaps these
tragedies wouldn't have happened if the jews had competed vigorously with other
faiths for converts. I soon discovered that Zionism was merely a combination of
the racist, tribalistic Judaism with modern secular nationalism. Zionism was
further discredited in my eyes when i learnt that few if any of the leaders of
the Zionism were observant Jews and that perhaps nowhere is orthodox,
traditional Judaism regarded with such intense contempt as in Israel. When i
found nearly all important Jewish leaders in America uncritical supporters of
Zionism who felt not the slightest twinge of conscience because of the terrible
injustice inflicted on the Palestinian Arabs, i could no longer consider myself
a Jew at heart.
One morning in November 1954,
Professor Katsh during his lecture, argued with irrefutable logic that the
monotheism taught my Moses (PBUH) and the Divine laws related to him at Sinai
were indispensable as the basis for all higher ethical values.If morals were
purely man-made as the Ethical Culture and other agnostic and atheistic
philosophies taught then they could be changed at will according to mere whim,
convenience or circumstance. The result would be utter chaos leading to
individual and collective ruin. Belief in the Hereafter as the Rabbis in the
Talmud taught, argued Prof. Katsh. was not mere wishful thinking but a moral
necessity. Only those he said who firmly believed that each of us will be
summoned by God on judgment Day to render a complete account of our life and
rewarded or punished accordingly, will possess the self-discipline to sacrifice
transitory pleasures and endure hardships and sacrifice to attain lasting good.
While Prof. Katsh was lecturing thus, i was comparing in my mind what i had
read in the Old Testament and the Talmud with what was taught in the Quran and
Hadith and finding Judaism so defective , I was converted to Islam.
Although i wanted to become a
Muslim as far back as in 1954, my family managed to argue me out of it. I was
warned that Islam would complicate my life because it is not like Judaism and
Christianity, part of the American scene. I was told that Islam would alienate
me from my family and isolate me from the community. At that time my faith
wasn't sufficiently strong to withstand these pressures. Partly as the result
of my inner turmoil, I became so ill that i had to discontinue college long before
it was any time for me to graduate so that i never earned any diploma. For the
next two years i remained at home under private medical care, steadily growing
worse. in desperation from 1957-1959, my parents confined me both to private
and public hospitals where i vowed that if i ever recovered sufficiently to be
discharged i would embrace Islam.
After i was allowed to return
home, I investigated all the opportunities to meet Muslims in New York City and
it was my good fortune to make the acquaintance of some of the finest men and
women anyone could ever hope to meet. I also began to write articles for Muslim
magazines and carry on an extensive correspondence with Muslim leaders all over
the world. I corresponded with the late Sheikh Abrahimi, the leader of the
ulema in Algeria, Dr, Muhammad El-Bahay of Al-Azhar, Dr. Mahmud F Hoballah ,
then the director of the Islamic center in Washington D.C., Dr. Hameedullah of
Paris, Dr. Said Ramadan, the director of the islamic center of Geneva, and
Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maudoodi.
Even before i formally embraced
Islam, i found the integrity of the faith in the contemporary world greatly
threatened by the so-called modernist movement which aimed at adulterating its
teachings with man-made philosophies and reforms. I was convinced that had
these modernizes had their way , nothing of the original would be left ! As a
child I had witnessed with my own eyes in my own family how the liberals had
mutilated what had once been a Divinely revealed faith. Having been born a Jew
and reared in a Jewish family ,i had seen how futile was the attempt to
reconcile religion with atheistic environment. "Reformed Judaism" not
only failed to check the cultural assimilation of the Jews i knew but actively
encouraged the process. As a result they had become Jews by label only. None
had any religion worthy of the name. Throughout my childhood, the intellectual
dishonesty, hypocrisy and superficiality of "reformed" Judaism was a
vivid experience. Even at that early age i knew that such a watered down,
half-hearted compromise could never hope to retain the loyalty of its members,
much less their children. How dismayed i was when i found among the muslims,
the same threat! How shocked i was when i found certain scholars and some
political leaders within the Muslim community guilty of the identical sins for
which the God in our Holy Quran has vehemently denounced the Jews! Convinced
that God wouldn't spare us from calamity and doom us to the same fate the Jews
have suffered unless we sincerely repented and changed our ways, I vowed that i
would devote all my literary struggle to combating this menace from within
before it was too late.
Thus in his first letter to me
of January 1961, Maulana Maudoodi wrote:
"While i was scanning your
essays. I felt as if i were reading my very own ideas. i hope your feeling will
be the same when you have the opportunity to learn Urdu and study my books. And
that despite the fact there has been no previous acquaintance between you and
me, this mutual sympathy and unanimity in thought has resulted directly from
the fact that both of us have derived our inspiration from one and the same
source-- Islam "
------------
-MARYUM JAMEELAH's BOOKS-
1. ISLAM VERSUS THE WEST
2. ISLAM AND MODERNISM
3. ISLAM IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
4. ISLAM VERSUS AHL AL KITAB PAST AND PRESENT
5. AHMAD KHALIL
6. ISLAM AND ORIENTALISM
7. WESTERN CIVILIZATION CONDEMNED BY ITSELF
8. CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN MAULANA MAUDOODI AND MARYUM JAMEELAH
9. ISLAM AND WESTERN SOCIETY
10. A MANIFESTO OF THE ISLAMIC MOVEMENT
11. IS WESTERN CIVILIZATION UNIVERSAL
12 WHO IS MAUDOODI ?
13 WHY I EMBRACED ISLAM
14 ISLAM AND THE MUSLIM WOMAN TODAY
15 ISLAM AND SOCIAL HABITS
16 ISLAMIC CULTURE IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
17 THREE GREAT ISLAMIC MOVEMENTS IN THE ARAB WORLD OF THE RECENT PAST
18 SHAIKH HASAN AL BANNA AND IKHWAN AL MUSLIMUN
19 A GREAT ISLAMIC MOVEMENT IN TURKEY
20 TWO MUJAHIDIN OF THE RECENT PAST AND THEIR STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM AGAINST
FOREIGN RULE
21 THE GENERATION GAP ITS CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES
22 WESTERNIZATION VERSUS MUSLIMS
23 WESTERNIZATION AND HUMAN WELFARE
24 MODERN TECHNOLOGY AND THE DEHUMANIZATION OF MAN
25 ISLAM AND MODERN MAN
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