"We did not reveal the Quran to you to be miserable . . ."
Quran 20:2
I was originally planning on continuing my discussion of the 18th surah "The Cave" that I started yesterday, but this passage, which I saw on a Tweet from Shaykh Azhar Nasser, jumped out at me. I know we've talked about this before, but it always amazes (and saddens) me the number of folks of faith who seem to be made miserable by their own faith, and who, in turn, take out that pain on others. I will once again reference a line from Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, where he reflects on people who, like spiders bloated by venom, can only relieve the pain by biting someone. That said, where does the venom come from? If the pain and venom comes from the faith then what are we really worshiping? As Nasser says in his Tweet, "If Islam is making you miserable, it's not Islam, it's something else disguised as Islam." And this brings me back to me continuing discussion of the internal versus the external aspects of the faith. It's not that both don't play a role in any religion, but how often do we stop at the more readily quantifiable, the external, and stop at the rules? We don't have the time - or the desire - to push through the transcendent truth and beauty, and only see Islam, or any religion, as a mechanism to control my actions and make me feel terrible about myself.
Quran 20:2
I was originally planning on continuing my discussion of the 18th surah "The Cave" that I started yesterday, but this passage, which I saw on a Tweet from Shaykh Azhar Nasser, jumped out at me. I know we've talked about this before, but it always amazes (and saddens) me the number of folks of faith who seem to be made miserable by their own faith, and who, in turn, take out that pain on others. I will once again reference a line from Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, where he reflects on people who, like spiders bloated by venom, can only relieve the pain by biting someone. That said, where does the venom come from? If the pain and venom comes from the faith then what are we really worshiping? As Nasser says in his Tweet, "If Islam is making you miserable, it's not Islam, it's something else disguised as Islam." And this brings me back to me continuing discussion of the internal versus the external aspects of the faith. It's not that both don't play a role in any religion, but how often do we stop at the more readily quantifiable, the external, and stop at the rules? We don't have the time - or the desire - to push through the transcendent truth and beauty, and only see Islam, or any religion, as a mechanism to control my actions and make me feel terrible about myself.
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