The Religion Of The Ignorant

TO BE A "FINE" MAN

"Be smart!" "That wouldn't have happened if you had used your head!"

You must have heard those words countless times during your life: especially during childhood, when you said or did something your elders didn't agree with or didn't want you to do again.

For someone who utters these words, being a fine person is more important than anything. That means adhering to the morals, culture, attitudes and behavior generally accepted by the great majority in society, and conforming to a certain system of values, models and rules deemed acceptable. This is adopted and implemented in society. It's difficult to initiate any debate on where these models and rules originated and whether they're correct. Their inconsistencies cannot be questioned easily, because to question values adopted by the majority risks contradicting masses of people and becoming the target of their hostile reactions.

This structure, whose rightness is so firmly believed in, is not peculiar to our own society alone. The system is practiced in the East as well as in the West, and maintains itself in widely different cultures as a particular system of beliefs and values with its own prohibitions, sanctions and recommendations—just like a religion.

The concepts of Ignorantism are directly opposed to being a Muslim, believing in Allah, having proper moral values, and even being human. This religion definitely leaves no room for the behavior and moral values described by Allah in the Qur'an. Indeed, the religion of the ignorant emerges and grows wherever people do not live by the moral values of the Qur'an. People who are admired and regarded as prominent have learned this religion very well, and implement all its rules.

It's useful to emphasize the basic moral values recommended in the Qur'an that totally conflict with the corrupt logic of Ignorantism. It is revealed in the Qur'an that all people have a responsibility to Allah. A human being is therefore charged with pleasing Allah alone, and must not seek others' approval. A believer who lives by the moral values of the Qur'an thinks and lives according to these verses:

Is Allah not enough for His servant? Yet they try to scare you with others apart from Him. (Surat az-Zumar, 36)

… your Lord is a sufficient guide and helper. (Surat al-Furqan, 31)