:Mamdouh Bitar,ruba mansour
It is not surprising that there are attempts to assassinate criticism that reveals the hidden, backward rot,These attempts were not the first with Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, and they will not end, passing through Farag Foda, Muhammad Arkoun, and many others, Given the cultural decline that the peoples of this region are suffering from, there is no escape from practicing criticism with the aim of reform and correction.
Criticism is not limited to religious, political, and even social thought, but also includes the “prohibition” mentality and other obstacles to progress, Criticism of the applications of this thought represented by the spread of social epidemics such as female circumcision (more than 90% of Egyptian women are circumcised), polygamy (30% of marriages are polygamous in Damascus), the view of women, religious racism, superstition, faith, and others, The necessities of progress require getting rid of these epidemics, and getting rid of epidemics requires serious criticism, which does not include values such as calling for brotherhood and love and avoiding strife and other palliative, narcotic practices that are not healing or sufficient, practices that keep the swamp somewhat calm, but they do not eliminate the rebellious deterioration.
The ruin was not the result of criticism, but rather the result of a lack of criticism, It was the result of fabrication, favoritism and deception, which allowed the cancer of deterioration to spread, By spreading in the way it has spread, the mission of enlightenment is to transcend the forbidden and prohibited in culture, and not to submit to the mentality of prohibition and taboos and the sanctification of evils and vices, represented by religious and political oppression and mythical, superstitious, occult delusions dedicated to backwardness and deterioration. What is prevalent is irrational, and what is prevalent has led to decadence, which must be transcended, not consecrated. We must transcend the fear of the threat of sedition, which has pre-Islamic origins, which is considered an internal Islamic concept, that has been His invention to describe situations that do not exist in this era, the issue of Uthman was a sedition, Siffin and the Camel were sedition, the problems of the Abbasids and Umayyads were sedition, their past concepts were dragged, such as sedition, then the concept of guardianship, allegiance, slaughter, revenge, jihad, paradise, houris, and even the concept of political Islam…etc. to the present, and we have become as if we are living in the first century AH.
The mythical religious thought that destroys life, present and future, dominates the collective consciousness, responsible for the continuous presence of defeat, manifested in superstitious applications in the political-social-economic field, then in conspiracy and exaggeration in asserting superiority… We are the best nation!!! Even the verbal command to do good and forbid evil does not transform this nation into the best nation, as long as the practice has moved away from good and approached evil, and what is the value of people’s belief in possessing past glories that surpassed All imagination?? All of that is nothing but innocent chatter, deadly to achieving the glories that the Arabs imagine and dream of.
The political exploitation of religion, the spread of the sultans’ preachers, the fear of the concept of the unknown based on ignorance, then the insistence on importing legislation, customs and values from the past and implanting them in the present, the practice of violence, jihad and terrorism, and the emphasis on the necessity of the presence of God and his angels in every toilet, to ensure how the believer enters, whether with the right foot or the left foot, then that preoccupation and suspicious interest in the matter of marriage, and the issuance of marriage for the benefits of Paradise, then the strengthening of religious imagination and other superstitions, Which has stolen the minds of the simpletons and increased their ignorance and simplicity, and other than that, are among the most important obstacles that the people of this country are exposed to, It is necessary to liberate the mind from superstition, in order to enable it to work in the field of advancement, progress and science, There is no science with the mind of superstition, and there is no marriage between the flat earth and the spherical earth, between the sheikh and the mathematics teacher, and between the mosque and the school, Criticism of these obstacles is necessary for progress, and resignation is surrender to backwardness.
Most important of all was the space of the sacred, which expanded greatly in culture and life, and sanctification had a great impact on the development of these peoples, The sacred eliminates the need for Dickerian-Rushdian doubt, and is characterized by its imposition of absolute truth through faith, What does faith do to minds? It destroys them and turns man into a creature with a skull without a mind inside it.
Therefore, confronting the culture of faith is a necessity for reviving rationality, Peoples and nations have only advanced through rationality ,and peoples and nations have not advanced except through rationality, We do not differ from those who came before us by birth, but rather by upbringing and qualification, Their upbringing was characterized by rationality, and the upbringing of these peoples was characterized by stuffing heads with superstition, which represents most of religious thinking and its interpretations, which are considered absolute truths, sayings from divine prophetic sources that are not approached by falsehood, neither from before nor from behind, There is no need to dwarf the sacred to the point of abolishing it, There is no need to liberate the mind From the “prohibition mentality”, then getting rid of the tendency to monotheism and excommunicate the different thought, i.e. respecting the difference
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