Mamdouh Bitar, Samir Sadek:
:
The issue is reform and making life livable. People’s lives of poverty, backwardness, and injustice are not livable and have never been. An unlivable life is subject to many influences, some internal and others external. In this era, it is difficult to separate the external from the internal, and it is difficult to influence the external. Religion and heritage are among the most important internal influences in this region.
Therefore, there have been attempts to reform religion and repair the relationship with heritage. Religious reform partially evolved into its opposite under the influence of clerics, who promoted, through various means, the notion that the cause of the living crisis was a shift away from religion. Thus, religious extremism was ignited, the awakening was reborn, and ancient traditions that had died out were revived. The results of this development were disappointing, and not as some had hoped, as nations are moving backward! This backward trend, which represents failure, has many causes, including, for example, the confusion between reform and disbelief. Anyone who attempts to reinterpret texts is considered an infidel, because this was due to the confusion surrounding reform and disbelief, followed by transmission and reason. Anyone who seeks to reinterpret texts is considered an infidel! Anyone who engages in ijtihad is considered an infidel, because in doing so, they become a heretic and inventor of evil innovations, which the school does not want to be contaminated by, and therefore must distance itself from them. In truth, this was neither disbelief nor heresy, nor was it an attack on the sacred. The sacred is essentially human beings, who must be saved from the supernatural belief that threatens, hinders, and impoverishes them. This was not an attempt to undermine the sacred and religion, as much as it was an attempt to prove that religion is unsuitable for addressing complex social, economic, and political conditions,This loss of validity is not new; it is as old as religion itself. Efforts were not directed at changing the nature of religion, but rather at restoring religion to its natural state, that is, to the individual’s characteristic as a private experience, and defining a special relationship between the individual and the unseen. Religion is for all individuals, not for individuals as a society. Social life is political, not religious in nature, and its management requires everyone to fulfill their duties and grants everyone their rights. Society, which represents public affairs, has no right to interfere in religion, which is a private affair. Religion has no right or duty to interfere in public socio-political affairs. Religion and religious affiliation are a combination of personal right and duty, while society is the largest body in the state, and it is the one that determines the rights and duties of the individual as a social being. The goal of all efforts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to restore religion to its individual, personal nature, not to formulate a new religion. Some went too far in exhausting their energies in the field of reforming the nature of religion. Reform, in practice, meant abolishing religion. The goal was not to abolish religion, but rather to place religion, without attempting to reform it, in its natural place—the personal sphere. This can be expressed by separating personal religion from the state of society. Is restoring religion to its individual nature the ultimate goal or the only solution to humanity’s problem with religion? Are there no alternatives to burying religion with its adherents in the cemetery of marginality? Certainly there are alternatives formulated by the mind. If society is a no-go area for religion, then where is the problem if we try to domesticate religion and naturalize it with social sexuality? Since it is possible to transform religion into a social actor, that is, it is possible to create what is called social religion, and this is what happened in Europe thanks to the secular approach. This was done by eliminating the personal characteristic of religion, and by making the sacred worldly. If there is something sacred, it is the worldly! That is, man. Transforming religion into a social actor requires, in addition to that, reversing the concept of sanctification. The sacred is to serve man, not man to serve the sacred. Since the sacred is a servant of man, and man is evolving and changing, then the sacred will transform from fixed to mutable.