"There Is No Justice With Dictatorship"

A. Muslims need to know themselves and know others. They don't know who they are, what their role in life is, and what kind of relations they should have with others. They tend to choose naive and simplistic answers. They like to summarize everything by saying it is haram (forbidden) or halal (allowed). But fiqh (jurisprudence) is not everything. It is only one aspect of life. Life is not based on law alone. You have legal, economic, social, and political needs. The majority of Muslims, in the West and abroad, think it is enough to say this is halal or this is haram, this is OK, this is not, this is `kufr'.

Some of us think life is only a path to death, and that all you need to do is take short cuts to al-Janna (paradise). What about life itself? Allah tells us we are His vicegerents on earth and gave us his trust. He gave us certain responsibilities. In the Qur'an, Allah says "He who created you from this earth and gave you the responsibility to build it."

Our task is to build a civilization with values. Unfortunately, this concept is absent from our lives. Muslims now have an "individual" mentality. They think of the need of the individual not the ummah, or community, needs. In our religion, we have many obligations to the community. You must have hospitals, doctors, engineers, schools, roads, food, etc. These obligations fall on the community. The individual must cooperate with others to fulfill these requirements. Muslims think, by mistake, that if you pay to build a mosque, you will get more reward from Allah than if you pay to build a hospital, for example. A Muslim can feel the link between the mosque and Allah, but he or she can't feel or see the link between a hospital and Allah, in the same way. This also applies to other societal needs such as housing students, publishing books, or building an institution fighting against dictatorship and calling for Shura and democracy.

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