The assignment was given to me in the Sunnipath, Essentials of Islam (Hanafi) course and it was to ponder on the logic behind the phrobition of certain things to mankind by Almigty Allah.Firstly I would like to state that as Muslims we do not even need to ponder why Allah has made something lawful or unlawful for us, if we are Muslims we should enter Islam completely.
If we gain knowledge of a new law in Sharia we have to obey it immidiately without questioning it.
When the phrobition of alcohol was revealed to the Muslims,, the streets of Madina al-Munawwara were flooded with wine, because of the level of Iman that the Sahaba r.a had, they heard the new revelation and they threw out all the wine they had in their houses, they did not question the order and neither should we.
In the next section I’m going to analyze the phrobitions of zina,alcohol,drugs and the looking of immoral pictures and videos. It will inshAllah become quite clear that even though these sins might be separate on surface they are linked in one way or another.
1.Alcohol:
Even though this substance is in a different category it could be in the category of drugs, since it is a poison that effects the nerve system and is lethal if taken excessively.
I live in a country where alcohol could be seen as a plague that is effecting the population.
People start drinking at the age of 14 and continue to do so until their death, which can come sooner than expected because of the intake of the substance.
Lets look at some facts about alchol use,
In my country,Finland about 80% of all crimes are alcoholrelated and 4% of the population are addicted to drinking, not to forget the 500.000 people who are in a so called ”riskgroup”.
In the UK 70% of all admissions to hospital accident and emergency departements are linked to alcohol misuse.
In the EU 10% of ”premature” deaths are caused by alcohol.
Just looking at the facts wont give you the whole picture of the situation, specially if you live in a country where alcohol is banned you can not completely understand what kind of problems alcohol brings with it.
It increases the risk for zina which is in itself a disgousting sin.
Not only does alcohol affect a society on a personal level but it also effects the state itself. Alot of people say that it is actually good for the state to sell alcohol but infact that is not true, the state of Finland loses about 5 billion Euros each year because of the medical care and other damage related to alcohol use.
2.Drugs
The definition of drugs differ from country to country with for example the Netherlands having a ”liberal” policy on so called ”soft drugs” like Cannabis. In Islam the phrobition stands very clear, banning the use of any intoxicants, wether it he Cannabis, Alcohol or Heroin.
Drugs affect the human beings in very different ways, Cannabis which is considered a ”soft drug” makes the person passive and hence he is not a beneficial member of the society, he does not study nor work at his full capacity.
Then there are the very lethal drugs like Heroin.
Not only is it highly addictive and poisonous, it can lead to the spread of HIV through the re-usage of needles between Heroin addicts, which leads to the death of many. The virus might be spread further because of some addicts that are forced by someone or by their financial status into prostitution to get money for their addiction, hence spreading the HIV to the ones visiting the prostitutes.
Crimerates also rise because of drugusage, in Usa in the year 2004, 17% of the inmates were convicted because of crimes committed in order to get money for drugs.
Drugs can effectively cripple a whole nations economy .For example in Afghanistan many farmers prefered to grow poppys instead of wheat or other beneficial plants because they would get 20 times more income from the poppys, hence making the individual farmers rich but affecting the states financial status negatively when not paying taxes.
3. Immoral pictures and movies.
With modern technology such as satellite disks and Internet the spread of immoral pictures and movies has been rapid all over the world, specially with the internet enabeling the accessing websites from all over the planet.
Alhamdulillah some of the Muslim countries have tried restricting the access to the material by placing filters to block the citizens from accessing such websites and material.
However where the material is acessable it has led to some problems, namely that women are not respected as they should be, most of the immoral material shows women as some kind of objects that not really are humanbeings , rather some objects that you can use as you please.
In the west this phenomenon is so common that even shops that are specialized in this kind of material have been set up and people can visit them casually like it were a grocery store, the shops are not even hidden, but out on display for everyone to see and find them.
It has effectively corrupted the mentality of the people and alot of women have eating disorders and are obsessed with the way they look so they can attract attention from men. This has also made the youth to become ”sexually active” in a much younger age.
4.Zina
You may have noticed that the sections before all lead into zina and this is a very serious sin but unfortunately alot of the non-Muslims and even Muslims do not understand the logic behind phrobihiting it.
In 1996 the World Health Organization stated that about 1 million people are infected with a sexually transmitted disease daily, 352 million infected people per year, and 60% of those infected are below the age of 25.
There are a number of different sexually transmitted diseases that and they vary from eachother alot, some of the disases will go away with time and some of the more serious ones will eventually lead to the death of the infected person.
The most common sexually transmitted disease is Chlamydia which aparently 25% of the global population has had and in 2007 HIV had infected 33.2 million people and killed 2.1 million.
The sexually transmitted diseases are not the only problem that zina brings, another problem is teenage pregnancy, specially the babies that are born outside the wedlock. In Usa 55.6 girls out of 1000 will become pregnant during their teenyears and 30.2 out of 1000 will have an abortion.
The ones who abort the baby will have that on their consience during their whole lifetime and this can be very traumatic.
The ones who decide to have the baby often become single mothers since the man does not want to take responsibility and abandons the new mother.
I would like to conclude with saying that everything that Allah has deemed unlawful for us has a logic behind it, it might not be clear for us in this day and age, but the thing we have to remember is that Allah has created us and he knows his creation the best.
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