When Allah SWT says in Quran 5:3 – “Today I have perfected your faith for you, completed My favor upon you, and chosen Islam as your way”, we know that the Deen of Islam is complete and perfect. When Allah says it is perfect and complete, who are we to even raise a question. It not the Deen of Islam that we at Tashih seek to correct, but our human application of that perfect Deen that needs to be corrected. Muslims being humans are fallible and we have made many serious mistakes in understanding applying the great Deen of Islam in our lives. “The Great Disconnect – Between Islam and Muslims” is a well-researched book that identifies these mistakes made over the last 1400 years in the light of Quran and Sunnah. The mistakes thus identified then need to be corrected one at a time with care and compassion. That is the goal of Tashih.

Tashih does not just believe in giving classes and lectures. We facilitate the actual application of Islam in our lives by giving pragmatic and practical solutions that can be acted upon with clear intention. We know that there are schools and mosques where we normally get the education. However, there are several gaps that are left which no one covers and we are left to fend for ourselves often making same mistakes our parents and their parents made. If we use the experience and expertise of those within our own Ummah we will learn much faster without having to pay the price of failure each time. Some examples of the gaps are,

Pre-Marital Counselling

Parenting Classes

Responsible social media for youth

College Admissions

Entrepreneurship

Career Counselling

Personal Finance

Tech Adaptation etc.

By prohibiting mankind from worshipping anything or anyone other than his Creator, Islam liberates human beings to live free of subservience to anyone else. Islam teaches that all humans are equal in the eyes of Allah SWT regardless of their race, nationality, social status or wealth. That is the reason when Muslims stand in front of the Allah SWT they stand as equals in one row with the monarch standing next to the laborer. Or when they perform Hajj or Umrah in Mecca where they all wear the same simple white cloth to cover their bodies. After making the all equal, Allah blesses them with the ultimate honor of His vicegerency and calling them as Ashraful Maqluqat (Most honored of His creations). But this honor is not reserved for Muslims or any other special category of people. This honor comes from the freewill that Allah SWT granted to all human beings. The price of this honor is that we will all be judged on the Day of Judgment on how we apply this limited freewill in this world. On that day there will again be absolute equality in the treatment of all human beings and the only distinction will be that of who accumulated greater net number of good deeds for which only Allah SWT is the absolute judge.

Islam is the guidance sent by Allah SWT for humanity to exercise their freewill and live in accordance with what is best for them in the long run. In addition to the promise of preservation of this guidance which came in the form of Quran until the end of times, Allah SWT also sent his beloved Prophet Muhammad SAWS to show us by example how to apply this Deen in our lives as humans. The Seerah of Prophet SAWS is one of the most documented of any prophet or perhaps any human being in the history of mankind. Hence all the tools are made available and preserved for those of us who are willing to seek true knowledge of Islam and gain wisdom from it. It is this preservation of message and the tools and instruments of Islam that enables 2 Billion Muslims to even identify themselves as Muslims. However very few of those Muslims are willing to benefit from the message and Deen of Islam the way it was meant to be. We instead trust our Imams and scholars to tell us about Islam and how to live according to it. We forgot that the message started from the command to read. We are too lazy to read and study so we left it to the “professionals” to do that for us. The professionals interpreted Islam in a way that preserved their position as the Masters. Even though all the tools of gaining knowledge are in our hands we choose to live a life of self-imposed ignorance and laziness that is extracting a huge price from us all.

Ever wonder why Allah SWT says in Quran 3:110, "You are the best community raised up for [the benefit of] humanity; you enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong and believe in Allah." Allah SWT emphasizes that the community must actively work together to establish moral and social justice. Islam drives us to be a collective, righteous community (the Ummah) built on mutual responsibility, social justice, and the active betterment of society. Unlike some other religions Islam is not about worship and meditation alone in solitude to grow you spiritually and make you an ascetic monk. Elsewhere Allah SWT instructs us not to forget joyful participation in this world when He commands in Quran 28:77, “Seek the (reward) of the Hereafter by means of what Allah has granted you, without forgetting your share of this world. And be good (to others) as Allah has been good to you. Do not seek to spread corruption in the land, for Allah certainly does not like the corruptors.” Hence Allah wants us to enjoy the worldly life while making sure that we become agents of good for everyone. We are not only forbidden to spread evil and corruption in the world but elsewhere we are explicitly ordered to stop them whenever we confront evil and corruption. Hence Islam commands us to make this world a better place for everyone to help secure a heavenly hereafter for ourselves.

When Allah SWT asks us to say in Q1:5 “You alone we worship and you alone we ask for help” and follows that up with stating that “I respond to invocation of the supplicant when he calls upon me” there is no room left for intermediation of any kind. That is the reason during the life of the Prophet SAWS and his companions every effort was made to show that humans have direct access to their Creator. There was no act of worship nor religious ritual or ceremony that required a priest to officiate. Anyone one can perform Salah by oneself and anyone who has the ability can lead a prayer as an imam in the local masjid. Muslims do not need a priest to keep fasting in Ramadan or pay Zakat or complete the pilgrimage of Hajj. A father should be able to perform the Nikah of his daughter and a son should be able to read the Janaza prayer for a parent. However the human tendency is to exploit other human beings and that crept into Muslim community gradually over time and we started having professional imams, scholars and pirs. We have become too lazy to study Islam and depend entirely on these people to tell us what to do in small recipes and formulae. Allah SWT warned against this very thing in Q9:34 "O you who have believed! Indeed, many of the scholars and the monks devour the wealth of people unjustly and avert [them] from the way of Allah..." I don’t know how we can dare to be rebellious in face of such direct warning from Allah SWT.

Historical facts and stories are incorporated in the Quran frequently not for story telling but to deduce moral and ethical lessons from it. Historical incidents from thousands of years ago to some as recent as a year before the Prophet Muhammad SAWS was born is included in Quran to help us distinguish good from bad. This moral clarity seems to be compromised in some critical events in Muslim history. We started interpreting history from a sectarian, national or racial perspective. The result is we have history interspersed with moral ambiguity from which only moral confusion and ethical dilution can be deduced. When an event as significant as massacre of the entire family of the Prophet’s (SAWS) grandson is treated with ambivalence because of sectarian inclinations it does a great disservice to the message of Quran as a Furqan (distinguisher between right and wrong). When a Caliph sanctioned Mihna persecuted the scholars for believing one way or the other they violated the rule of “no compulsion in religion”, it should not be handled with kids gloves. When the entire family and friends of the rulers get massacred, it should be condemned unambiguously. If the response is that history is always written by the victors, then we have failed to understand the message of Islam which came to challenge such entrenched unjust assumptions. It is high time we start learning from well informed history without ambiguity by applying the Furqan (criterion).