Good Concept - Bad Implementation

Here is the question: Can a principle or concept be brilliant, but its implementation flawed?  The general answer is: Yes.

We come across many examples in our day to day life of this duality.  Many people try cookbook recipes for baking a cake.  Not everyone's cake comes out perfect.  Let's take it a step further: let's assume some people never read the recipe but look at the picture of the cake in the cookbook and try to bake it.  Of course, when the cake is completely screwed up they can't blame the cookbook.

Let's take another everyday example.  Many people show up for a written driving exam without having read the driver's handbook published by the government.  They may pretend that by observing traffic on the street they have learnt enough about the rules of the game.  Once again, they can't claim that the written exam is faulty, or worse that the handbook - which they never really read - is wrong.

I could go on with other examples, but perhaps you catch my drift.

The Islamic society today is also a very good example of people who haven't read the instruction manual but blame Islam as being backwards, or extremist or close-minded, or archaic (there is a wide choice of titles commonly peddled these days).  Worse still, many blame the Quran as also being out of date or simply irrelevant.

There is a double-whammy hidden in this.  On the one hand, these "enlightened" folks have not bothered to read the instruction manual that was provided as a timeless moral GPS unit; their understanding of what is in the Quran is second-hand or often based on popular media's depiction.  On the other hand, this blame game takes them farther and farther away from the actual solution - that is, understanding how this moral GPS works and actually putting it to use.

The simple fact is that human interactions and societal linkages do not change substantively over time - these interactions are the major subject of the Quran, which provides fairly explicit guidance on how to manage these.  The key approaches outlined therein can be better understood if we reflect on the truism that history repeats - it is as applicable today as it was five or ten centuries ago and therefore Quran's finding are no less contemporary today than they were originally.  Nations and countries prosper, gain power, abuse power, fall into degradation and whither with quite predictable patterns.  The qualities that lead nations to the rising part of this bell-curve are also common: honesty, openness, innovation, hard-work, dedication to a cause, fiscal prudence and having internal peace (for those of you who read my earlier blog "Who is an Ideal Muslim?", this may sound familiar).

The Islamic countries - 56 the last time I was counting - can also prosper if they also adopt these qualities.  The irony is that all these instructions are already there in moral GPS and its at our fingertips.  But we have blind-folded ourselves and let half-literate mullahs define and interpret the Quran for us.  Certainly a bad choice.  The current situation of depravity, impoverishness and utter chaos in the Islamic world can only turn around when our thinking about the Quran will change.  Secondary impacts, like democracy, rule of law, basic justice and economic prosperity, can only take hold when the fundamentals of society are sound.