The Vanguards of Knowledge?

www.pakpositive.com Life constantly confronts us with that unwritten rule �the end justifies the means�.

�The senior management at the bank will push juniors around. It is not merit that will qualify for scholarship but your relation to government bureaucrats and political families. Study abroad; that is a wise career move to achieve your success milestones of life�Maintain your social connections at all costs� All corporate and governance strategies gear towards the profitable use of human psychology� etc. etc.�

�And lean on religion only for �milestones� as birth, death and marriage.

That is life as we experience it.

��Religion is for the pious and upright�irritating self-righteousness at times...Just be a good person and that�s it!�

So where does centuries of religious scholarship, and centuries of questioning and search for knowledge, fit in? Does Islam as a way of life have a meaningful role to play?

�Is what the Quran says really true?�

�Is there any Muslim country that follows Islam truly, and upholds its principles and values?�

�I will not learn Islam from any Maulvi. What does he know?�

�Normally the cognitive elite in society is the vanguard of knowledge. The elite in the Muslim world, and certainly if you look around in Pakistan consider many things beautiful. Those who have been endowed with the means to travel [in the Muslim elite] do not travel mostly to Tashkent and Bukhara, they go to Paris and London. They find glittery sky scrapers and subways the symbols of progress, pleasing and beautiful. It ranges from the dress, to Western attitudes, music and what have you. If you talk to the elite seldom will they have gone to the Seckler Gallery of Art or the Smithsonian; Herschel Museum, which have a large collection of Islamic arts and artifacts. That�s the state of the elite.�

�The elite in our country - they are amongst the most ignorant group of people on the face of this earth. Not only are these people ignorant about their own country, about their own history, about their own religion, they are ignorant even about that other place which they think is the ideal.� mullah hate www.pakpositive.com