The post of El Azhar is stating that Hijab is not an obligation has been circling a lot on lately and although it's clearly FAKE news, It surely took a whole lot of attention. Which brings me to question the nature of interactions between modern ideologies and Islam.
As a start let's go with the George Orwell's style, and use veganism as a metaphor for other ideas such as liberalism, feminism, etc. (Credit goes to Sh. Yasir Qadhi for the next examples with little tweaks)
Picture a country called "United Lands of Veganopolis" where everyone is vegan. In fact, they consider being vegan as civilized and modern, and eating meat ending possible months/years of good healthy life for a little pleasure of food as barbaric and backwards, and divide the world into first world, second world, and third world countries accordingly.
Now imagine that some Muslims are born to families from the so-called "Third World countries" but they are all raised in Veganopolis, where they interact with both Islam and veganism. Let's analyze their reaction to this clash.
First, we have the Murtads, the Apostates. Generally, they didn't have as many friends in the Islamic community or a connection with Islam, and Their thought process goes something like this:
"How can Islam be true if it allows eating meat?"
"How can a real Prophet eat meat?"
"Islam was made by Mohammed so that he can eat meat"
"The Quran says that you can eat cattle and you have a whole holiday about eating meat"
So they leave Islam.The next group of people is the progressives. According to them, Veganism is the right way and Islam's long term goal was to put an end to meat eating, which literally has no Islamic precedent. According to them, the last 1400 years of Islamic Scholars had it wrong because they had a meat-eating bias, and suddenly THEY come out of nowhere, claiming to know what no one before them did. So these progressives come up with a whole new radical reinterpretation.
"The Quran stops you from eating as much meat as possible. Look at all the meat banned. Pork is banned etc, and the rest of eating meat is limited"
"I'm gonna reject most of these Hadiths because they come 300 years later. However, there are 1 or 2 Hadiths that agree with me, so I'll take them as authentic. And one of them says that The Prophet went months without cooking a fire. So that means it's Sunnah to be vegan"
"Islam needs to have a reform, to make it with veganism"The Traditional Conservative. These are the people who, according to them, Islam is the way their parents followed it. And so they get offended about their meat, because that is the issue being brought up, the one with all of the focus. The Problem with this is that they get so extreme that meat becomes a source of theological deviation. You will see different Masjid popping up with different meat styles. h different meat styles. You will see Biryani Masjids, Lamb Kabob Masjids, Shawarma Masjids.
Now to break this into the most basic simplified version, what decides which group a person would choose to belong to is how he sees religion and morality.
Whether religion came to serve morality "إنما بعثت لأتمم مكارم الأخلاق"
or whether religion and morality should be the two definitions for the same concept (Halal and Haram are the only measure of morality for 3rd group)
and rejecting religion for disagreeing with "modern" moral values (first group)
For my personal POV I disagree with the 3 examples of Sh. Yasir Qadhi, for the first takes the present morality for granted while history have always proved us wrong (let's take slavery that was okay at some part of history and now we all discriminate it we even see those who call it a "forgotten Sunnah" criminals that should be jailed just for promoting such ideas. Same with women who at some point of history were debating if they should be considered independent humans, and who knows now we're actively debating veganism, and in the near future maybe we'll be debating whether is it morally okay for us to let animals suffer in nature.
For the second I disagree with the way progressives work, Truth should be respected, and the measure of credibility of a story shouldn't be whether it is compatible with a group of moral values.
For the third I believe morality is a concept that exists and existed independently from religion, so it's pointless to think that any religion's view on it is the only measure of it. and I think I don't have to say that we shouldn't go extreme with rejecting "modern morality" to the point where we see our identity in that.
Of course disagreeing with all doesn't mean that we should let ourselves sink in relative laziness, "like I don't know man I don't agree or disagree everyone is free and it's always a personal choice", No! If there's anything special about truth, that would be that it is one! and that two contradicted truths can't logically be. thus we should continuously aim for truth and have an opinion on every essential issue within our society.
So let's go back to our first story, I think this fake news took a lot of attention because of it symbolises the struggle of women against all shapes of sexism, and discrimination and violence. A struggle that we should all be part of. For one day where the amount of liberties we get wouldn't be influenced by the type of our genitals.
