To say Salat, to keep Roza, to respect Holy Quran, to consider Hazrat Muhammad () the last Prophet of Allah and to act upon His Sunnah are our religious values.
Everywhere you look, it seems, signs of the decline in moral values are in evidence. It’s visible in a rampant narcissism, sense of entitlement and generalized contempt exercised by some factions of society. It’s recognized in the breakdown of the family structure. It’s acknowledged in the depersonalization wrought by social media that activates and reinforces both unchecked hubris and an utter absence of accountability.
One constant that we see in most every Western society whose morality has decayed from within is a rejection of spirituality and a concurrent decline in religious faith—a creeping secularism that even now washes over the United States in particular, like a flash flood over a parched landscape.
But is that merely a coincidence? Maybe. Then again, maybe not.
Religion is acknowledged as the glue that binds a culture—or series of smaller cultures—together. It’s the theological port in the storm, a place to remain grounded during times of crisis and strife. Its absence is thought to leave a nation adrift like a rudderless sailboat, like a backpacker who misplaced his compass and now aimlessly wanders.
And yet it’s become not only permissible to flagrantly mock religion in America today, but cool. From Bill Maher to Jon Stewart, South Park to Family Guy, irreverent impiety is all over television. They assure everyone from Catholics to Lutherans, Hindus to Muslims, Jews to Presbyterians, and Mormons to Scientologists that their system of belief is quite literally a joke.
If that doesn’t bother us just a little bit, perhaps it should.
I say this as someone who has not always been the most devout of human beings. In fact, at many points in my adult life, in part because of my calling as a skeptical journalist, nearly the opposite has been true. I have regularly questioned the existence of God, struggling to imagine what Supreme Being would see fit to wipe out 6 million Jews during the Holocaust, permit the rise of AIDS and Ebola, allow young children to waste away from cancer or be gunned down in a Connecticut classroom by a firearm-wielding madman.
This is, of course, to say nothing of the justifications of extremists who are able to validate the perpetration of stunning evil as a purposeful misinterpretation of their religious doctrine. I’m talking about terrorists who hijack and crash passenger jetliners into buildings in the name of striking back at so-called infidels (i.e., those who conduct their lives in ways they consider aberrant and disrespectful to their faith).