FarQuest Fariha's Quest: Finding an answer to the question "Why can’t Utopia be a reality?" Wish to add some colors of Utopia to this world because I dare to dream and strive to turn my dreams into reality!

Few years back in one of the social sciences class, our instructor asked us “Are you Fundamentalists?” Our instant reply was “No, Sir…no way”. Then he asked, “Do you believe that the Holy Quran is meant for all times and for all kinds of environments?” This time our instant reply was “Yes, Sir…Alhamdulilah being Muslims we do believe in this fact.” On that he showed us an excerpt from a book on sociology and the excerpt was as following:

In “Popular Conceptions of Fundamentalism”, anthropologist Lionel Caplan (1987) offers his readers one of the clearest overviews of a complex religious phenomenon – fundamentalism, a belief in the timeless nature of sacred writings and a belief that such writings apply to all kinds of environments”

After reading this from a book which was quite an authentic one and knowing that our instructor always checks the veracity of all the information he shares with us, all we could do was to say “Yes” when he asked his first question again.

Btw.. I would also like to ask the same question from all the readers of this post “ Are you a fundamentalist?”

Most of us believe that everyone needs to modernize in order to cope up with the dynamics of this world. We feel that its ok to change ourselves with changing times as long as we don’t compromise on our religious principles and so Mush came up with the concept of Enlightened Moderation. A huge number of Pakistanis except religious fanatics welcomed this notion since it seemed to lead to a neutral path…“deen aur duniya saath saath” I also supported it up until I began to formally study what “Enligtenment” is. Enlightenment in its real sense is an effort to humanize religion. Mr. M. J. Inwoods explains the leading doctrines of Enlightenment as shared by most of the spokesmen in the Oxford Companion (1995,236) and one of those doctrines goes on as ‘ Beliefs are accepted only on the basis of reason, not on the authority of priests, sacred texts or tradition. Thus Enlightenment thinkers tended to atheism, or at most to a purely natural deism, shorn of supernatural and miraculous elements and designed primarily to support an enlightened moral code and in some cases to account for the faith that the universe is a rational system wholly accessible to human reason.” This very clearly shows that Enlightenment leads to the replacement of religion by reason and rationality.

In order to modernize Pakistan, Mush also wanted to have this sort of "Enligtenment" but since it was too difficult to openly reject the supremacy of religion so he came up with a desi version of it giving it the name of "Enlightened Moderation". It is just a softer image of the original concept so we shouldn’t fall in the trap because initially this desi version may seem to be tolerant towards Islam but would ultimately lead to the rejection of it. In fact, even now we can see the repercussions all around in the form of the amendments being made to the curriculum and the demolition of Mosques in Islamabad which are just a few examples.