Dr. Hossam Badrawi Official Website
The four of us had a strange meeting and decided to open an unconventional dialogue.
I said: Come on, let each of us put a challenge in front of the others. We usually avoid confronting it for fear of embarrassing each other.
My secular friend said: Before setting challenges, let us agree on why we are friends, and what is the bond that unites us as we live in different countries and with different backgrounds.
I said: Perhaps because we belong culturally to a group of similar values. I see in you honesty, sobriety, respect for the differences between us, openness of heart, and cultural depth.
My Christian friend said: I add to you that you, and I with you, have a great deal of courage in expressing opinion, integrity, and responsibility.
The Jewish friend said: Let me add that we all come from respected scientific backgrounds, and we know the value of friendship and we seek to support it between us.
Our secular friend said: The most important thing that unites us is our use of reason and logic in our discussions, and your keenness to raise this above habits, penetrating the walls of beliefs with science and knowledge.
We all agreed on what we had in common, which encouraged us to engage in unabashed dialogue about our religious differences.
The Jewish friend said: I will start as I belong to a numerical minority among the world’s population. Our number in the world is no more than 18 million people, and the number of atheists is about one billion, Muslims are more than one and a half billion people, and Christians are a majority of nearly 2 billion people.
The Christian friend commented: I mean, we all belong to one another, we belong to only half of humanity, and there are about three and a half billion people who do not belong to our religious groups.
I smiled and said, directing my talk to our Jewish friend: Let it begin, you numerical minority and the influential majority in the financial markets, the markets for jewels, diamonds, sin and weapons.
He said: We are distinguished over you that we are the chosen people of God, and we raise ourselves above you that we are the only religion that did not spread with wars, invasion, killing, captivity and forcing peoples to your type of faith. In fact, we do not want to spread mainly, but rather strive for purity of race and non-mixing. In addition, even our Prophet Moses, when the Torah was revealed to him, did not invite the Egyptians to it, not even Pharaoh, for he only wanted a people to leave the country. I mean, he wanted an exit visa, which he was not allowed to, so he fled.
He was the owner of miracles, and he is the only human being to whom God spoke directly.
So we, the Jews, are the first written books, and Christ is one of us, and the Qur’an contains more about Moses and the Children of Israel than any other prophet.
I said: What do you mean?
He said: Moses is mentioned in the Qur’an 136 times.
I mean any part of the Qur’an..Mostly it contains the name of Moses 4-5 times…
The story of Moses was told in the Qur’an 10 or more times in different ways, with different passages, and from different angles.
As for the Bible, it is a development and modernization of the Torah, and we do not consider it a separate book.
The Christian friend said: You are inside us rigid, and you forget that the Jews disbelieved in Christ, peace be upon him, and disbelieved in him and defamed him, and they were the cause of solidity.
I said: We will return to you, troublemaker. Throughout history, the Jews have been the cause of mankind’s problems with all the peoples of the earth, with Jesus, Muhammad and those who believed in them.
And I added: Islam came confirming what the messengers came before it, and we enjoy this tolerance and acceptance of all the prophets, even though you deny the message of Muhammad, peace be upon him. Even my atheist friend, the Qur’an says about it: Whoever wills, let him believe, and whoever wills, let him disbelieve.
We recognize everyone, and you do not recognize us..so Islam is more tolerant.
I add that Islam and the Qur’an are a complete religion, in this world and in the hereafter, and its teachings have included all aspects of life. It is the religion with which God completed His message to mankind and completed the messages of all the prophets. We consider everyone who believes in God, His Oneness, and adheres to noble morals, as a Muslim.
The Christian friend said: The Lord Jesus Christ saved humanity, lifted its sin, and brought a prophet like no other with miracles that humans did not know before him from a virgin mother, and he commanded us to be tolerant, fraternal, pardon and chivalrous. All the commands of Christianity came for the benefit of humanity… Does the fact that there are more Christians in the world than all other religions tell you that the message of God is spreading and is still spreading?
The secular friend said: For the record, I am a secular Muslim and there are secular Christians and Jews. Not every secular person is an atheist, according to what you say.. A secular person may believe in God, but he also believes in using reason and science, which is the line between philosophy and faith.
The definition of faith is believing in what has no proof
And the secular is looking for rational proof.
Philosophers like Ibn Rushd say that reason is the path of faith
I said: Bring what you have
He said:
I am not afraid to tell you that we are better than all the adherents of religions who follow me blindly.
I said how, philosopher?
He said: I, and I am talking about a large segment of those who do not belong to any religion or who use the mind who belong, have reached a set of respectable human values that may agree with all the content of religions and their true message without a list (menus) placed and specified from heaven. We do this not out of fear of punishment or out of desire for reward, but because that is what is best for humanity. Values such as honesty, credibility, honesty, and not harming others, and others, which came in the Ten Commandments in the Torah, and what Christ said and what I understand from what came in the Qur’an.
You, the owners of the heavenly religions, differ, fight and fight through the ages, even though the heart of religions does not contain killing, theft, or captivity of women. Throughout history, religion was used to rule and control, and all of you are between you and some hypocrites, you say what you do not do, and you use your religions to terrorize, intimidate and control humanity without logic or reason. ..
The revolutions of the Enlightenment in the Middle Ages were to get out of the oppression and darkness of the Church. And what I see today of glimpses that wish to enlighten Muslims, stand before them fanatical sheikhs who extract from religion killing, injustice and imposing opinion on others.. Muslims live the same dark ages with their ISIS and their brothers, and their offshoots of the Taliban and Boko Haram that terrorize the world, especially moderate Muslims among them, to be duplicate copies Societies that lived thousands of years ago, had neither knowledge nor knowledge today. They want and are convinced that a billion and a half Muslims are the only people of the paradise of bliss after death, and that all those who are not in their likeness and beliefs will be roasted in the fire of Hell and must be flogged in this world.
Christians throughout history also, despite the tolerance of their religion, carried out oppression, murder and Crusades, and even the Church controlled and ruled in the name of religion until the peoples separated religion from the state.
As for our Jewish friends, they do not stop harming humanity, and what they are doing in the name of religion in Palestine goes beyond the laws of the jungle, to the lowest definitions of racism under an illusory philosophy about the promised land of God who only recognizes the children of Israel and speaks with them alone under the illusion of God’s chosen people..
Read your books with reason and with knowledge of the day without extremism and fanaticism, you will find the truth, that noble morals are a choice and not an obligation, and that you will not steal, you will not commit adultery, you will not lie, because this is what a person should be, not for fear of punishment or desire for reward..
Tolerance and pardon when capable, and belief in freedom require our minds and consciences and the accumulation of wisdom of generations.
Then he added: I have an atheist friend who says to me
He, after knowing by science that all matter is nothing but energy, and that the basic structure of the universe is one which is what is called the quark, changed his concept and admitted to himself that there must be a cause for all of this with this genius.
As for me, I just do not believe those who claim to belong to a religion and fight others who belong to the same machine just because of the difference in rituals and the name of the religion.
I said: Islam is a comprehensive and complete religion, and its miracle is the word, and I began calling it with the word read.
The use of reason and understanding is the essence of Islam
Creation and the universe are the miracle, and we humans are the greatest miracle, and if God wants to show us His miracles, it is enough for us to look around and inside us.
I remind my secular friend that belief in God’s justice after death, judgment and reward, are all matters of faith that go beyond the limits of reason, but are important for man to live in a world full of evils in peace.
Likewise, reason alone may not suffice, and a person must sometimes consult his heart and conscience regarding matters presented to him or in the interpretation of what is said to him.
As a Muslim and you are the followers of other monotheistic religions and all of humanity is before us a challenge to live happily in peace and love, and to save our planet from our evils.
The tragedy is that all our disagreements are about wealth, power and control and are challenges of our own invention.
Wake up from the discussion in the past and let’s think about the future
