@Halaine, you mistook me and mistook me more than once but I equally blame myself for talking too much and drawing analogies where it might not be obvious. Yet let me talk too much again with the expressed intention of clarifying the one thing quoted below:
I believe I’ve intentionally and repeatedly modified the noun ‘Muslim’ with the adjective ‘honest’. This was with reference to ISIS causing unavoidable cognitive disequilibrium to them in particular. Honesty here requires not passive Islamic consciousness but active conscientiousness in which every Muslim is necessarily practising; and practising is fostered by deeper
Islamic knowledge often gained by the individual informally and through their own initiative. So an honest Muslim who is also conscientiously seeking Islamic knowledge could be safely excluded from those who pick and choose their Islam and preachers according to their taste or those 'average Muslims' whom a fair minded person can workout an 'average' from.
Thus another connected and interesting phenomenon rears its head. That is, the so-called ‘non-practising Muslim’ as a concept could hardly be anything but an importation into Islam from other traditions which might not require the fullest commitment of its subscriber so long as the subscriber theoretically agrees with them. If I may draw an analogy here, I’d say the concept of ‘lapsed Catholic’ is canonically apt (incidentally, when native speakers of English say about someone that they have “catholic tastes”, they mean having a variety of interests and not just one thing to which they give their full attention, and this could be an etymological wink at its origin in Late Latin and from Greek
katholikos ‘general, universal’).
Unlike both
Imaan and
Ihsan, Islam is quintessentially demonstrable even without comparing it with the other two individual 'states of the heart'. You must ‘do’ Islam and let it be known about you doing it to be a Muslim; you publicly declare the shahada unless you’re fearful for your life (this is why new Muslims do their declarations in public in mosques after well-attended prayers) ; you must ‘do’ your prayer to remain a Muslim; you must ‘do’ your Zakat when applicable to you; you must ‘fast’ Ramadan; you must ‘go’ on Hajj. All these are acts of worship which are sine qua non within the earliest, authentic understanding of Islam shed some explanatory darkness on why some people were told off for claiming
Imaan before they've performed demonstrable Islam in Surat al hujurat [49:14]. Islam cannot be un-practised by a Muslim and you cannot hide your Islam from others without a compelling reason.
((( I’m aware of the absence of jurisprudential consensus regarding the certainty of the disbelief of any Muslim through their omission of fasting & ‘doing’ Hajj but I believe the traditional point I’m making still stands. I’m also aware that the Murjites believe you can be a Muslim without ever needing to practise it as they focus on
Imaan being a testimony rather than an action — aware also that the late Salafi muhadith, Nasiruddin al-Albani too was of the opinion that you can still be a Muslim even if you completely stopped praying, but this view isn’t widely held.)))
Therefore, I assert that those Muslims for whom Islam isn’t an everyday lived reality (as mentioned in [6:162]) are not very many, especially past teenage and as people get on in years. They are not very many because it is not consistent to put up with the physically tasking prayer and fasting, financially tasking Zakat and doubly tasking Hajj. This is with conclusive reference to the five pillars, without any dietary and sexual limitations Islam places on its subscriber.
I know about people wishing there to be Allah or a god, Halaine, and not very long ago have leafed through
The Future of an Illusion by the Viennese quack but it is experientially hard to deny that this wishful Allah is a "god of the gaps" particularly when a worshiper experiences bereavement or illness or any incurable hardship from which they seek solace/salvation.
People grow acute islamic conscience, become more active participants in it and become stricter adherent to their Islam for a variety of reasons and at various stages of their lives to often cope with different life experiences and emotions. And I do not disagree with what sociologists say about women, on humanity level, being more prone to be religious because they have more injustices to cope with, and equally they, as a kind, are less likely to commit suicide. But I'm interested in what could happen to any passive Muslim suddenly becoming 'very practising' in what they wear, how they conduct themselves socially and more importantly, in the all seeing voyeuristic eye of Allah.
In my experience, it is these Muslims if they were honest and have become thorough in finding out what Allah traditionally wants — through his book and prophet — that either end up becoming murtadoon or Jihadi Johns (I appreciate the irony of the former becoming the very opposite of what they'd really and earnestly wanted to achieve and I also appreciate that through their acute Imaan that 'significant minority' can be said about Islamist extremists). I'm sorry to agree in this regard with the view that any Muslim anywhere in the world might be susceptible to becoming an extremist once they sought more based on knowledge, more authentic and earnest form of Islam on the way and guidance of the Salaf. Again, I really hope that I'm laughably wrong in all this.
I actually find that the average muslims are not really bothered by what ISIS does. ISIS is far away from the reality that they live in, they don't think it's Islamic. Their average muslim community doesn't act like ISIS.
They just dismiss ISIS as being non-islamic after listening to some preacher they heard somewhere.
I don't think ISIS is effective at being "necessary evil" as you said.
Topic: Can Islam be Reformed?