I doubt Libya is worse than Syria. In syria you really don't want to have a trouble with police and moukhabarat.. Sometimes some criminals or anti-government might not see the sun for life as a punishment..
Oh believe me its just as bad, half the population function as informants to the moukhabarat here, people don't even trust their brothers, nobody ever dares to talk about the government. In fact, i've never heard anyone say a word against the government ever when i was in Libya. In one of the UN's reports on free speech, we were ranked before last, only North Korea was worse than us.
ok less than about 30 minutes
. As I said is a hard question.. Im unsure where I stand in that question, where do you live? I live in sweden and here it's not many young muslims who prays. Do you pray?
I live in the UAE, while i might not be always punctual with the prayers, generally i try not to miss any.
There's no middle ground for me here. You're either a Muslim, practicing Islam, going through its instructions and teachings or you are not. As simple as that. Religions inherently aren't different from each other. The basics are the same but practices are different. When you stop practicing Islam and Qoran's instructions, there's nothing left for you except for a label: Muslim, as someone who has been born to Muslim parents. Someone who would have been a Christian/Jew/Buddhist/Zarathustrian/etc if he had been born in another place to another parents.
Why one considers himself a Muslim? What are his beliefs? That Muhammad was the God's (a supernatural force) messenger and Qoran was his book? So if you really believe in a supernatural force and you also believe that he sent Muhammad to people, descending Qoran upon him, isn't it a bit odd that you're still not practicing what a supernatural being has ordered you through a man and a book? One must be shitting in his pants believing that a supernatural omnipotent force has ordered him to do prayers, to fast, etc yet he refrains from doing that.
The time you stop practicing Islam, you quit it.
Its not just black and white. People are faithful with varying extents, not everybody is the same. People who don't practice yet still consider themselves muslims and believe in everything Islam said are still muslims, but they are muslims with weak faith.
I remember reading a Hadith about calling someone a kafir or a non muslim. I can't remember the exact words of the hadith, but the general meaning was that we as muslims should not call anyone a non muslim if he says that he believes in Islam, no matter what you see him doing(or not doing).
So what do you exactly want here? What are you proud of? The number of people who only consider themselves Muslims without practicing it?
I'm not proud of anything at all, on the complete contrary i'm bemoaning the state of current muslims.
This just illustrates the vagueness of religion. These people do not actually believe in this stuff. If they did, like Hoori said, if they were actually living in fear of punishment from god, they would damn right follow his stupid rules, just to get him off his back. But they don't. They say they do, but their behavior doesn't reflect their supposed beliefs. The beliefs are for show.
And this applies to at least half of all religious people in the world. They identify themselves with the belief, they say they belong to the religion, they tell themselves this, but in actual fact they don't actually have the behavior that reflects the belief. Which means that if it wasn't for social pressures they'd easily toss it.
You can't judge people like that. A lot of my friends do not pray and do not practice most of Islams teachings, but i'm pretty sure they still believe in Islam. They "know" that they're wrong in not praying, they just slack off.
Its like when someone commits a crime, he knows he's going to be apprehended and punished for it, but sometimes he does it anyway. Not because he doesn't believe he won't be punished.
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