People say: Don’t look at the Muslims because they are imperfect but look at Islam because it is a perfect system.
If we accept this, we will merely have another ‘ism’, another type of idealism whose inevitable result is nihilism.
Rather, Islam is a means giving a person direct unequivocal access to his Lord, speaking to Him in prayer and He speaking to him in the Qur’an. The one who brought that means in this age is Muhammad, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. And this has stages and degrees although it is not something only open to an élite.
Whenever you meet people who live by Islam in order to keep the door of communication with their Lord open, there you have met Muslims in reality as well as in name. The existence of even a few such people is astonishing but the huge numbers of such men and women among the Muslims is something inconceivable to most people in this age.
Once we start calling Islam “a system” we are thinking of it as yet another human-concocted ideology. Islam is NOT an ideology, it is an understanding life based on the premise and realisation that there is one creator and sustainer who created for a purpose, as revealed in The Holy Qur’an, the life example of Prophet Muhammad and the earlier prophets, and then living to the best of our abilities according to that understanding.
Most people use the word system for Islam uncritically as a set of inter-related ideas and actions, they know no better.
How does idealism inevitably lead to nihilism? Is it because there are internal contradictions in the ideas leading to a type of ‘take anything’ attitude?
Idealism proclaims that something that does not exist ‘ought’ to exist. Our starting point, on the contrary, is that whatever does exist has been decreed and is divinely destined. That does not mean that we are fatalists, but it is the foundation for our acting. In all of the bewildering plethora of good and bad things that do exist, we connect to the best and forswear the worst. We invite to the best and warn against the worst.