The ISMs trap-Workshop review

 

People who have read any of my blogs earlier, should know that amongst people who inspire me the most, one is Hamza Andreas Tzortzis. I have been counting on days for him to arrive from United Kingdom and deliver lectures in Pakistan. He had come a few months earlier but I couldn’t attend any of his events due to some reasons. I did not know that he would be returning in such a short span of time until I found one of the posts on a WhatsApp Group-Live deen- mentioning about his workshops in Karachi.

 Alhumdulillah, I got the opportunity to attend one of his initial events on Sunday, 3^rd September.

The event was held at Bahria Auditorium, Karsaz. It was a half-day workshop designed to identify the prevalent ISMs-Feminism, Atheism, Liberalism, LGBT-Q+ ideology-, bring to notice the underlying fallacies in them and equip ourselves against their perils, giving the workshop its name "The ISMs trap”

Atheism, which was discussed in the most detail and marked the beginning of the event, was described by Hamza Tzortzis as ‘a deviating path’. He did not only mean this ideologically but linguistically too, since Atheism stems from the root word ‘Lahad’. Explaining Atheism as an ideology, the speaker chose the Richard Dawkin’s, an outspoken atheist, version of definition which is as follows: There is nothing outside the physical world.

This type of Atheism is also known as philosophical naturalism or metaphysical naturalism.

Underpinning this ideology are three assumptions:

1.     A belief that there are no Gods or a God

2.     There is no supernatural

3.     All phenomena can be explained in a reductive or non-reductive way.

The implications of these beliefs are that it detaches any value from a human being, meaning the killing of a snowman is tantamount to the killing of a breathing, thinking, thoughtful and a conscious human being. Secondly, it thwarts its followers from accomplishing an explanation of any objectivity with moral values.

Now, you may think, what is the scale of objectivity, or, in other words, what determines if objectivity has been achieved. The Greek scholar taught a marker for this: Objectivity means that it is mind-independent, hence even if everybody on the earth claims for an ‘objectively’ wrong thing to be right, it will still be wrong.

To debunk this argument, Hamza Tzortzis, stressed on the fact that the best arguments are from Quran only. He then imparted to the audience, the application of one of the strongest arguments of Quran in chapter 52, verse 35.

This ayah offers three questions:

1.     Did they come from nothing

2.     Were they the creator of themselves

3.     Did they create the heavens and earth

These three questions are the only possibilities of understanding universe for a person who does not believe in Allah as the God. When these assumptions are refuted, the existence of Allah, his oneness and his qualities all will eventually be clear.

The third question invites us to think about the possibility of whether a created thing can create itself or not. Illustrating it with the same as example as speaker, when you look at a rock, do you think that it can create another thing?

The answer in all cases is no. Since the rock is limited, meaning, it cannot give rise to itself from its own physical qualities. How is it then supposed to create anything else?

conclusively, a created thing cannot create another thing. 

Coming to the first question-did they come from nothing-. This is easily refutable since 0+0=0. He then mentioned a common response that atheist resort to, in reply to this, is that: if something cannot come from nothing, how did universe ,then, come into existence'. This is answered by the idea that by nothing, we mean absolutely nothing, but when Allah created the universe, He was present, which means that his will and power were also present, no longer making it a situation of nothingness.

The second argument-Were they the creator of themselves- which is easily deniable by the mere question” can a mother give birth to herself. Meaning for an atheist to consider this as truth, he should first ask his mother to exist and not exist at the same time.

As we reach here, it can be concluded that an uncreated creator, who is one and all powerful, created the universe.

There was an ample number of intriguing concepts that Hamza Tzortzis explained such as the absurdity of infinite regress, Al-Ghazali’s theory of conceptualization and Shah Waliullah's way of dealing with Plato’s dilemma. All of these topics need separate blogs to be dedicated to them, hence for atheism we shall stop here.

The next session which was majorly dedicated to Liberalism and partly to LGBTQ+ ideology began with the description of liberalism-we shall only be discussing Liberalism.

Liberalism, essentially means dealing with the primacy of individuals. It is an approach to the human being that sees it as an abstract entity devoid of any social obligations.

Tracing its roots into Hedonism, Liberalism is a form of shirk according to the speaker, since it consists of making your desires-in particular blameworthy desires- your lord.

One argument, that liberalists are most likely to resort to are the trap of universal rights. Meaning, liberals try to convince people of the universal human rights as the objective way of determining human rights.

This results in two ontological values that liberals cannot answer:

1)    Where do moral values come from

2)    Why are they mind-independent

In our perspective, moral values come from Allah and they are objective since Allah s the only who is not a part of the creation. For our moral values, we believe in the divine command theory to dictate us good and bad.

But for liberals who argue that the innate idea of good and bad is objectively driven because people sat together and decided them, our answer would be that over the years conceptions of good and evil have changed with regards to social pressures and ideological constructs. Hence, the result of a group sitting together to work out moral values is not consistent throughout different eras and epochs.

Other possible arguments by liberals consist of them saying that moral values are moral because they are a result of the biological design of species. This necessitates the confession that moral values develop as a result of physical processes, so why do some animals behave in immoral ways?  Individualists may also propose that it is due to secular moral realism meaning that moral values are moral because they just are. Really? Then Islam is also true because it just is!

Other liberalists stick to the idea of consequentialism-Consequences of a thing determining if it is good or bad. But the questions are, do human beings really have the ability to predict the full consequences of everything and what determines if the consequence is good or bad?

In Muslims’ akhirah-centric perspective, the full consequences of anything shall only be known on the day of judgement.

The last 23 minutes of the session were dedicated to LGBT-Q+ ideology. Hamza Tzortzis believed in the fact that Islam is truthful enough for us to even dedicate 20 minutes to something as absurd and imprudent as the LGBTQ+. Therefore, I shall not contaminate this blog with its mention but I sure will unpack this, according to Hamza Tzortzis’s methodology, in some other piece of writing

The workshop ended with some 80 questions collected for the speaker, but due to lack of time only 12 could be covered.

It was one of the greatest learning experiences that I have ever had and I am so grateful to Allah for having met this opportunity.

May Allah make me implement all the good that I have learned and protects me from all the evil that I have been forbidden from.

And like Hamza Tzortzis ended the session, I shall end this blog:

I am sorry for my shortcomings, indeed everything that was bad and evil came from my nafs and Shaitan, and everything that was good came from Allah.