Comment: ‘All religions guide to the path of God’
14 Nov 2011, 4:40 PM
Azim Zahir
Like all Maldivians, I have always known that former president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom articulated an Islam that he calls a ‘meduminuge’ (moderate) religion, or in Quranic terminology a religion of wasatiyyah. But until recently, when I immersed myself in Gayoom’s speeches and books for my Master’s thesis, I could not have fully articulated this Islam. I have only space to use material from three important speeches. (All quotes of Gayoom are from their original English versions.)
Progressive face or phase
The best place to start is Gayoom’s paper in 1985 on the ‘Flexibility of Islamic Shari’ah’ presented at a seminar in Kuala Lumpur. In this paper, Gayoom laid out his broad outlook on Islam:
Gayoom’s understanding of Islam is fundamentally ‘progressive’. He argued, ‘the message of Islam was never meant to be limited to the confines of a backward nomadic community of fourteen centuries ago’.
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