Comment & Analysis: And then I saw the bottle and am a non-believer

Millions of Muslims live in communities where pork products are on every other breakfast dish but do not feel the urge to binge on bacon at the crack of dawn. Their belief in Islam and its teachings removes, or at least provides the strength to resist, the temptation to commit any of these acts that Islam has forbidden.
 
Why is it that religious leaders in the Maldives cannot bear the thought of allowing Maldivians to inhabit an island where an open bottle of alcohol may breathe the same air as a native? Is it that these religious leaders have so little confidence in Maldivian Muslims’ faith that laws have to be brought in to ensure that believers believe? Are they saying the faith of Maldivian Muslims is so fragile it will flounder at the slightest of tests?

Surely whether a believer’s faith is strong enough to resist temptation is a matter between him and his Maker? What arrogance to appoint oneself God’s policeman and regulate a person’s thoughts and actions when it is clear from religious teachings that He knows everything His believers think and do. What insouciant interference in God’s business to be running around regulating people’s thoughts in His name! 

So preposterous is the idea that such learned men might be inclined to behave with such egotism in matters to do with God that, perhaps, they should be accorded the benefit of the doubt, and the enquiring mind should turn elsewhere for answers. Let us then, for argument’s sake, assume that the threats to go on strike if regulations were brought in to allow the sale of alcohol on inhabited islands were not meant to police believers’ faith.