When it comes to aḥkām & talking about them in the public realm, my intent is to probe deeply & get to their essence, to understand what halal & haram & why, to appreciate parameters God sets & functionalise them in best way possible to achieve the optimum outcomes God wants...
& thank Him for true guidance & all that is good. Atomising what God tells us into unrelated & abstract aḥkām not only causes the shari'ah to loose its efficacy, but renders shari'ah into shattered vessel broken in a million pieces & unable to hold that which it was intended to.
Practicing Islam for many is a meaningless set of rituals, or insipid attitudes/acts/beliefs that serve as 'identity' markers. There's nothing compelling abt this way of living, nor enlightening, let alone action-guiding & actually leaves us feeling quite awkward.
Intuitively we feel it's not quite right:the emptiness is apparent bt we continue bc we've been socialised into accepting modern notion of religion which draws a line bw material world & the rest of reality, & explaining latter as some mystical realm beyond the purview of reason.
The calls for “Quran and sunnah” are made by those with only an ayah or hadith, 'tradition' is advocated by those who massacre it with dogma and sectarianism, and 'spirituality' is preached by mystifying the simplest of things and rambling incomprehensibly.
I'm frequently told by godly ppl that contemporary Islam increasingly feels irrelevant & meaningless, but deep desire in God keeps them going where there's nothing else. I salute those who seek to put God first but had to adopt bizarre things along way for lack of anything else.
Where might we begin then to become better informed on these matters, in a way that makes sense of the whole, and gives us the level of meaning that compels the strongest commitment we can muster to God and what he has revealed?
I propose that this comes from knowing God's account of reality, and then learning God's account of a good and productive life which is rooted in that reality. Essentially, this is what the Qur'an was revealed to inform us about.
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