The peaceful Islam

By Aya Ahmed

I always thought about Islam and other religions, I wanted to see how as a Muslim I can apply peaceful Islam. With all these wars and media brain washing the youth, religion is becoming confusing and not helpful. Which made me think about why we actually have religion. I think religion is just a medium to communicate with God, he doesn’t care how you want to communicate as long as you actually communicate. The problem we are facing today has nothing to do with religion. It is mainly how we use religion. Unfortunately we tend to misuse and abuse religion. Everyone thinks his or her religion is right.

Now we are facing a lot of extremism because we forgot the main goal of religions which is to communicate with God.

In my art project I tried to reflect my ideas by an analogy that I came up with.

If we imagine that God is waiting for you at the mall and asking you to come see him. Would it matter how you go or the fact that you need to be there anyway?

It was never about the medium that you are going to use, it’s about how important it is for you to go in the first place.

In my analogy I picture Judaism as camel (like how people used to use them for transportation) since it’s the oldest compare to Islam and Christianity.

Then a bike that represents Christianity. Last but not least Islam as a car.

Now it’s up to you to use any one of them as a transportation (medium) as long as you are trying to reach for God.

Now in order to have a peaceful Islam, Muslims must not think that you can only go to the mall by car even if they think that it’s the “fastest or easiest” way to reach. When we all reach to that conclusion we will have not only a peaceful Islam but a peaceful world.

A Reflection

 

By Shahera Nassar

"The taking of one innocent life is like taking all of Mankind... and the saving of one life is like saving all of Mankind" - Holy Qur'an, 5:33.  I’m an Arab Muslim that has lived all her life in Saudi Arabia and in the UAE. I have interacted with people of different cultures than my own. Not just people form the Middle East but also from around the world. Thus, I believe that I have a good understanding and admiration of people of different backgrounds than mine. Although I have always lived peacefully with people of different culture and religion, that doesn’t seem to be the reality in the Middle East. Being a Muslim in the 21^st century is adjacent to being a terrorist that is always angry and blood hungry. But isn’t this our reality in most of the Middle Eastern nations? The greatest controversy in my opinion is the clash between what Islam is and how its portrayed weather by Muslims or westerners. Islam like all other religions is the epitome of peace and forgiveness. It speaks of growth not destruction, love instead of hate, and truthfulness instead of betrayal. But in our world all we see is the contradiction between what Islam should look like and how “Muslims” are acting. We know that in theory Muslims should live as a brotherhood, but all we see is destruction and burning ashes. Although there are many reasons as to why a lot of the Arab world is burning down, like the interference of some western nations and their greed for our lands, but a huge reason for our destruction is in our own selves.  My artwork explains the contradiction between what we should live by and in reality what we are living.

My artwork is called Reflection and is portrayed through a painting done on a rounded glass mirror. I used the top part of the mirror to write a verse from the Quran in Arabic that states “we sent thee not, but as a mercy for all creatures”-Holy Qur’an, 21:107. The downward part I have used the style of drip painting that was an inspiration from the great American artist Jackson Pollock. I used dark colors and red for the lower part, and used the brighter color, which is yellow, to paint the words of the Quran. My goal is to show the contradiction between what Islam really stands for and how it is showed in the Middle East in reality. I used drip painting in the lower part because after researching I have found a discernible similarity between destruction after war images and the way drip painting is portrayed. Both show chaos and unsettled emotions. You can see motion and anger with the way the lines of color clash and how in real life destruction you can see pieces of homes and humans clashing too. I wanted to show the despair of our lowest stages as Arabs thus painting the sadder part on the lower part. And by painting the words of God on top to show that this is what we should aspire to. I used my main platform to show the painting on a mirror. This platform also describes the title of my work. Reflection stands as medium for me specifically and generally us Arabs to reflect and draw conclusions on how our reality looks like and how we can solve it. As I stated above, our real problem isn’t just the intruding nations into our lands, but it’s our attitudes that have caused our real destruction.

One of the main tactics westerners have used to increase their power was by the tactic “divide and conquer”. We have divided ourselves in the first place and built the cracks between ourselves. We failed our selves when we believed that there is difference between a Jew, Christian, and Muslim. We are murdering our nations by causing turmoil over who is more right “Sunni or Shiite.” So the first people to fix the damaged perception of Islam are Muslims. Even though the western media has done its fair share of portraying us as terrorists, we have to work on understanding our religion in its real form so we can live peacefully. It this contradiction that is breaking us apart, judging Muslims by appearance and not content of character is what’s dividing us. As Muslims its our duty to work on what our religion needs us to be so we can shift our nations from a destructed wasteland to heaven on earth. 

SHAHERA NASSAR - June 9, 2015, Dubai