The Islamic thinker, Dr. Mohammed Amara (may he rest in peace), once recounted an encounter in which a secularist attendee sarcastically questioned him, saying, “Do I understand from your writings that you want to implement Sharia laws and take us backward?”
Dr. Amara responded by asking, “By ‘backward,’ do you mean about 100 years ago when Sultan Abdulhamid II ruled half the globe? Or when European kings governed their people with the Ottoman Sultan’s authorization? Or perhaps you mean further back during the Mamluk rule, who saved the world from the Mongols and Tatars? Or do you refer to the time of the Abbasids when they ruled half the earth? Or the days of the Umayyads? Or even before them, during the reign of our leader Umar, who governed most of the earth? Or do you mean when Harun al-Rashid initiated his message to the Byzantine king Nicephorus, saying, ‘From Harun, the Commander of the Faithful, to Nicephorus, the dog of the Romans’? Or to the time of Abd al-Rahman Al-Dakhil, who surrounded his army with Italy and France?”
