Distractions

Are you familiar with Mr. Goodkat's Kansas City Shuffle?

He basically demonstrates how easy it is to draw your attention to certain subject matter, generally an unimportant or even unrelated one, giving him the opportunity to perform something while your attention is drawn, possibly right under your nose. The result of this unfortunately led to his victims demise.

We see this every day. Magicians aren't capable of conjuring pigeons (sorry if i burst your bubble here) out of thin air, they demonstrate impressive showmanship. They distract you with, and are skilled in directing your attention to their flailing hands, colourful assistants and flashy explosions.

Before you have time to realize the misdirection, they have you in awe while they parade with a glacier white bunny, that could never have fitted inside that flat top-hat which was on that large wooden box.

Unfortunately, this trivial trickery is also the cause of broken family ties, the brotherhood or friendship destroyed, and in the most severe cases, death. Not illusionists, the Kansas City Shuffle.

For some reason we seem to focus on an issue of lesser importance, while issues of much higher priority are being completely forgotten. I believe this has everything to do with misdirection. Consume ones attention to something that in context is insignificant and you will have all the time in the world to do pretty much anything right under their noses.

 We're under a constant barrage of information from TV, the internet, radio, newspapers, its no wonder we think and feel the way we do. This point was illustrated in many works of literature and movies. Now I'm not going to get into the conspiracy theories that surround the consumerism conspiracy anecdotes, but onto a more serious side of what I think occurs today.

Now I know I'm opening up a can of worms here, and some people will have their brandishing finger at the ready, but hear me out. The person who ignited this train of thought was my beloved teacher Sh. Mirza Yawar Baig. I sat for a lecture once where he described 3 conditions on progression and success. We basically need 3 things:

1) Shared common ideology

2) Shared common command structure

3) Shared common source of funding.

Like a simple checklist lets go through our priorities. Number 1, shared common ideo... WAIT WHAT? I will never follow that idiot, he goes to meelad (celebration of the birth of Prophet Muhammed (PBUH)), and that character ties his hands on his chest when he prays and that fool actually thinks coming to my house for tabligh (door to door propagation of Islam mainly to fellow Muslim) is going to bring me to the Musjid.  Kufr (disbelief)! Kufr! Kufr!

Now before all the self righteous people begin telling me that this divisive tribalism is a result of people innovating in religion and not following what they themselves believe, did you ever stop and wonder what would be better than criticizing one another and proactively work towards a solution.

There are people starving, being raped, murdered but for some reason our primary focus has been to concentrate on how wrong everyone else is and how right we are.  I guess one question would be what other things are we being distracted from? 

It doesn't take much for people now days to think that all Muslims are dangerous. Do you know whose fault that is? Media? Well not entirely, its our fault. Where were we all these years when we had to show people that Islam meant respecting our elders, caring for neighbours, feeding the less fortunate and practicing equality irrelevant of race or lineage? We busied ourselves with harsh criticism and focused our attention on showing the world how divided we could be in such a distasteful manner. Shame on us.

Now I'm not saying you should sell out your beliefs just so we can satisfy point number 1 on being successful, but there must be another way of approaching our current situation if the way we're doing it is obviously making things worse. Our misdirection is making us focus on things which in reality are a grain of sand on an infinite shoreline. 

I'm not going to approach this in the way most of our speakers do, which is to describe the problem and end the discussion prematurely, but I'll give you the opportunity to think about solution.

One that will bring us as humanity together, promote critical thinking and proper discussion. A solution that we've known all along but we've been distracted from realizing. We need a prognosis STAT!

=)