Out of the blue, if someone were to approach one of us, the so-called “modern,”educated Muslims, and ask us the Islamic date on that particular day, we will literally, see the moon during the day.

Having said that as a satire, I would like to point towards the rapidity, at which we have been losing our own culture and values, and adopting the foreign, more specifically the western mannerisms blindly.

We are at a point were our next generation would completely lose its identity as a Muslim, if we continue at the same pace.Our life-styles, food habits, goals of life, and even our celebrations are not in accordance with the Islamic tenets.

It hasn’t been long, when Muslim traders traded free of envy or grasping fear to hold a customer.So much so that the owner of a shop would leave it in the custody of his neighbour and competitor, whenever it became necessary for him to be away for a while.

The same competitor would step in to enquire after the customer’s wants, and sell him the required goods, not his own goods, rather those of his absent neighbours, leaving the price on the neighbour’s bench. This is in absolute contradiction to the modern business ethics.

A Muslim traveller would never relish his bread until he shared a part of it with his co-traveller, similarly any celebration in a Muslim house hold, would not be complete without sharing the food and goodies with the neighbours. Some of our pious predecessors would even skip their meal to feed their guest.

In reality, these values of humanity, represent us as Muslims.These small gestures of love and care made us conquer the world. This was the civilised culture of the East, and Muslims in particular, which we have lost, and most often forgotten, while we mimicked the west, taken over by their material progress.Never before this time, had agreed outgrown in men, it has become an obsession in us to acquire things more than our needs, blurring our sight of everything else.

If Muslims only adopt, which they inevitably have to, the modern science and technology, they will be benefiting themselves with the other men’s experiences and wisdom. But on the other hand, if they adopt western forms of life, their customs and social concepts, they will be destroyed completely.

We have to change our perception of progress, and view the material success as only a means to achieve the spiritual heights.With the passing of time we have made our faith/iman a habitual recital of words, without pondering over it’s meaning, and when we have to present Islam to the non-Muslims, we are either apologetic or aggressive in our approach.

No wonder Islam is perceived as a fanatic and oppressive religion, and hence the world is in a rage to free the Muslim people from the subservience of Islamic beliefs.

It is an urgency now, than ever before, to retain our Islamic Morales and values, we need to hold on to the teachings of our prophet with our molar teeth, and put it into action. Perhaps this could even benefit the other communities who have lost the real essence of life. For with the dawn of twenty first century, man has become more sceptical, and therefore isolated himself from his fellow human, being lonely within himself.And in order to come out of that loneliness he has endeavoured to make technology his companion, and this in turn has posed more new dangers and new fears.

The priests and preachers of new technologies have turned a deaf ear to this spiritual despair.It is time we stand up against the onslaught,revive our Islamic identity, and present it to the world with same beauty, as we received it from our rightly guided leaders, because the world cannot morally benefit from science and technology, what it needs is –the sweetness of Islam.