Difference Of Opinions
Walaikum as Salam, I feel what you say, as I am a “layman” myself. There is not one “layman”. When the same layman goes from Pakistan to, for example Libya or Tunisia, there, you won’t just find differences in religious practices, but a difference in The Quran. And there are many historical and social reasons for it. You have to try to understand what is right or wrong in those reasons, if you are inclined to make sense of such a huge difference. Same here. First listen to what the man is saying. Ghamidi sahab, in his detailed lectures explains WHY he has formed a different opinion about a subject. He also puts forward what other opinions about a religious subject there are and he often explains the reasons for their existense. He has done so at great length in his 23 questions series, even unlike his previous lecture series. The problem I think the layman runs into is that he only sees what the end result is, usually disregarding the thinking process behind the end result. Then he ends up accepting or rejecting it due to some convenience or inconvenience or being emotionally attachment to other schools of thought. THIS is a flawed method of dealing with difference of opinion. He refuses to hear or see what is being said, just because he thinks that the speaker is uttering something that goes against what he has been told to believe all his life, and he believes in it blindly. Of you gloss over the religious history of muslims, it is filled with religious differences in each and every period of our history. There are still to this day differences, although to a very less degree over the pronunciations of a few portions of the Quran, there are differences at some places in the Qur’an, where a different word is used altogether. When this happens, the “layman” looses trust in what he believes, and blind trust leads to blind mistrust. This happened to me also. This is because we as muslims as a whole are used to trusting things blindly and not with proper reasons backing our beliefs. The short answer to your question is that a “layman” finds Ghamidi sahab “different” is because he doesn’t know better. And we as Muslims today are in an all time historical low point when it comes to knowledge and character.
No offence taken. Let me talk about a less “serious” issue. Most muslims believe that calling azan in a newborn baby’s ear is a sunnah of Rasoolullah. I myself did so for my son. But when I read research about this topic on Al-Mawrid’s wedbsite. It got clear to me that it is actually a BID’AH which started some 300 years after Rasoolullah due to a few weak narrations, those narrations too appear some 300 years after Rasoolullah. Our early books are void of any such mention. Reading that, I was convinced that Ghamidi sahab’s opinion is correct.
The translation clearly says that he is with Allah and has not passed away. Don’t you think that what he says about Hazrat Isa (AS) is not true?