The Muslim Ummah is now experiencing some of the most serious challenges in its entire 1500 years`history. It is being attacked by all its enemies, economically, socially, politically and all other means possible. There are some voices within the Ummah to fix the issues. However, there have been no concerted efforts so far to do. In the 20th century, there were some powerful voices such as Muhammad Iqbal from Indian sub-continent. However, the 21st century has yet to see a powerful personality or leader who could chalk out a clear plan to bring the Muslim Ummah from the present-day fiasco.
In France, a truck driver recently killed 86 innocent people. Another young man killed eight people in Munich by indiscriminately firing on the passers-by. In Orlando, yet another person killed 49 people in a gay club. In Paris, 130 people were killed. All the above incidents of terror occurred during the last three to four months except the last one in Paris. All these sad incidents were reported extensively by the international media.
However, it is sad to see that in Syria alone, 270,000 people have been murdered either by the Syrian Government or the rebel factions fighting inside the war-torn country during the past four years of the conflict. About 7,000,000 people have been forced to leave their homes. 4,200,000 others had to migrate to other countries Yet, we do not see very many news stories about these human crisis in many Muslim countries being reported by any major international media outlet.
In fact, more than half of the Syrian population is in dire need of urgent help by the international community. Many cities and towns have been facing acute shortages of medicine, food, utilities and other basic necessities. Children as well as adults have been dying due to the hunger so widespread in the country.
The neighboring country Iraq is also facing similar fate especially in those areas where there is an in-fighting among various factions is still going on. Another Arab county Yemen is also facing a similar situation. Hundreds of people have died due to the war in the country. Even Pakistan and Afghanistan have been witnessing terrorists attacking innocent civilians almost on daily basis.
Just look at the world map and start circling the countries facing conflict in red. You will see that most of these countries happen to be Muslim nations which are affected by countless acts of terrorism especially, after 9-11.
However, the irony of the matter is that only the Muslims are considered terrorists and no one else. The international media as well as the general public in most non-Muslim countries seem to agree that whenever there is an act of terrorism, it must have been committed by Muslims only. Their agencies start investigating all these occurrences of terrorism in their soils by arresting Muslims. This is the first challenge, we, the Muslims of the world face today.
Another challenge we need to address urgently is the poor image building of the Muslim Ummah as a whole. We should confess that Muslims are bad at marketing their own strengths. They do not know how to present a nice picture of themselves in front of other nations.
Just take the example of the number of immigrants to various countries. The richest countries of the world, the US, China, Japan, Germany, Britain and France host only couple of million immigrants in total. However, on the other hand, Jordan is hosting three million refugees. Turkey is also hosting about the same number of refugees. Even Palestine, which has not yet become a full-fledge country in any practical sense of the word, currently hosts two million refugees. Pakistan has been hosting 1.5 million registered Afghan refugees and countless number of unregistered ones for the last three decades. Lebanan has 1.5 million refugees in its borders. However, international media is not reporting it because they are busy raising the important issue of burkini, We need to ask ourselves why we fail to take the rightful credit of all the good work we do for the sake of humanity.
Yet another challenge we need to think seriously about is the lack of education and development in the modern world. With the exception of few clusters of education and development here and there in the Muslim world, most of the Muslim countries are backward in every sense of the word.
Although, we claim to comprise almost 30% of the total world population, our performance remains close to zero. We have not invented any thing in the last several decades. Even 80% of the halal food we consume on daily basis, is being produced by non-Muslim countries.
We like to make a fuss of non-issues. However, our productivity levels are amongst the lowest in the world. We have not made any contribution to solving any pressing issues of the present-day world. We have not even presented any viable solution to control the vicious circle of terrorism our societies are facing as a whole.
In fact, all these challenges are related with one another. We are weak in science and technology and even in other normative sciences. Our societies have become dormant. That is the reason we have no weight in international politics and are being treated like football which is being kicked by every body who has some power.