"What happens when you stir a cup of coffee for a long time? After you take the spoon out the coffee continues to stir on its own, right? Shaytan is that stirrer and we are his coffee. Our bad habits continue to stir even when he is away (i.e. during Ramadan)." --- I would really like to know who thought of this analogy.
How the scholars lost their exalted status as keepers of the law is a complex story, but it can be summed up in the adage that partial reforms are sometimes worse than none at all. In the early 19th century, the Ottoman empire responded to military setbacks with an internal reform movement. The most important reform was the attempt to codify Shariah. This Westernizing process, foreign to the Islamic legal tradition, sought to transform Shariah from a body of doctrines and principles to be discovered by the human efforts of the scholars into a set of rules that could be looked up in a book. Once the law existed in codified form, however, the law itself was able to replace the scholars as the source of authority. Codification took from the scholars their all-important claim to have the final say over the content of the law and transferred that power to the state. --- Noah Feldman
For a human being, change and decay are usually slow and silent. Sometimes even a little heedlessness, a slight straying from the caravan can cause a complete collapse and a total loss. However, because those who have fallen see themselves as still on the same line and in the same situation, they do not realize that they have plunged to the bottom of a deep well from a minaret-like peak. --- M. Fethullah Gulen
