The Cost of Extremism

THE COST OF EXTREMISM A hadith reports that the Prophet of Islam  said: “Do not be hard upon yourselves, lest the matter be made severe upon you. Verily, if people are hard upon themselves, God will be hard upon them. Their remnants are in the monasteries and abbeys.” (Sunan Abi Dawud, Hadith No. 4904) That is, do not make religion unnecessarily hard for yourselves, or hardship will be imposed on you. When a community makes things hard for itself, by the law of nature, everything becomes hard for it. In this hadith, harshness does not refer only to religious extremism or excessive monasticism in a limited sense. Rather, it applies to all matters of human life. Any matter in which the path of balance is abandoned, and the path of excess is adopted falls under the warning of this hadith. Religious extremism means declaring others disbelievers or sinners over minor differences. Ritual extremism means building separate mosques on the