Organized religion -- who needs it?

Our ummah doesn't. After all, we're the heirs of Ibrahim (as), the man who sought Allah (swt) on his own, who listened to the personal call of Allah (swt) to leave his home and birthplace. He left behind the organized religion of his father and never founded one of his own. Don't the all the prophets affirm this call to humanity? The call to Tawhid?

Islam has always been among the least organized religions, and one could argue that it's for the best. We can follow most the Quranic and sunnat duties as individuals or families in the privacy of our own homes. To have a full prayer service, we only need a quiet place. And if we want to learn, we can simply sit down with someone more learned than ourselves. This is barely organized religion. Why do we need big mosques with their committees and lecture series? The best argument for organization is probably to educate the children, but even that could be handled on a small scale.

When we complain about organized religion, it's because we recognize that it can easily become spiritually empty. Our mosques often become mirrors of our secular community, projects of humanity in the creative aspect of mastering the world. Religion becomes a way of creating pleasure and satisfaction, rising above mere animal survival by providing comfort and happiness.

But there is often something missing -- a sense of meeting heart to heart with the message of Allah (swt). In our ummah, we reveal ourselves to one another in our deepest essence; we see each other's unique truth. This can be hard to find in many of our religious organizations, where we readily become preoccupied with mastering disorder and maintaining the organization itself. Then, when our mosques are missing that special quality, we're tempted to bail out and search for true and deep relationships elsewhere, often just in the friendships life brings us.

This doesn't solve the problem, however, because there is another answer to the question, Who needs organized religion?

Allah (swt) does. Allah (swt) is in need of our ummah. Allah (swt) asks us to change this dunya. If we want personal religion, we can have it in our own homes. But we are also called to transform the world at large. We may personally prefer to travel the more intimate road of Ibrahim (as), Muhammad (saws) and his sahaba. But Allah (swt) also wants us to remember Dawud (as) and his son Sulieman (as), who built a Temple whose light shone out into the world.

We find our personal nourishment in the Muslim relationships we form, inside or outside of mosques. Our sources of inspiration can be our spouses or our best friends, our teachers or our Imams or our doctors. But wherever the inspiration comes from, we must take that energy and put it to use for our ummah. Islam insists that ultimately there is no separation between the personal and the public realm. Allah's (swt) will is manifest in both.

We may feel differently about these two levels of community and relate to them differently. That is because we suffer from a sense of separation between our nafs and body, the internal and external. Our challenge is to overcome that separation and make the secular community reflect more fully the integrity of the intimate Muslim community.

Uniting these two worlds requires some sacrifice. It may mean wading through bureaucracy and putting up with people who are not on the same spiritual wavelength. Each day, we have to patiently reimagine the community we ultimately want to create so that it expresses more light and loving kindness than when we began. This sacrificial action is the nature of giving to Allah (swt). In this mode, we don't go to mosque to receive, but to give.

When we do this, another truth appears: religious organizations are where we're more likely to find what our true ummah, those who travel the same spiritual pathways as we do. Yes, there are people in mosques who are there for extraneous reasons--because their kids are learning Arabic or because they feel obligations to their parents' faith or for personal business reasons. But even those reasons are a thread of connection, a sign of wanting to be in the ummah that stretches across the generations.

And most people are there for much deeper reasons. They are searching too. We may find, when we begin to reveal ourselves more deeply, that a new brother or sister is sitting next to us at one of those unending committee meetings.

So before you stop supporting your community mosque, look at your relationship with organized religion. Sometime, you may find that it is truly not responsive, and you may have to seek elsewhere. But you may also find another way, and other people right where you are, to help you transform your local organized religion into a living deen -- a radiant center of life, happiness, and hope.