The Trousers

There was once a man who came home with a pair of trousers and found that it was too long for him. He asked his newly wedded bride to shorten it for him. She said, "Don’t you see I’m busy cooking the food. Tell your sister to do it. She sits the whole day doing nothing."
On asking his sister to do it, she replied, "What do you have a wife for? Let her do it." Meekly agreeing, he went to his mother and asked her to do him a favour and shorten it. She asked him what good his wife was for if she could not do it. "I am so old now. I can’t even get the cotton through the eye of the needle."
The man gave up, went to his room, shortened the trousers himself, hung it up and went to sleep. His wife thought to herself that my husband had asked so nicely and I’m finished cooking. Let me shorten the trousers. She took it, shortened it a bit and hung it up. The sister came and also shortened it. After a while, his mother came and did like wise. Finally, only a shorts was left of the new trousers.
This is the parable of what we are doing to Islam. We add and subtract from it according to our whims and fancies, according to our independent research, without consulting the Ulama, the experts of Islam. In the end, we do a disservice to our religion. Z