Daily Inspiration Quote by Abu Bakar Bashir

Pride is doing heavy political work here: it recruits religious devotion as a mandate for social engineering. Abu Bakar Bashir frames Islam not as a private faith or inherited tradition, but as a reform project with a built-in directional arrow. The line “to change it for the better” sounds consensual until you notice the rhetorical trap it sets: who gets to define “better,” and by what means? By stacking the alternatives - “not for the worse, or to keep things as they are” - he narrows the moral universe. Stasis becomes a kind of cowardice, and disagreement can be recast as opposition to the Prophet’s mission itself.

That’s the subtext: a claim to exclusive legitimacy. If Islam arrives to change the world, then existing institutions, pluralistic norms, and even local religious practices can be painted as obstacles. The quote uses reverence for the Prophet as a shortcut around debate; it’s hard to argue policy with someone who has already framed the argument as fidelity versus betrayal.

Context matters because Bashir is not speaking as a neutral theologian. As an Indonesian Islamist activist long associated with hardline networks, his public rhetoric has often operated in the space where spiritual renewal bleeds into political struggle. Read in that light, the sentence is less an uplifting call to personal betterment than a justification for confrontation: a moral permission slip to disrupt the status quo, with “pride” serving as the emotional glue that binds followers to a program.