Is this the modern interpretation of “those who believe and do good”?
The above expression occurs commonly in the Quran to describe a true Muslim.
With the spread of social media, this can be seen in a new light. "Those who believe" means those who believe in the contents of any e-mail they receive from a contact, who has forwarded it from one of his contacts, and so on, from a long chain. The doing of good is to forward the same e-mail to all your contacts. These are the present-day fundamental qualities of a true Muslim. This is not a joke or exaggeration because they actually do think that they are performing an important service to Islam by believing in and forwarding such e-mails.
Just as the text of the Quran remains unchanged after passing through so many hands, also by a miracle the text of these e-mails remains unchanged after several years.
This is the Islam of today as followed by hundreds of millions!
— Zahid Aziz
From Abdul Momin:
More than a decade ago, I used to receive mass emails (emails really designed to clog an email system). At the end of one email was a cleverly disguised statement intended for exerting psychological pressure on the recipient of the email: "If you believe in God then send this email to your friends. If you don't believe in God then don't send it to your friends." A very large number of recipients fell for this trick. Rather than "lose their faith in God", most recipients decided that they were not going to take that risk, and took the easy way out by forwarding that email to their friends and acquaintances.
One email in particular was very frightening because it displayed the depths of ignorance that has seeped into the Muslim minds, especially the youth. The contents of the email read something like this:
In a mosque there were about one hundred worshippers listening to the sermon of their Imam when three men with Kalashnikovs burst in. They announced that whoever was willing to die for Islam should remain inside the mosque, and whoever wanted to save their lives were free to leave the mosque. After 90 woshippers fled the mosque, the gunmen proudly said to the Imam, "Please proceed with your prayers, we have now cleansed the mosque of hypocrites."
In a split moment 3 unknown gunmen had decided who was a true Muslim and who was a hypocrite. In this instance a Muslim was one who was willing to die for no reason other than that someone had challenged him to prove his credentials as a Muslim according to criteria set forth by 3 gunmen.
A hypocrite was one who decided that it was better to get out of the way of mad men.