"They
display a paradoxical modernity, the ideas
are today's, the attitudes yesterday's."
- Octavio Paz
(Mexican poet and writer)
The Muslims are in a quandary. Why is their
religion facing an onslaught from the
western world? Is it the Muslim community
that is to be blamed or does the religion
need to go through some structural changes?
For some serious scholars, the Muslim
ummah's consciousness is in conflict with
the reality on the ground.
Two western scholars of Islam have written
on the paradoxes of the Muslim
consciousness, which has shaped the Muslim
worldview inmodern times.
W.C. Smith 's Modern Islam in India
(Lahore, 1943) is an account of what the
author encountered, when he was teaching in
pre-partition subcontinent. He observed:
"A young Muslim, fashionably dressed, sits
with his friends in the Lahore Coffee House
and talks in English, of Marx and tennis. He
has perhaps never studied the Quran, and
dislikes what he knows of Canon Law. Yet he
is intensely conscious of being a Muslim, he
insists that he and his co-religionists in
India are a nation, and he is, he says,
ready to fight to establish for them a free
country."
According to Smith, Muslim awakening during
the two world wars produced a romantic view
of Islam, with emphasis on religion as a
civilizing force, glorifying the Abbasid
period, the Spanish Muslims, old Islamic
sciences and philosophy, and sustaining a
glorified hope for the future.
Today, in a tormenting mood, Muslim
conferences in North America, Europe and
many Muslim countries play the same tune as
if living in the past would tackle the
military and technological might of the
West.
Smith also met some prominent religious
ideologues, who interpreted religion
liberally. He found liberal religion to be
emotional and vague, lacking a structure. It
formulated no coherent theology and dealt
with 'idealized' personalities, in a chaotic
society. He gave the example of Amir Ali's
The Spirit of Islam. His book was
followed by hundreds of booklets and
articles on the charisma of the Prophet
Muhammad (PBUH) and countless publications
on Islam and science, Islam and
civilization, Islam and women, Islam and
slavery, Islam and what not, without any
systematic analysis of some possible
problems in the fundamentalist theology.
Smith's book was also an insider's report of
British India and the modern Muslim
responses to crisis in a changing world. He
provided an intimate account of some Muslim
groups who used religion for the stimulation
of a flustered middle class. Thus the Ahrar
Party, All India Momin Conference, Jamiat
Ulema, the Khaksars and the Khilafat
movement sought to restore the glory of
Islam by fighting for the Turkish empire
against the British.
William Montgomery Watt, a British Islamic
scholar, in Islamic Fundamentalism and
Modernity (1988) conceptually captured
Smith's description of the Indian Muslims of
the 1940's to their dilemma in the last
quarter of the 20th century. He wrote a
general review of today's religious fervour
against the backdrop of the rise and fall of
Muslim empires.
However, his concerns were different. He
studied the behaviour and turmoil of the
Muslims in the contemporary western
dominated world. He wrote as an 'outsider'
who hoped that if only the Muslims could
adopt the western thought process, their
religion could undergo the reformation which
Europe experienced in the 17th century.
Smith lived among the believers as an
insider and had empathy with them. He could
understand why they were denied material
progress.
Watt wanted Muslim enlightenment only
through the process of ideas. He was
concerned with the Muslim mind. He wrote:
"The central theme of this book is that the
thinking of the fundamentalist Islamic
intellectuals and of the great masses of
ordinary Muslims is still dominated by the
standard Islamic worldview and the
corresponding self-image of Islam."
His research revealed that Muslims were
frozen in time. He wrote:
"For Muslims unchagingness is both an ideal
for human individuals and societies, and
also a perception of the actual nature of
humanity and its environment."
Then he observed that Muslims did not accept
development, progress or social advancement
and improvement as a part of their
futuristic outlook. Their perception
persisted, when everything was already
provided for, why worry for material
changes. One must only work for the world
hereafter.
Another European Islamic scholar, Von
Grunebaum, put forward a similar proposition
that "Muslims progressed only within the
circle of God's given world. For them,
scientific progress meant, un-discovering
God's glory in spiritual and material
wealth." Watt also quoted an Islamic
academic, Hamilton Gibb:
"The old Islamic view of knowledge was not a
reaching-out to the unknown but a mechanical
process of amassing the 'known'. The known
was not conceived as changing and expanding
but as 'given' and eternal."
Watt alludes to the decline of the Ottoman
Empire, and the beginning of Islamic
resurgence as a response to the western
imperial powers' intrusions into the Muslim
domains. With European agricultural and
industrial revolutions in full speed, Muslim
empires eclipsed. There was panic and
helplessness facing the rapid scientific and
technological advancements.
However, resurgence, fundamentalism and
other reactions of desperation remained
confined to the rulers and their mandarins
producing regressive scholarships, building
sand castles on the perceived past glory.
Watt also noted, when the Europeans
conquered India and other Muslim populated
regions, the contact was confined to the
upper classes. While the Muslim masses were
exhorted to work for their spiritual uplift,
the rulers indulged in European luxuries.
The slower their development, the more
dependent the Muslim masses became on
European technology, as is the case today.
He implored Muslims to understand the West
authentically. When educated professional
Muslims complained that the knowledge gained
by orientalists enabled their governments to
threaten the destruction of Islam, Watt
wondered why Muslim scholars did not make a
similar study of Europe and Christianity on
behalf of their governments.
He remained skeptical of traditionalists,
promising that the return to the true
'spirit' of Islam of the earliest period
would solve all social problems.
Watt was puzzled, why Muslim diplomats and
students, who travelled during the 19th
century, at the peak of development of the
European civilization, did not conceptualize
innovative ideas for the salvation of the
ummah. At best, they fought against the
very idea of progress or plunged into the
maelstrom of western intellectual life.
The third book is Discovering Islam -
Making Sense of Muslim History and Society
(1988) by Akbar S. Ahmed. He is a former
Pakistani civil servant settled in the West,
churning out books, on 'ideal' Muslim
societies as a coherent whole. He is
educated, articulate, conscious and
liberalized with post-modern vocabulary.
He fits in well with Smith and Watt's
description of 'self-conscious' modernist,
idealizing the Prophet of Islam and the
Muslim ummah as a chosen 'ideal'
community for the present day's world. But
Akbar Ahmed makes a confession:
"Writing the book confronted me with my
ignorance, with how little I know. For me
personally - in an Islamic sense I have just
turned 40, the critical age for Muslims - I
am not much older than the Prophet when he
received the call to Islam. It is an
appropriate time to attempt the exercise. It
is a voyage that opens doors to the past
taking me straight to the seventh century."
His answer is the idealization of the
seventh century. Using modern rhetoric he
exhorts the ideal Muslim to have
consciousness of the past to relive his
religion, regardless of where the person
lived.
There are problems in such idealization.
Regardless of education, environment,
geography and history, a born Muslim has
ideal behavioural patterns transmitted
through some genetic miracle. A Muslim could
travel from India or tropical African forest
to Chicago or Tokyo and retain his 'ideal'
with religious consciousness of the symbolic
seventh century.
The ideal Muslim category could fit in with
the educated Muslim middle class, who might
even be settled in the West. This is where
the 'ideal' turns into 'idleness' of
inaction and non-innovation. Everything is
given. Innovation is not necessary. All
answers are given in an ideal form, and for
a Muslim it is only to 'rediscover'.
In conclusion, the survey of these books fit
in the pattern of today's crisis of Muslims,
whether in their own domains or overseas.
There is a crisis of classical consciousness
and paradoxical modernity |
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