A Challenge to My Co-religionists

Islam as a religion is under siege today. Those who adhere to it as well as those who are supposed to believe in it are at the receiving end of all sorts of punishment – withering scorn of once-friendly neighbours, racial profiling of individuals entering a non-Muslim nation, and now a full-fledged war by the Christian West whose true motive, however much disguised in politically correct language, is to see Islam reengineered in its own image.

Good Muslims the world over would like the rest to believe that Islam is a much-misunderstood faith, and that the calumny being heaped on it is because it offers an ideological challenge to its rival civilization, the Christian.

But is this all there is to it?

As a non-practising and non-believing but cultural Muslim, I feel the problem facing us today is to a large extent of our own making. While most other religious systems have moved forward to adapt their traditions to the requirements of modern times, Islam remains stuck in the quagmire of its ‘unchangingness’.

The Scotch Arabist and sympathetic Islamic scholar, Montgomery Watt, noted this nearly a century ago. So did another Islam-friendly critic, the Canadian scholar, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, as long as the late 1950s. Lest these names seem to be exclusively of Christian critics, it may be useful to look at what two of the sharpest scholarly minds, both incidentally believing Muslims, Fazlul Rahman and Shabbir Akhtar, have to say about their faith’s reluctance to move forward to modernity.

In thus fault-finding with Islam, I do not have in mind simply the current trend towards what is generally though perhaps loosely termed ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. An urge to return to the fundamentals of one’s traditions is a feature of most major faiths - Muslim, Hindu, Christian – today. Strictly speaking, then, fundamentalism is not the issue. The real issue is the politicization of religion, often indulged in by extremist fringes of the faithful, usually for cheap electoral or popular gains. The only difference in Islam’s case is that, by an accident of history, it happens to be a staunchly political faith and is therefore more readily politically exploitable.

In Islam, as in other traditional belief systems, there is today, as I see it, an urge for a return to a mythical ‘past golden era’, one that probably never existed in history. With Islam, this manifests itself in a particularly regressive form - as seen in two of the most tyrannical Islamic regimes of recent decades - Taliban-dominated Afghanistan and Khomeini-led Iran.

And it seems to me there are at least three factors that explain why religious fundamentalism is such a popular political proposition in the world today. These factors have been identified by social scientists and may be briefly summarized here as follows: a) a return of the sacred; b) a retreat from modernity; and c) a nostalgic search for narrow ethnic identities in a over-centralized modern world.

But before I deal with their essential elements, let me clear up some preliminary issues.

There has always been a trend among thinking people to search for a perfect state of society that is free of problems the ‘human flesh is heir to’. The idealism that drives such visionaries to create models of utopia is not in itself worrisome. The world would, indeed, be a poorer place if well-meaning critics of the status quo did not come up with utopian fantasies.

The well-known American sociologist, Peter Berger, in his book Pyramids of Sacrifice, said extremist utopias were of two kinds. At one end of the spectrum is the ‘returning home’ utopia; at the other the ‘homecoming’ utopia. Both tendencies occur repeatedly in history particularly in times of stress and despair. Berger mentioned religious revivalism as an example of the former utopia with its vision of a return to a mythical golden age of the past; and, as an example of the latter kind of utopia, he cited communism with its prediction that, if it were implemented in a society, the state would ultimately wither away.

This vision, as we now know, never materialized in the 70 years that communism was state ideology in the former Soviet Union. Instead, the Soviet state collapsed because the bureaucratic system there became so strongly and deeply entrenched that it stifled whatever social good an honest-to-goodness implementation of the communist ideology might otherwise have wrought.

Utopianism, then - I repeat - may not be a bad thing in itself. But, human wisdom acquired over aeons of experience shows that the conept of utopia is never realized and indeed is unrealizable. Utopia, as American social scientists tell us, is best regarded as a ‘process’, not a ‘structure’. Which, paraphrased, means that utopia is a goal humans will ever strive for, but will ever fail to attain. The achievement of utopian conditions on this planet is a mirage, an illusion.

This is a lesson we ought to have learnt (and taken to heart) from recent history. The failure of Stalin’s Russia to achieve a perfect state, and the failure of Hitler’s Germany to create a perfect race, are both examples that reinforce this lesson. What’s more, both experiments is social engineering were at the expense of enormous human suffering. On a cyclical view of history, with the failure of the godless creed of Communism, is it now the turn of the God-driven religious ideologies to work themselves out?

It is time now to return to the three factors I identified to explain why religious fundamentalism seems such an attractive proposition in our times:

a) Return of the sacred: This is a reaction to the collapse of various godless creeds and social engineering experiments of the 20th century (communism, fascism etc). The idea of God which had, with the advent of rationalism and modern science, been declared dead is a palpable fact of modern life;

b) Retreat from modernity. Western modernity’s well-advertised social ills – individual anomie, breakdown of family values, sexual permissiveness with its concomitant of teenage pregnancies, mindless and often motiveless urban violence and so on - have produced a favourable climate for what one US sociologist called a ‘returning-home’ utopia (Peter Berger), a trend often seen in highly coloured and historically unrealistic terms;

c) Nostalgia for narrow ethnic identities. The homogenisation of national cultural systems has, under the influence of the global revolutions in communications and transport, given rise to a quest for narrow ethnic identities, more particularly in the newly-independent countries of the world, peopled as they are, in Marion J Levy’s phrase, by ’latecomers to modernity’ who have remained untouched by modernity’s liberal and human right benefits.

As I just mentioned, of all the religious fundamentalisms going around today, Islamic fundamentalism poses the gravest threat, including a serious threat to world peace. I say this for two reasons. Firstly, Islam is believed by its one billion adherents to offer a perfect utopia which would end all of the modern world’s current ills (individual anomie, breakdown of the family, teenage pregnacies, urban mafia violence etc). Secondly, the Quran is believed to be not simply the Word of God, but Word of God that is “good and valid for all times and places” – as the Muslim global community (the ummah) have been (mis)led by its religious doctors (the ulema) to believe.

It is no wonder, then, that the world has witnessed in recent decades so intense a popular resurgence in one Muslim-majority country after another for a return to an imagined golden age of the past. Worse, the teachings of the Quran are misinterpreted to make the fundamentalists among us believe (Osama bin Laden?) that it is their religious duty to wage a holy war (jihad) against the prevailing inequities in any part of the world, against all societies which in their view are dens of materialist iniquity (meaning the Christian West) - never mind the injustices that prevail in their own backyard.

Incidentally, as a Muslim however imperfect, I find it astonishing that any of my co-religionists living in contemporary times would want to see a return to an Islamic fundamentalist way of life if this implies that the socio-legal code laid down in the Quran 14 centuries ago - a code that probably made sense in its time - would bring in its wake the following three social consequences:

a) that women would be treated only half as equally as men;

b) that a cruel and barbarous penal system would be introduced as punishments for certain common crimes; and

c) that the property of a deceased person would be distributed according to a scheme of rigidly specified and unequal shares, mostly to the disadvantage of female heirs?

Is this what ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ is all about? I would like in particular the younger generation of Muslims to stand up and be counted on the issues I have outlined above.