Farrukh Khan

Many of our western friends are only too keen these days to portray Islam as a pack of self-contradictory absolutes. Their stubbornness has reached a level when some of their important leaders, like Don Burlusconi, the Mafioso-turned-PM of Italy, have started claiming that the western civilization is far better than the Islamic world and that Islam should reform itself to win the benefits of the West.

While apparently condemning such views others suggest that the Muslims need to realize that old traditions cannot survive the onslaught of scientific discoveries. Although these propositions have emanated from a genuine concern for the current situation, such hypotheses are by no means new.

To what extent these claims are serious in nature? Does Islam really need what Burlusconi is obliged to call the occidentalization of the East and a radical bid for reformation? Is Islam really becoming irrelevant in the present days? Not quite.

All such impressions flow from grave misperceptions regarding the essence and nature of Islam as the socio-economic force. Most of the people in the West that view Islam as archaic, out-dated and medieval, tend to look at it through the tinted glasses of the western historical experience. In the West, religion had a serious confrontation with the growth and spread of modern knowledge, in which their religion which in essence was more political than spiritual could not survive the tough competition. However, Islam is not against modern knowledge, rather Islamic tradition goes the pursuit of knowledge of religion is mandatory on all Muslims. This is probably because the societies Islam desired to reform from its very start were of the worst kind of retrogressive and ignorant lots.

In the social context also, Islam displays very progressive outlook. Any society in order to maintain its health needs to maintain an adroit balance between the forces of change and stability. If any society doesn’t adhere to the forces of change it risks itself growing stagnant. But the societies that divorce the forces of stability fall from the very definition of a society. The West, in the modern times, has shown its love for change at the cost of stability. Therefore, at best, it is not more than a hotchpotch. Islam makes an excellent bid to overcome this dilemma. While it does not compromise the essence of its belief and values enshrined in holy Quraan, it gives liberty to its followers through Ijtihad to interpret these principles in the light of their circumstances. 

The opportunity to interpret religion, provided that the interpretation does not contradict or conflict with the stated categorically in Quraan, is enjoyed by those qualified and pious scholar according to standard yardstick of religious knowledge. Some people ascribe this adherence to centuries old principles as obscurantism. 

Unfortunately those who make such generalisations forget that obscurantism not only flows from religious absolutism but also from the dogmatic pursuit of sense perception, the only relied source of knowledge in the West. Interestingly even a host of western scholars accept that the west’s over-emphasis on sense perception spoils any reasonable research on other possible sources of cognition. 

While talking of the western knowledge an epistemological precaution must be observed. The key structure of the facts discovered by the western science does not deny the presence of a Supreme Being on its own. Facts of science just like the facts of history need interpretation. And this is the place where the historical experience of the West has seriously damaged the prospects of a benign interaction between the sacred and mundane. 

It seems that either through deliberate orchestration or owing to the fierce opposition from the Christian religious elite, denial of a Supreme Being and all such philosophies were consciously woven into the fabric of the western knowledge. It might be a necessity of Christians of that time but the present era does not need any such philosophies any longer except if one desires to maintain the already crumbling facade of western intellectual legacies. Otherwise modern science that once stood for the replacement of God with ascertainable sequence of causational facts, now, licks its wounds by submitting to theories like big bang and others that start from an uncaused cause. 

Those who propound western superiority forget that the Western post-industrial society is not an enviable ideal. At best this social system juggles between two antithetical absolutes, democracy and capitalism. It is worth noting here that while the basic premise of democracy is universal human equality, capitalism thrives on firm belief in lack of it. In other words, democracy is always hijacked by the capitalists to manoeuvre the political decisions in favour of their selfish interests. 

Umpteen techniques are employed to impede the citizens of their own nations from realising what takes place in their name. The best tool in the regard is the much-touted western liberalism. The western brand of liberalism snatches from man his real freedom and leaves him with a very few choices to make. Also those who tend to see Islam as a peril and therefore demand its reform fail to understand that Islam is not a cultural monolith. It enjoys a wide variety of adherents and cultures both vertically and horizontally. 

Geography has imparted a characteristic beauty to the Islamic civilisation. There are several overtones varying from very moderate to very extreme. This variety is enough for the inner vibrance of the Muslim society. However someone may observe that despite such diversity and rich legacy the Muslim world is lagging more or less in every field of knowledge.

This phenomenon has two causes. First since during the colonial days the West tried to impose its own version of knowledge and experiences on its Muslim colonies. Secondly, we have relinquished the real source of power i.e. the strong relationship with Allah SWT as His ‘Abd (slave), which gives the Muslim Ummah to lead the world as has been witness throughout the centuries.

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