The Aftermath of the Christchurch Massacre,
An Opportunity for Internal Renewal (Part 1 of 2)
By Prof Dr Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA
Seldom has a civilization stood at a crossroads as does the Islamic civilization today. On the one hand, there are challenges that the Ummah has seldom faced in the last 1500 years. On the other hand, it has seldom had an opportunity for internal renewal as it does today.
Scan the horizon from the east to the west and you will notice that Darul Islam has become Darul Harab. The lush paddy fields of Myanmar weep over the genocide of the Rohingyas. On the plains of Hindustan, you can be lynched for a rumor that you ate beef. In the mountains of Afghanistan, you are as likely to be killed by a bomb dropped from the air as by a suicide bomber who is your neighbor. Iraq has become an orphanage thanks to the devastations wrought by a merciless American invasion. In Yemen, a Saudi-led coalition has rained havoc on a hapless population. The horn of Africa has long been embroiled in civil and foreign imposed strife. In the ancient hills of Syria, you witness a devastated land on its knees. Westward in North Africa, you find Libya, a country crushed by the weight of NATO bombardment. In a vast swath of earth, stretching from Yangon to Tripoli, it is the same story, destruction after destruction.
From New Zealand to San Diego, Muslims feel under pressure. Yet, in the midst of this period of trial and tribulation, we have also seen an outpouring of compassion, comradery and love, from every corner of the globe. Even those who were not sympathetic to the Muslims in the past have expressed their abhorrence of the massacre in New Zealand. The other day, at an interfaith gathering in Pittsburg, CA organized by my good friend and community leader Mohammed Chaudhry Saheb, a Catholic priest got on his knee and asked for forgiveness from a largely Muslim audience. A Catholic priest on his knee asking Muslims for forgiveness for the massacre in far-away Christchurch! This is indeed astounding in this age of Islamophobia.
The heavens reveal their Signs through history (“Soon shall We show them Our Signs on the horizon and in their own souls until it is clear to them that is the Truth” (The Qur’an). The current travails offer an historic opportunity for an internal renewal of Islamic civilization. Just as we use reaction wheels to correct the course of a spacecraft that is losing altitude, or correct the attitude of an airplane in a nose dive by applying a torque to a gimbal or an electric pulse to a control system, a civilization needs an occasional correction to keep it on-course its heavenly mandate. The Islamic civilization has lost its heavenly vision and has veered off-course. The subject is broad-based, embracing history, economics, sociology, politics, technology and interstate relations. However, as Mevlana Rumi said: You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the ocean in a drop. So, let us drive into the subject.
A brief excursion through Islamic history shows that the Ummah has faced many crises from the time of our Prophet Muhammed (sas). The passing away of the Prophet was a great crisis and the Suhaba overcame it with the establishment of the Khilafat. The assassinations of Uthman and Ali (r) were big challenges. The offshoot was the onset of the civil wars. The resultant schisms were never resolved, and they continue to haunt the world of Islam even to this day. The eighth century witnessed a challenge from Greek ideas. The challenge was met by the emergence of the Hanbali fiqh and the intervention of Imam Ahmed. The Islamic civilization was pulled back to the center. Then came the golden period of Islam when science and civilization thrived until the thirteenth century.
The challenges faced by Muslims today are similar in many ways to those faced by Muslims in the thirteenth century. If one was alive in the year 1200, one would be awed at the expansive power of Muslim empires. Only fourteen years earlier, in the year 1186, Salahuddin had recaptured Jerusalem. Only nine years earlier, in 1191, the Ghorids had captured Delhi and had established the sultanate of Delhi in India. Only four years earlier, in 1196, the Almohad had defeated the conquistadores and reestablished Muslim sovereignty in Southern Spain. It was a period of triumphs.
Yet, within the span of a generation after the year 1200, the Muslim world encountered catastrophe after catastrophe. It is not commonly appreciated that the Crusades and the Mongol invasions took place at the same time and the simultaneous onslaughts of Christian Europe and the Shamanist Mongols well-neigh annihilated the world of Islam. In 1212, at the battle of Las Novas de Tolosa, Muslims lost Spain. It took a while for the Conquistadores to capture Cordoba (1236) and Seville (1248) but Spain was essentially lost in 1212. In 1219, Gengiz Khan descended from Mongolia and in a span of two years obliterated more than half of the Islamic world. A vast swath of Eurasia including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan up to the river Indus, Iran, Iraq, Anatolia and Syria lay in ruins. The Mongols were only stopped on the outskirts of Jerusalem at the Battle of Ayn Jalut in 1261 by Sultan Baybars of Egypt. So, within the span of one generation, the Islamic empires that extended from the Guadalquivir River in Spain to the Yamuna River in India shrank to the Ayyubid domains of Egypt and the Mamluke Sultanate of Delhi.
The destruction was total. Ninety percent of the population perished. Political and social institutions that had grown up over a period of five hundred years in the golden period of Islam were destroyed. Libraries burnt. Ulema beheaded. Dams and canals leveled. Agriculture disappeared. Towns and villages became pastureland for Mongol horses. In one instance, in the city of Bamyan in Afghanistan, Genghiz Khan slaughtered all the men, women and children. Not even the donkeys were spared; so much so that the Mongols called it the City of Sorrow.
And yet, in the midst of this darkness, Divine light made its appearance. The Qur’an declares: Throw the Truth upon Falsehood, and lo! Falsehood is crushed, and it is pulverized. How did the world of Islam overcome the challenges of the time? What can we learn from the thirteenth century that we can adapt to this century so that we too can experience a spiritual triumph?
It is not the body that contains the spirit; it is the spirit that surrounds the body, inside and out. Oppression brings darkness. And at the darkest hour, Divine light heralds the onset of a new dawn. Moses appears within the household of the Pharaoh. Justice triumphs over oppression. Truth prevails over falsehood. Human history revolves around this principle.
While the political structures were destroyed by the Mongols, and the madrassahs burned, the people of the spirit, those who had stayed outside of the state structures, were spared. These were the awliyah - the people of the spirit. They were the men and women who would encapsulate a heart and transform it in the mold of its own essence. Every human being has an essence (it is the khudi expounded by Allama Iqbal). A spiritual master grabs a heart and molds it in the shape of its inherent, God-given essence.
In the aftermath of the Mongol devastations there ensued a tug-of-war between Christianity, Buddhism and Islam for the soul of the Mongol. The Christians in the fray represented different denominations, the Latins from Rome, the Orthodox of Constantinople (modern Istanbul) and the Armenians. For fifty years, between 1252 and 1302, the competition between the three great faiths was in full swing. It was a galactic struggle, a historical hinge that would decide the destiny of Eurasia and fundamentally alter the course of world history.
