Faith and the Dialogue of Civilizations - Part 5 of 8
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
CA
Resistance and Reform
Reform, as a collective effort to return to the purity of faith, is a recurrent theme in Islamic history. Since the decisive moment when the Prophet passed away, Muslims have struggled to shape their destiny in the mold of the Sunnah of the Prophet. This perpetual struggle has produced some of the most influential personages in the history of the Muslim peoples.
After the Battle of Plassey (1757), the tide of global affairs turned decidedly in favor of Europe. Although it would take more than a hundred years to supplant and colonize much of Asia and Africa, the relative weakness of the Muslim world was obvious to perceptive minds. Some scholars felt that this weakness was the result of deviation from the Shariah.
First there was Shah Waliullah of Delhi (d. 1763) who followed in the long lineage of scholars in the subcontinent and had a decisive impact on the political military events in South Asia. Then came Shaykh Abdul Wahhab of Najd, Arabia (circa 1780). His reformist thrust was terse, shorn of the embellishments that had accrued to religion in the Ottoman Empire. The third influential personage was Shaykh Uthman Dan Fuduye of Nigeria. Shaykh Dan Fuduye belonged to the Qadariya movement and his approach, in contrast to that of Shaykh Abdul Wahhab, was decidedly Sufi and activist. The last in this line was Sir Syed Ahmed Khan of Aligarh, India who saw the benefits of cooperation with the West and founded the Aligarh Muslim University along the lines of schools in England.
Although they lived in the 18th and 19th centuries, these reformers faced different challenges. Shah Waliullah lived at a time when rampant corruption had destroyed the Mogul Empire. He attempted to restore the glory of Muslim civilization in India. Shaykh Abdul Wahhab desired to bring back the simplicity of religion that existed in early Islam. Both Shah Waliullah and Shaykh Abdul Wahhab were dealing with local situations wherein Islamic civilization was past its zenith, and decay had set in. In contrast Shehu Uthman Dan Fuduye faced a society wherein Islam was spreading among the masses and the purity of faith was compromised by the retention of old animist practices of the people. The first two, Shah Waliullah and Shaykh Wahhab, waged a rear-guard action to arrest the decline of old societies. The last one, Shehu Uthman, was in the forefront of a revolution to create a new one.
In historical hindsight, the efforts of Shah Waliullah were not successful and India became a British colony. Shaykh Abdul Wahab waged war against fellow Muslims in Arabia and his rigid code became the foundation of the Wahhabi school of thought which in modern times takes extremist positions in religious, social and political matters.
Uthman Dan Fuduye did succeed in transforming the Muslim societies of the Niger River basin located in Northern Nigeria, Niger and beyond. His reforms continue to influence the Islamic movements in West Africa to this day. The institution founded by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan went on to become a premier school of learning in the Indian subcontinent and has produced thinkers, scholars, engineers, scientists and statesmen who have served the nations of India and Pakistan.
The Post-Colonial Modern Age
It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that Muslim thinkers confronted the challenge of the West. Many of these thinkers had studied in Europe or had lived there for long periods of time and were familiar with western thought. The challenge before them was to formulate an Islamic response to European humanist ideas. It was a daunting task, and it remains so today, as humanism is man-centered and places human reason in the driver’s seat in the march of civilization. Islam, in contrast, is God-centered and placed divine writ as the governing paradigm in human affairs.
In this dialectic of the West with Islam, Muslim thinkers occupy the entire spectrum, from those who were openly opposed to all things western, to those who saw in the West solutions to their own doctrinal, social and political problems. The response has ranged all the way from adopting socialism, nationalism, communism, capitalism, humanism to a total rejection of all of the above and the advancement of a rigid Islamic code.
The works of Jamaluddin al Afghani, Muhammed Abduh, Sir Muhammed Iqbal, Zia Baran, Ali Shariati and Syed Qutb deserve to be studied. All of these thinkers worked in the context of continuing and overbearing political, social and military interference from a non-faith based western civilization upon the world of Islam. Jamaluddin al Afghani was a political activist who tried to preserve the remaining vestiges of the Ottoman Empire by bringing about a Shia-Sunni reconciliation. His disciple, Muhammed Abduh, continued his work and tried to implement modernizing reforms in Egypt. Mohammed Iqbal, in Reconstruction of Religious Thought, made an incisive analysis of the works of modern European philosophers, found them wanting and advanced his own idea that Ijtehad as applied to Shariah was the moving principle of Islam. His ideas led to the establishment of Pakistan. Zia Baran was a poet of repute. His reformist thrust for the emancipation of women and the modernizing of Islamic societies found partial expression in Kemalist Turkey. Ali Shariati was one of the most incisive thinkers of the twentieth century and his ideas paved the way for the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Syed Qutb was at the other extreme, rejecting western thought in its entirety and advancing Islamic teachings as the sole panacea for the condition of modern man.
The dialectic of Islam and the West continues to this day. While western thought seeks to liberalize traditional Islamic thinking, Islamic thought seeks to round off the sharp, jagged edges of an egocentric European thought. One must hope that the interaction will be beneficial to both. (Continued next week)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
