Faith and the Dialogue of Civilizations - Part 2 of 8
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
CA
Why do civilizations fall?
There are a host of theories about the rise and fall of civilizations with which the reader is no doubt familiar.
Ibn Khaldun, the great philosopher of the Maghreb, and the father of historiography, studied the Berber dynasties in North Africa and postulated his theory of the rise and fall of civilizations based on asabiyeh, namely tribal cohesion. Ibn Khaldun found that the desert nomads possessed the qualities of courage, valor, integrity, hard work and mutual support in abundance. He contrasted these qualities with those found in the city dwellers where the ease of city life led to lethargy, mutual rivalry, chicanery, deception, acquisitiveness and a lack of ethics.
Ibn Khaldun observed that as city dwellers succumb to the pleasures of a settled life they are overrun by the desert dwellers. With time the newcomers themselves settle down and develop the flaccid habits of city dwellers only to be overrun by a fresh wave of conquerors from the desert.
Ibn Khaldun’s theory has universal application. Civilizations decay from within. Upright action fosters mutual support and sustains a civilization. Vices destroy a civilization, and as they decay they are overrun by other civilizations that are more cohesive and virile. And the process repeats.
However, Ibn Khaldun left several issues unanswered. Must city life necessarily lead to corruption? Were not some of the great civilizations of the past city-based? For instance, the Islamic civilization originated in Mecca and Madina. Both were large, well-settled cities in the Arabian Peninsula. This city-based civilization overcame the resistance of the surrounding desert tribes and forged them into a brotherhood that became the genesis of a universal civilization.
Secondly, once a civilization begins to decay, must it necessarily fall prey to outside forces? Ibn Khaldun’s theory leaves no room for internal renewal.
There are other theories for the rise and fall of civilizations. Those of Toynbee, Adams, Hegel, Marx, Spengler, Kennedy and Diamond deserve serious study. Toynbee’s challenge and response is a further development of cause and effect. Brooks Adams saw economic centration as the driving force for the formation of civilizations. Hegel’s dialectic found a concrete expression in the material dialectic of Marx and Engel. Kennedy advances his thesis for the decay of empires based on over-stretch in relation to its resources. Diamond takes an ecological view to societal collapse postulating that the capacity of a society to endure is directly connected with its ability to maintain a balance between the availability and exploitation of natural resources available to it.
By contrast, our approach to the rise and fall of civilizations is based on a theory of renewal. A great civilization is based on faith. That faith provides a reservoir of energy for the civilization to renew itself from within as it faces the vicissitudes of time. Those civilizations endure that have this capacity for renewal. Those that do not, disappear.
Civilization is like an engine that runs on four cylinders: justice, mutual support, perseverance and righteous action. Faith is the fuel that powers all of these cylinders.
Faith is not only the cement, the glue that holds a civilization together but is also the reservoir that a great civilization dives into for its renewal. Faith fosters righteous action which alone propels a civilization forward. Take the faith away, a civilization degenerates like a brick that has not been fired. It collapses into dust. Such a civilization does not endure. It is overwhelmed by the vicissitudes of time.
In a shrinking world, it is difficult to attach geography to civilizations. For instance, almost 400 million of the 1.6 billion Muslims today live as minorities in countries which are predominantly non-Muslim. Similar is the case with Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Hindus. The modern agnostic civilization is global and has adherents in every corner of the globe. The diffusion of faith into a non-believing matrix presents its own opportunities and challenges, as we shall describe later.
Renewal: The Islamic Paradigm
We illustrate our observations on the rise and fall of civilizations with the historical experience of Islam. There are at least seven milestones in the fourteen hundred year history of Islam when the Islamic civilization faced an existential challenge which it met successfully. And the struggle continues.
1. The Death of the Prophet.
The death of Prophet Muhammed was the first historical crisis faced by the Islamic community. The process by which the community met this crisis has determined its strengths and its weaknesses in the subsequent centuries. The shape of the historical edifice of Islam was cast in that hour.
The Prophet was the fountainhead of Muslim life. No other person in history occupied a position in relation to his people, as did Prophet Muhammed with respect to his. He was the focus for all social, spiritual, political, economic, military and judicial activities. He was the founder and architect of the nascent community. When he passed away, he left a vacuum that was impossible to fill. His legacy was tested immediately upon his death. At stake was the continuity of the historical process. The Prophet had welded together a community of believers transcending their allegiance to tribe, race or nationality. The glue that had cemented this process was the Qur’an and the Sunnah of the Prophet. Now the Prophet was gone and it seemed that the divisive forces that Islam had overcome would resurface and tear apart the newborn community.
The first reaction to the death of the Prophet was shock, disbelief and denial. So great was the love of the Companions for the Prophet that they could not part with their love. So central was he to the life of the community that they could not imagine a life without his presence. When Omar ibn al Khattab heard that the Prophet had passed away, he was so distraught that he drew his sword and declared: “Some hypocrites are pretending that the Prophet of God - may God’s peace and blessing be upon him — has died. By God I swear that he did not die; that he has gone to join his Lord, just as other Prophets went before. Moses was absent from his people for forty nights and returned to them after they had declared him dead. By God, the Prophet of God will return just as Moses returned. Any man who dares to perpetrate a false rumor such as Muhammed’s death shall have his arms and legs cut off by this hand.” People listened to Omar, too stupefied to believe that the man who had transformed Arabia from the backwaters of history to the forefront of the historical process was dead. The situation was grave indeed.
The resilience of Islam showed itself in the person of Abu Bakr. After confirming that the Prophet had indeed passed away, he entered the mosque where Omar was speaking to the people and recited the following passage from the Qur’an: “Muhammed is but a Prophet before whom many prophets have come and gone. Should he die or be killed, will you give up your faith? Know that whoever gives up his faith will cause no harm to God, but God will surely reward those who are grateful to Him” (Qur’an, 3:144).
It was as if the people had heard this passage for the first time; it struck them like a bolt of lightning. Omar (r) related later that when he heard it, his legs shook as he realized that the Messenger of God had indeed departed from this world. The mortality of the Prophet was established, while the transcendence of God was reaffirmed. The civilization of Islam was to be God-centered, not man-centered. Islam was to have its anchor in God and His Word. The Prophet, as the man who had brought the Divine Word and fulfilled his historical mission, had departed, but the light that had shone through him was to show the way to succeeding generations. Islam retained its transcendent character. It was to survive the physical absence of the Prophet and was to hurl itself as a dynamic force into the historical process.
The civilization of Islam met this challenge by establishing the institution of the Caliphate and affirming the continuity of historical Islam. The price that was paid in the process was a dispute in the community about who should be the leader of the community. This was the origin of the Shia-Sunni split which continues to haunt the world of Islam even to this day. (Continued next week)
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