The Fire This Time - Part 3
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA
In a shrunken world, religious leadership is too serious a business to be left to the professional mullahs. The modern world demands that those who speak for a religion before a global audience must have a firm grounding not only in the traditional disciplines but also in modern communications, science, technology, mathematics, history and sociology.
When I was a graduate student at Caltech more than fifty years ago, I shared my office with an ordained Catholic priest, father Arenz. Father Arenz held an earned doctorate in theology from a distinguished school near Princeton and had been sent by his archdiocese to obtain a PhD in Aeronautics from Caltech which at that time was the best school for space sciences in the world. I lost touch with him over the years but I am certain wherever he served he excelled in presenting a synthesis of his tradition with the best of modern scientific knowledge.
There is nothing equivalent to such training in the world of Islam. There are fifty-seven Muslim countries. Almost a quarter of the population of the world is Muslim. But there is not one academy that produces scholars who are at home at once with the traditional, natural and human sciences. Our higher institutions of religious learning at Nadwa or Deoband excel in the traditional religious sciences but offer little or no training in the modern scientific disciplines. Al Azhar and Qum have made an attempt to modernize their syllabus but they still have long ways to go. It was not always so.
Imam Abu Haneefa was not only one of the greatest of mujtahideen but was also a very successful and rich merchant, a mathematician of repute, an accomplished architect and city planner who was responsible for the layout of the city of Baghdad when it was founded in 760 CE. In the classical period, Muslim scholars were trained in the Qur’an and Hadith, mathematics, the languages, discourse, astronomy, medicine, chemistry and tasawwuf. These disciplines were a part of the curriculum as late as the Mogul era. The marginalization of the syllabus in our religious academies is a recent phenomenon, dating back to the onset of the colonial era. I have covered in depth the history of this marginalization in the Encyclopedia of Islamic History www.historyofislam.com .
Great civilizations use every major challenge to renew themselves from within and rise to new heights of achievement. Lesser ones recoil and disappear. Great moments in history are occasions to reshape, mold and transform a civilization. Where was Muslim scholarship during the recent upheaval? Did it rise to the challenge and use the upheaval as an occasion to chart new ground for religious and interreligious discourse? Or, was it bogged down in descending spirals of condemnations, denials and self-righteous proclamations? There were indeed condemnations of the movie and of the violent response to it. Are mere condemnations and hand-wringing enough? Muslim scholars are stuck in ancient paradigms, unable to extricate themselves from its inertia and move forward or lead others to new vistas in the unfolding panorama of God’s will through human history.
It is obvious to me that there is a crying need for an accepted etiquette in interfaith and interreligious dialogue. Charity begins at home. Muslim scholars must first get their own house in order. The terminology of “Muslim”, “Kafir”, “Darul Harab”, “Darlul Islam” must give rise to a new terminology based on genuine faith, mutual respect and shared space. This, in my opinion, is the message of the Qur’an.
I am not an attorney nor am I a mufti. But as a practicing Muslim who fears God and the Judgment Day, I would advance a suggested Declaration for Interfaith Etiquette along the following lines:
“As a Muslim, I believe in the Oneness of God, and in the Angels, the Books and all the Messengers of God;
I believe that the Qur’an is the last of the revealed Books and Muhammed (pbuh) is the last of the Messengers of God;
I hold the Qur’an in the highest esteem as the Word of God;
I accord the most profound honor and love for the Prophet Muhammed (pbuh);
I expect those who do not share my faith to respect my sanctified space when they chose to enter it, and if they do disagree with me, to do so with due respect;
I undertake on my part to honor and respect the sacred space of other faiths, and if I do disagree with them, I will do so with due respect;
I hereby undertake to work with the utmost zeal to foster mutual respect for the sanctified space of all faiths and to honor the shared humanity of all men and women on this planet independent of their origin, race, color or creed.”
The recent upheavals in the Muslim world are of extraordinary historical import. More specifically, the Arab spring marks a turning point in the history of the peoples of the Middle East. There have been social movements, religious movements, anti-colonial movements in parts of the Arab world but one has to go back centuries to find a movement that swept across the entire region. Comparing it to the Abbasid Revolution of the eighth century would be an exaggeration but comparing it to the post- World War II nationalist movements that brought in Nasser of Egypt and the Baath party of Iraq and Syria would be an understatement. For a moment, the Arab masses woke up and gave vent to their pent-up frustrations through what Jesse Jackson used to call “street heat”.
No sooner did the Arab spring start than forces opposed to it went into action and co-opted it intellectually and suppressed it militarily. The motive forces behind the Arab uprising were two-fold: (1) the increasing economic centralization which left out millions from the benefits of growth in trade, industry and commerce, and (2) the rampant corruption that has overtaken their societies like a tsunami inundating the political, social, economic and even religious landscape. Both of these are universal issues. The global economic processes have worked in favor of a few to the disadvantage of the many. While there are more billionaires today than at any time in history, millions have very little to eat and no jobs to support their families. Two-tiered economies flourish in most part of the world: one for the rich and the other for the poor. The same cup of coffee that is sold for ten cents in a hut and served in an unfired clay cup is served next door in a five star hotel to the wealthy for ten dollars in glazed Chinese cups. We were the first ones to point this out, way before the outbreak of Arab Spring in our article on Egypt, under the title, One River, Two Egypts, published in Pakistan Link.
Graft and corruption gnaw at the social fabric of a society just as termites gnaw at the inside of a tree and ultimately destroy it. That is why the Qur’an repeatedly warns against the perils of corruption. Corruption saps the creative energies of a people and makes rational, strategic business planning impossible. How can you plan to build a bridge when more than half of your budget is siphoned off by graft and corruption? In some Muslim societies, the percentage consumed by graft is even higher. The Arab Spring was the voice of millions that cried out aloud: “Enough is enough! Give us a level playing field.” (To be continued)
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