Extremism and an Opportunity for a Knowledge-based Civilizational Renewal - 4
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA

Modern Extremism

Extremism is the bitter fruit from a thorny bush that has been allowed to fester and grow for over four hundred years. A cogent argument can be made that the political and social decay of the Islamic world is directly related to the loss of spirituality and the consequent ethical and social decay. Mogul India thrived as long as it followed the inclusive Sufi path charted out by Emperor Akbar. More than a century of peace vaulted India into the position of the richest country on earth, accounting for over 22 percent of the GDP of the world by the year 1700 CE. It was richer than China, richer than the Ottoman Empire, richer than all of Europe put together. In 1679 CE, Aurangzeb reinstated the jizya on non-Muslims, a tax that had been abandoned by Akbar, alienating the Rajputs who had provided a firm anchor for the Mogul empire on the soil of Hindustan. The Fatawa- i-Alamgiri, a monumental compilation of legal edicts, formulated at the direction of the emperor had the unforeseen effect of social fragmentation; it gave legal underpinnings to stratified social and religious structures based upon class, income and religion. It solidified the hold of Muslim ulama on political and administrative structures that had been eliminated a century earlier by Emperor Akbar. At the same time it weakened the hold of the Sufi shaykhs and the zawiya which had provided a shared and egalitarian spiritual space for people of different faiths and varied social ranks. We observe a similar development in Safavid Iran at about the same time. Morality flows from the spirituality that animates all human beings. It comes from within and is a gift from God. It cannot be forced. Within a generation after the promulgation of the Fatawa, the empire was consumed by ethical rot from within, a fact acknowledged by an aging Aurangzeb himself in wistful letters to his son, Prince Muhammed Shah.

Centuries of colonialism followed. India was the first great non-Western civilization to fall to Europe. Much of Asia and Africa followed. The impact of colonialism was to weaken the social structures and devastate the educational institutions that had grown up over a span of a thousand years in the colonized lands. It was the beginning of the Age of Discontinuity in the Islamic world. Political impotence provided further opportunities for the growth of exclusivist, rejectionist and extremist ideologies.

The two World Wars exhausted Europe, colonialism ended and it seemed as if a new era of enlightened international cooperation had dawned. But alas! It was not to be. The victorious allies from World War II were divided into two camps, the capitalist and the communist, and a cold war emerged. This bipolar world lasted until 1990 when the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its own bureaucracy. A new era began, unipolar, dominated by the neocons of America. Overarching these two periods was the financial domination of the United States sanctified in the paramount American dollar as the exchange currency of the world. Colonialism ended but the reigns of economic power stayed with Western bankers.

The post-World War II period saw the realignment of national boundaries and the emergence of new nation states. South Asia was partitioned. Israel appeared on the map and fought a series of wars with the Arab states. There emerged substantial Muslim minorities in India, China, Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and North America. Almost a third of all Muslims lived as minorities in nation states, each with its own constitution and its own culture.

In retrospect, this period, between 1945 and 1990 provided a golden opportunity for the world of Islam to change its direction from self-absorbing narcissism to an outward reach across the globe, as one civilization to another, joining hands to fulfill the divine human mission to serve. But this was not to be. The cold war had provided opportunities for smaller players to operate in the crevices between the two antagonist camps and rediscover their existential identities. This opportunity was squandered by the ruling classes in exchange for palaces and a pittance.

The civilizational winds that had captured and pushed the Islamic world to the conservative right since the eighteenth century continued unabated and with full force. The intellectual energies of the Muslims were spent more on carving out Islamic nation states than creating interfaces with other civilizations in a rapidly shrinking technological world. The poetry and prose of the great philosopher-poet Allama Iqbal had provided a spurt for Islamic nationalism in South Asia in the pre-World War II period. The trend continued after the war. Hassan al Banna and Syed Qutub in Egypt and Maulana Abul Ala Maududi in South Asia stood on the shoulders of Ibn Taymiya, Ahmed Sirhindi, Shaykh Abdel Wahab, Shah Dehlavi, Uthman don Fodio and provided dialectic energy for right wing forces. These were highly influential in capturing the attention of educated youth in Muslim lands. Very little was done to provide an intellectual framework for an Islamic life as one in a multitude of civilizations in an interconnected world. To my knowledge, the only feeble attempt in this direction was made by my former colleague, the late Dr Syed Zainul Abedin, an Aligarhtrained American social scientist, through the Journal of Muslim Minorities published in the 1970s and 1980s from King Abdel Aziz University in Madina, Saudi Arabia. Even this effort fizzled out after his death. So, when the wheels of fortune turned and there were social and political pressures on Muslim communities, the Islamic landscape was bereft of intellectual energies to cope with the pressures. Extremism was the result.

The pressures on the Islamic communities have increased enormously since 1990. This phase started with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The invasion destroyed the traditional tribal structure of Afghan society and set in motion forces that continue to destabilize not only Afghanistan but the neighboring countries as well. The Carter Administration cultivated the Taliban as a resistance force to Soviet occupation. When the Soviets left in 1989, exhausted from the war, the Taliban took over, unleashing their own brand of coercive dogma on a hapless and suffering population. The events of 9/11 happened followed by American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq with consequent devastations on a wide swath of territories extending from Central Asia to the Mediterranean. Without the countervailing force of the Soviet bloc which was formally dissolved in 1991, the West has had a field day in intervening in the nations of the Middle East. The destruction of Libya in 2011 is an illustration. The reasons for these military interventions are complex and primarily economic but the end result is the same. The death of the Soviet bloc denied the West a bogeyman for marshalling its populace for its hegemonist goals. A new bogeyman had to be invented. What else but Islam? Since the Islamic world lacks the economic muscle and political power to confront the West, as did the former Soviet Union, the assault was formulated in ideational terms. Samuel Huntington’s book, The Clash of Civilizations (1992), attempts to give this assault a philosophical foundation, anointing it with an aura of inevitability A social scientist can decipher the birth, careful nurturing and growth of Islamophobia over a span of half a century. Up until the Second World War, the image of a Muslim as seen by Hollywood movies was that of a handsome Arab in long, flowing white robes who was as much enamored of fast horses as white European women. After the tragedy of Palestine in 1948, the focus shifted to the Palestinians. Gradually, it was expanded to include all Arabs. After the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1971, the net of hatred was extended to all Muslims. The rise of the neocons during the Bush administration seemed to open the flood gates for anti-Islamic literature. The publication of The Satanic Verses (1988) by Salman Rushdie was a first salvo in this direction. What was until then a tirade against Muslims turned into a jugular assault on the person of Prophet Muhammed (pbuh) and finally the Qur’an itself.

An Opportunity for Knowledge-based Renewal

The Islamic community is caught completely unprepared for this new challenge. After towing the line of conservative ulema for four hundred years, the Muslim mind is unable to formulate a cohesive intellectual response to the current ideational challenge which spares neither the person of the Prophet nor the Word of God. For over a thousand years Islamic scholarship has been preoccupied with fulfilling the ahkam (the do’s and don’ts). That is understandable. But it overlooks the higher ethic of creation, to know Him through His Signs which He offers in profusion in nature, in human history and within the soul. Absent also is engagement and negotiation with other civilizations in the shared, common space of a shrinking world. Great civilizations renew themselves and rise up to new heights when faced with challenges. Weak civilizations recoil when they meet a challenge, wither away and disappear from the canvas of history. Islam is a great civilization embraced by more than a quarter of the people of the earth. It has demonstrated time and again its capacity to rediscover itself and overcome adversity, as it did after the Mongol deluge. The renewal must come from within and must be based upon the universal, loving message of the Qur’an. Knowledge is the antidote for ignorance just as Truth is the antidote for falsehood. The basis for knowledge and the Truth in Islam is the Qur’an and the Seerah (path, methodology) of the Prophet. In response to the current global challenge, let there emerge a knowledge-based society, immersed in the Qur’an and the seerah of the Prophet that extends its hands in love to all humankind. The takleef (burden) that history has placed on the Islamic community in America is to build such a society. “God does not place a burden on a soul greater than it can bear” (The Qur’an, 2:286) The Prophet founded such a knowledgebased society in Madina. It had its basis in the loving, universal message of the Qur’an. The Prophet was, in the words of Aisha (r), an embodiment of the Qur’an. The current challenge demands a transformation of Islamic civilization, not just a riposte to the thrusts of the Islamophobe. This is an historic opportunity that presents itself once in a thousand years. The Islamic community in North America is in an ideal to take the lead for this transformation. Every educated Muslim, man and woman, must learn the Qur’an, its inner spiritual meaning as well as its outer meaning, in the original Arabic if possible; if not, then, from a good translation in his native tongue. How can one defend what one has not studied? Only a person who knows the Qur’an and the seerah can engage in a dialectic with the Islamophobes who spare neither the Prophet nor the Word of God from the acidity of their tongue or the prickly tip of their pen. And only a person with knowledge can dispel the darkness that shrouds the warped mind of the extremist. Religions collide when they descend from their transcendent mission of divine servitude and are used to define group identities. Islam has a divine mission to serve (“I created not beings of fire and beings of clay except to serve Me”, The Qur’an). Extremism has shattered this grand vision into a thousand pieces.

The audience of the Qur’an is all humankind. The message is general. The guidance to the believers is specific. The seerah (literal meaning, path) embraces the Prophetic methods and processes. It is independent of time and space. One can learn from it no matter when and where one lives. The kingdom of Islam is the kingdom of the heart. Its fortress is taqwa, the consciousness of the divine. Justice is its banner. Its guidance is from the Word of God and it becomes a witness by the Light of Muhammad. Its reason to be is service. Nature and history are its teachers. As Mevlana Rumi expressed it, this kingdom is neither of the East nor of the West. It is the kingdom of the spirit, the kingdom of God. This kingdom cannot be invaded by the assault of the Islamophobe nor can it be demolished by the acts of the extremist. This, in essence, is the secret of divine surrender. This, in essence, is the answer to extremism.