The Making of a Muslim Manifesto

Most contemporary Muslim writings are the product of reaction. This is true of serious academic works as well as columns published in newspapers; “Quantum published in newspapers; “Quantum Notes” are no exception. This is understandable; for over two centuries now Muslims have been on the receiving end of a military, political, and economic aggression which seeks to take control of their lives in all spheres, from politics to social customs and from economy to cultural patterns. The overwhelming imbalance of material resources between the aggressors and those who have borne the aggression has produced a psychology of response steeped in reactions. And naturally, a polity faced with the threat of extinction has the right to make a final desperate cry.

This general pattern of reactionary Muslim thought is as obvious in the works of Jamal-al-Din al-Afghani and his Arab contemporaries of the nineteenth century as it was in Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s educational policies and is evident in the writings of most of the twentieth century intellectuals as well as in the economic and political decisions made by contemporary rulers of the Muslim world.

While this need to react is built into the historic condition that has produced contemporary Muslim societies, reactions alone cannot generate a new social, political and economic order and for this reason post-World War II history of the Muslim world is bereft of any success. In many ways, independence from the European colonizers was the result of a reaction and because there were no blueprints for the reconstruction of a Muslim polity in the post-independence era, little could be achieved beyond the change of rulers. This is perhaps the greatest calamity that has befallen Muslims in the last two centuries: their heroic efforts to rid themselves of colonizing European powers have produced no real independence. Surely Muslim masses are not to be blamed; they sacrificed everything. Thousands of ordinary Muslims gave their lives to gain independence. The chilling details of atrocities committed by the British and French occupation forces in India, Algeria and other parts of the occupied Muslim world testify to the splendid sacrifices of the Muslim masses. But what went wrong was at the level of leadership. At that historic juncture, when whole nations had risen to take back their rights from the occupation armies and there was a tremendous amount of energy to reconstruct new social, political and economic orders, often with sincere attempts to invoke Islam, no one appeared with a realistic blueprint of the new polity toward which a nation could strive. As a result, within the first few years of gaining independence, all Muslim countries had become entangled in a complex web of internal intrigue and foreign intervention.

Today, we still witness the bitter harvest of the failures of Muslim leadership. The situation has not improved fifty years later, at least not in the Sunni world. Theoretical formulations have not been able to generate a process of change because they have not dealt with concrete realities. It is easy enough to say that an Islamic polity is the one that will be based on the Qur’an and Sunnah, quite another matter to chalk out the details to implement the grand vision in polities like Pakistan where sectarian violence has made even mosques unsafe.

Muslim societies now face large-scale engineering aimed to produce a new cultural, economic and social order bereft of basic Islamic values, which will in the end leave them a dry conceptual faith retaining nothing but the two Shahadahs – there is no god but Allah and Muhammad (SAW) is His Messenger. Such draining of the real Islam from the Muslim world will inevitably reduce it to the status of religion in the West today. Then, not only will the state and religion be completely divorced from each other, but one person’s faith will also be completely severed from the other, and each will practice his or her Islam privately. The new order’s prescribed hollowed faith which will characterize the targeted collective body of believers, the Ummah, has already appeared and early signs of the broader calamity are visible. Muslim societies face extinction, and unless a Muslim manifesto is broadly implemented and positive change emerges within a generation, it may be too late.

Basic change comes into existence organically, through the transformation of individuals in a given society who whole-heartedly believe in an Islamic vision of life and are motivated enough to produce a collective environment conducive to promote a genuinely Islamic polity. A new generation of committed Muslims has to emerge from those who are now in their early schooling years, men and women who would know their Qur’an and Hadith as well as their sciences and who can integrate Islam into all aspects of their lives. This point needs to be truly understood by those who are concerned with the state of the Ummah: investment must be made to establish mechanisms of change aimed at the transformation of the worldview of the youth.

A new Muslim manifesto will place a very high priority on the development of a complete curriculum and training of a core corpus of teacher-trainers, followed by the establishment of a network of schools that could share resources. A uniform global Muslim educational program, with provisions for local diversity, will unify and strengthen Muslims around the world. By establishing a global waqf (endowment), Muslims will be able to pool their resources, network a large number of existing trusts and organizations and avoid duplication. A Muslim Education Trust, which would be needed to organize this program, could establish its credentials much more easily on a global scale than as a small local trust in one country.

A Muslim Manifesto needs to come into existence soon. A Muslim Manifesto needs to encompass a whole range of agendas dealing with core issues faced by the Muslim world, not just education. These include issues related to the development of a new economic order and a mechanism for a just and equitable distribution of wealth. Fortunately, Islam has many corrective measures which can produce visible change. Zakah, for instance, used to be a powerful agency for distribution of wealth; it can once again be an effective means. Likewise, the practice of endowment, (awqaf), which began with the dedication of the home of Arqam (RA) near Mount Safa, was instrumental in propelling a vast agenda of social reform for centuries. It is necessary for a large number of Muslim thinkers to engage each other for developing a manifesto. A website dedicated to such a goal, leading to more organized and focused efforts, can be an initial forum. The starting point is to depart from reactive thinking and to generate an outline of the Muslim Manifesto.