August 21, 2006

Securing Our Way of Life

Dr. Muzaffar Iqbal

 To be called a revivalist is an honour no Muslim scholar has ever wished to proclaim for himself, for it carries a heavy responsibility. Even the great al-Ghazali did not dare to claim it for himself, though posterity bestowed upon him this title and his magnus opus, Ihya Ulum al-Din, continues to serve the purpose of revival of Islam in thousands of searching hearts a thousand years after its first publication. In Islamic tradition, the word “revivalist” carries specific meaning because of the Prophetic tradition which informs us that God will revive Islam at the head of every century through a person of his household. Such a person is called a mujaddid. This Prophetic tradition has been personified by many over the last fourteen Islamic centuries, though the knowledge of the identity of a genuine mujaddid has always remained confined to a small minority.

A revivalist in the West, however, is anyone who dares to speak of Islam as the only viable and true path open to Muslim societies for an honorable existence in a world dominated by the West. This adhoc definition makes allowance for equating the revivalists with fundamentalists. Once this nexus has been established, then it is not difficult to make the next transition: that is, from a “fundamentalist” to a “terrorist”. Thus, anyone who speaks of Islam as a defining factor for Muslims, anyone who seeks to establish Islamic societies based on the Qur’an and the teachings of the Prophet in lands where Muslims have lived for over a millennium is a fundamentalist. This is not allowed. This is Islamic extremism. In reality, it is a call for establishing a way of life exemplified by the Prophet—a way of life every Muslim aspires to live. This is not acceptable while it is perfectly legitimate for all sorts of Western ideologues and political leaders to advocate and support invasions and destructions of other lands to “secure our way of life”.

The familiar rhetoric is simple enough: We in the West have the “global values” of fairness, justice and freedom. Islamic extremists threaten these values. We must, therefore, attack and invade their lands in order to secure our way of life. This perfectly “logical” reasoning has been repeated so many times that a significant number of ordinary Europeans and North Americans have come to regard it as Gospel truth, without giving it a second thought. A recent survey shows that 40% of Americans still believe in the presence of those mythical weapons of mass destruction in possession of Saddam Hussein which threatened their way of life. Given this mindset, it is not surprising to find numerous hateful emails in my inbox after the publication of a “Quantum Note”. I trash these unceremoniously, for there is no point in replying to those who see in calls to establish truly Islamic societies nothing but an imaginary destruction of their way of life. But to be called a revivalist/fundamentalist by someone who has a doctorate in Islamic studies from McGill University (Canada) and who teaches Islam at the University of Queensland (Australia) deserves a response.

The person in question is Dr. Roxanne D. Marcotte. In a review on my 2002 book, Islam and Science (Ashgate Publishing), published in Ars Disputandi (Volume 6, July 2006), she wrote: “The ideological underpinning of the work constitutes the hallmark of a familiar holistic revivalistic (fundamentalist) discourse. At the heart of all revivalist projects is an ‘idealized’ version of Islam that the ‘vanguard’... attempts to re-actualize and implement via the establishment of an Islamic Society/State.” Dr. Marcotte tells her readers that the book falls in the “familiar holistic revivalist (fundamentalist)” category because it proposes a solution for the revival of a truly Islamic scientific tradition through the “(i) revival of the umma (political entity), (ii) a return to Arabic as lingua franca of the Islamic world, (iii) the reintroduction of the traditional (religious) system of education, and (iv) a return to an Islamic political system and its (traditional) institutions.” She then concludes that according to my vision of an “idealized Islam”, this solution would lead to a situation where “Islamic sciences will once again thrive when scientists will be educated and trained in an ‘organic’ and living Islamic tradition (read: a re-Islamized society). Islamic beliefs and worldviews (sic) will become producers of an Islamic scientific tradition once the Qur’an and the sunna reintroduce this ‘matrix’”.

Notwithstanding the conceptual inaccuracies introduced by her through insertion of qualifiers in brackets, what she sees as problematic in my book is “the false assumption that Islam, or any religious tradition, was and, more problematic, can be the driving agent that produces a scientific tradition.” To be sure, she will not see her conclusions to have been driven by an ideological commitment (only the works of “Muslim revivalists” are driven by such un-academic underpinnings). Further, she would not question even for a second her firmly rooted assumption that there is nothing unique about Islam. After all, she has learned through her own study of Islam in the western Academy that Islam is just like any other religion which can be dissected through the analytic apparatus provided by the Academy. Of course, she is aware that Muslims claim that Islam is unique among all religions because its revealed Book remains uncorrupted, because the life which practically demonstrated how to live the message of the Qur’an remains an operative reality in the hearts of 1.5 billion human beings, but such claims have little merit; these are just the claims of the revivalists/fundamentalists which need not be taken into consideration by academics.

Further, Dr. Marcotte and other “scholars” of Islam in the West would like to tell us that Islam has no “historic agency” whatsoever. That it produced no science. This makes Islam an inert set of beliefs, bereft of any inherent transforming force which transforms individual lives when Islam is truly lived by a believer. And when individual lives are transformed, societies automatically revive. This is exactly how the ideologues of the new American empire would like to see Islam. This is how they can secure their way of life—by removing from Islam its inherent force. Notwithstanding their wishes, Islam is not about to become this inert, sanitized religion.

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