May 05, 2006
Quantum Note
No Time to Mourn
Dr. Muzaffar Iqbal
Bombs, charred remains of bodies, severed heads and limbs, twisted metal, and shattered glass are images of violence which have become commonplace. When they appear on TV screens they appear with a place name attached to them. More often than not, that place is cities like Karachi, Baghdad, Kabul, Jerusalem, Ghaza, and Qandahar. More often than not, violence of this kind happens within the geographical region of the traditional Islamic lands—the middle belt of the planet where Muslims have lived for centuries. By contrast, such random violence is almost absent from the lands of Europeans and their extensions (North America, Australia, New Zealand). Why?
Violence is the product of a violent inner fissure within the perpetrators of the crime, a breakdown of humanness, a total plunge into the dark abyss of non-humanity. Given the existential nature of humanity, the person committing such random violence sinks into the raw animal form, negating all traits of the spirit infused into the physical body thus endowed with reason, intellect, compassion, mercy, and love. This kind of violence was almost unheard of until our own times. At least, no one committed acts of violence which would take lives of hundreds of human beings in the twinkling of an eye.
Why is such violence a typical characteristic of our times? What is so peculiar about this time? We are witnessing a time in which the killer does not know why he is killing and the killed do not know why they are killed; this is precisely what a Prophetic saying had foretold. The time mentioned by the Prophet of Islam is now at hand. No one knows how this raw and random violence is begotten and no one has a clue how to stop it. The news flashes seen or heard in horror, are forgotten as soon as the next day or the day after; no one even has time for mourning; such is the speed of events.
Violence begets violence, an age-old axiom tells us. What violence have people of these traditional Islamic lands suffered, that they continue to produce more violence? What has robbed them of their humanity to such an extent that the cycle of violence does not stop? What is so rotten in their psyche that they have forgotten the sanctity of life so central to the message of Islam? Your blood and lives and properties are inviolable, the Prophet of Islam had said on the day he delivered his farewell sermon. He also said that a Muslim is the one from whose hands and tongue another Muslim remains safe. What, then, is so corrupted in the minds and hearts of those who continue to blast bombs in crowded places, indiscriminately killing the young and the old? Do they not see any consequences of their deeds?
Of course, we must distinguish between the raw and meaningless violence of the kind so often witnessed in Pakistan from the armed resistance of oppressed people whose lands are occupied by foreign armies. Resistance against oppression is a duty of every Muslim, we are told by none other than the Prophet himself. Upon witnessing oppression, he said, oppose it by hand; if you cannot do that, then by your tongue and if you cannot do so, then by your heart and that is the weakest kind of faith. What is abhorrent, therefore, is not resistance against foreign occupations, but the kind of violence that has no meaning whatsoever.
Those who merely wish to find scapegoats are quick to label this raw and meaningless violence as “religious extremism”. This is, indeed, a meaningless way out of a meaningless situation. A term empty of content is applied to a real phenomena and the matter is considered closed. Religions, especially Islam, cannot be extreme by definition, for Islam is the middle path, the most noble of all paths. If anything, it is an extreme departure from Islam which brings a person or a group to such a horrible state of violence. What, then, are the causes of this violence? In order to answer this question, we must ask: what brings a human being to such a low state? Does it happen in a flash or is it a process that takes place over time? A common-sense response would be in favour of the latter. If this breakdown of humanity occurs through a process, then what are the ingredients of that process? A total absence of religious consciousness--that is to say, a total oblivion to the reality of life and the Hereafter--must be the most important factor in this process, for all other factors (poverty, lack of education, and the like) are secondary.
Thus, rather than being a result of religious extremism, violence of the kind we are discussing is a product of an absence of religion. It is the absence of the consciousness of the Creator—and the entire range of beliefs associated with that consciousness—that produces this descent of humanity. When human beings are left to their own selves, without the shining light of faith, reason breaks down under stress and rationality gives way to total blindness. It requires a special kind of circumstances to produce this breakdown of the rational mind. That special combination of helplessness, poverty, despair, and extreme awareness of futility of everything is present in the Muslim lands now. This is why we see this kind of violence in these lands. Occasional scenes of such raw violence can also be seen in those societies where the absence of religion has become a norm. An American high school student, for instance, takes a gun and randomly shoots at his class fellows. But such a breakdown of the rational mind is rare in those societies because the other factors (poverty, despair, helplessness, meaninglessness, etc.) are not so pronounced.
In the traditional lands of Islam, people cannot live without religious consciousness, because religion is all around them; when they do, their rational minds break down sooner than those living in societies where religion is not a public phenomena anymore. The remedy is either complete elimination of Islam from the public sphere, as is being proposed by various Western thinkers and their clients, or a true return to Islam. The former will lead to the destruction of Islam as a living religion in the Muslim lands, the latter to a blissful state of existence in the here and now as well as in the Hereafter. The choice is obvious.
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