January 19, 2007
On that fateful day of September 622, some 1427 lunar years ago, when the Prophet of Islam left his beloved Makkah on a journey that would simultaneously mark the beginning of his Hijrah (migration for the sake of Allah) and the birth of the first Muslim state in Madinah, Islam had already become the obsession of those who found it against their beliefs and ways of life. Neither the number of Muslims in Makkah at the time of Hijrah nor their material power was of any real threat, but the powerful, rich, and well-armed clans of Quraysh felt threatened by the very message to such an extent that they decided to kill the Prophet to solve the “problem of Islam” once and for all.
This obsession with Islam and Muslims has once again become the most apparent characteristic of those who do not accept it, though there are significant differences between the two times as well as important parallels. In 622, those who found Islam unacceptable had reached a state of desperation; they could neither live with it nor eliminate it. In 2007, we are in the same situation. In 622, Muslims were weak, poor, and far less equipped than their enemies; in 2007, we have the same situation. In 622, Islam was a stranger; there were less than five hundred Muslims in the world; in 2007, Islam has once again become a stranger, though in not quite the same manner.
Islam can be said to have become a stranger once again even though every fifth person now living on earth is a Muslim, in a manner foretold by the Prophet. He is reported to have said to one of his Companions, “Islam began as a stranger, and a time will come when it will again become a stranger”. This aspect of Islam is reflected in all spheres of the contemporary life—from politics to armed conflicts and from interpersonal relations to the major issues of world economies and statecraft.
Islam is a stranger today not only in lands where Muslims are a minority but also in the traditional lands of Islam where Muslims have lived for centuries. This is true of all places, even of Makkah and Madinah; exceptions may only be found in some remote villages, deserts, and oases where Bedouins still live according their centuries-old pattern of life.
Islam is a stranger today because the contemporary world has been shaped by forces unleashed by man-made ideologies which regard the worldview based on revelation as old fables which harken back to a time when humanity was still in a primitive stage of development. This evolutionary view of history—a characteristic product of the post-Renaissance era—is built upon beliefs and ideologies which consider human reason to be the ultimate arbitrator of all affairs. This view was unleashed in Europe along with the two powerful revolutions that now shape our world: the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century an intellectual revolution we now call Humanism. These two revolutions attempted to remove the last traces of the Divinity from the world of nature and affairs of humanity.
It is these two revolutions which have made Islam a stranger in the contemporary world, even for many Muslims. During the course of the twentieth century the Muslim world has embraced the underpinnings of these two revolutions, if not their overt manifestations, to such an extent that Islamic space has become an extinct entity even in the heartland of Islam. The directional forces and ideologies produced by these two revolutions govern public and private life; even though Islam is practiced in many parts of the Muslim world, its practice is compartmentalized to such an extent that it has been effaced as a governing force. From Makkah—the most sanctified place on earth—to the farthest region of the world where Muslims live, all are subsumed into the same race: become modern, catch up with the times, adopt and become like those who have shaped the world in which we live.
The aim of these movements is variously called enlightenment, modernity, development, and the like, but these are merely different labels for the same product: a world shaped by ideologies and beliefs foundationally alien to Islam. At the heart of this maddening race to catch up to the rest of the world—which is essentially a race to become like the West—is the grand failure of Muslim intellectuals and scholars who lived during that cataclysmic era when the two aforementioned revolutions in Europe were taking shape.
As if immersed in some impenetrable siesta, Muslim leaders of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries remained totally oblivious to the forces being unleashed in the Europe of their times—forces which soon arrived at their shores with material power they could not match. But more than the material power of the European colonizers, it was their own slumber that enchained Muslims and made them easy prey to the thousand and one ways of manipulation by those who wished to enslave them in order to reconstruct the world in their own manner.
Whatever the causes of that grand failure, the most amazing aspect of the new Hijri year beginning this week is the contemporary obsession of the West with Islam and Muslims. Islam and Muslims are not only the most written about topics in the media; they are also the most sought-after subject in the academic world. One needs only to browse through Books in Print to ascertain that Islam and Muslims have become one of the highest priority of major Western publishers. Most of this coverage is negative, hysterical, and filled with fear, but that aside, their basic obsession is like that of the powerful clans of Quraysh some 1427 years ago.
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