March 16, 2007

Understanding the Roots of Muslim Dilemma--II

Muzaffar Iqbal

Most of the major conflicts of the contemporary world have arisen from the historic encounter of Islam and Muslims with the post-Renaissance Western world. The Western world emerged as a dominating world power as a result of a series of transformations in its economic, political, and social structure. These changes took shape through a series of revolutions which have become the defining features of recent history: the Scientific, Industrial, and French Revolutions. What is really meant by these revolutions is a series of events emerging from a new philosophical outlook on God, humanity and nature. This new outl00k placed human reason at the center of all things and redefined boundaries of human conduct.

While Humanism was changing the face of Europe, the Muslim world was going through a process of transmutation that would deaden its centuries-old tradition of scholarship and reduce its capacity to produce knowledge to such an extent that it would finally collapse from within. In the course of that fateful century, the balance of world power would decisively shift in favor of the West. This can be quickly gleaned from basic historic facts: at the beginning of the eighteenth century, all traditional Muslim lands were under Muslim control; by its end European world hegemony was firmly established and although Muslims still controlled certain parts of the world where they had lived for centuries, they no longer ruled them in any essential manner, for behind the veneer of a local king or ruler were the invisible hands of the Europeans who would eventually dispose these puppets in the course of the next century. Though Iran and modern Turkey did not come under direct European control, these societies were not exempted from the indirect control of the Western powers.

This direct and indirect control of the Muslim world was not merely political domination; it drastically changed the social, political, economic, and cultural structures of those societies. One would expect that this transformation, which eventually produced the world in which we live, would be the subject of minute investigation by Muslims, but there is hardly an institution in the Muslim world dedicated to this task.

In the absence of any serious attention to the transmutation which reshaped the traditional Muslim world, one is left with disjointed events leading to no insight into the historic process. One can blame a George Bush or a Tony Blair for the great havoc they have brought on Iraqis, but this would only produce superficial understanding. Iraqis are not merely suffering from the aggression of neo-conservatives with their characteristic hunger for world domination; there is something much deeper in the making of this contemporary tragedy.

At the root of the contemporary Muslim dilemmas is a fissure with their own past. The world in which an educated Muslim lived in the eighteenth century was filled with things, ideas, and lifestyles which had emerged during the past millennium in an organic manner. The world in which an educated Muslim lives today is totally alien to that past. Not that one can stop the flow of history, but the extent of change is so enormous that the past has been uprooted from its rightful soil. This erosion of history expresses itself in numerous manners and is observable throughout the Muslim world in the form of a cultural schizophrenia typical of memory lapses.

In order to understand the dilemmas faced by Muslims today, one has to rediscover the past and examine those processes which led to the disappearance of the world of Saadi and Rumi. While one cannot expect one million Iraqi refugees in Syria or the culturally dispossessed masses to accomplish this task, one wonders what thousands of learned Muslim scholars doing with their learning.

The Ulama in particular are oblivious to this need. Still occupied with minute details of rituals, they fail to realize that soon there will be very few Muslims left to listen to their khutbas about where to fold hands in prayer. Not that these details are not important, but the urgent necessity to stop further erosion of faith and values is such a pressing matter that nothing can be said to have precedent over it.

The road to recovery of any ailment is through understanding the malaise. The road to recovery for the Muslim world is through understanding the great transmutation of their world through their encounter with the post-Renaissance West. This understanding can begin on a small-scale, through concerted efforts by groups of scholars who have the intellectual resources to examine various facets of the transformation which has reshaped the Muslim world during the past three centuries. These scholars need to work independently of government controls, with integrity and with the realization that their efforts are not merely theoretical investigations but a process that affects the lives of millions of human beings.

(Concluded)

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