Al-Huda
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the Message Continues ... 4/121
Newsletter for September 2011
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How Islam Lost Its Way
By Pervez Amir Ali Hoodbhoy
If the world is to be spared what future historians may call the
"century of terror," we will have to chart a perilous course
between the Scylla of American imperial arrogance and the
Charybdis of Islamic religious fanaticism. Through these waters,
we must steer by a distant star toward a careful, reasoned,
democratic, humanistic and secular future. Otherwise,
shipwreck is certain.For nearly four months now, leaders of the
Muslim community in the United States, and even President Bush,
have routinely asserted that Islam is a religion of peace that
was hijacked by fanatics on Sept. 11.These two assertions are
simply untrue. First, Islam -- like Christianity, Judaism,
Hinduism or any other religion is not about peace. Nor is it
about war. Every
religion is about absolute belief in its own superiority and the
divine right to impose its version of truth upon others. In
medieval times, both the Crusades and the Jihads were soaked in
blood. Today, there are Christian fundamentalists who attack
abortion clinics in the United States and kill doctors; Muslim
fundamentalists who wage their sectarian wars against each
other; Jewish settlers
who, holding the Old Testament in one hand and Uzis in the
other, burn olive orchards and drive Palestinians off their
ancestral land; and Hindus in India who demolish ancient mosques
and burn down churches.The second assertion is even further off
the mark. Even if Islam had, in some metaphorical sense, been
hijacked, that event did not occur three months ago. It was well
over seven centuries ago that Islam suffered a serious trauma,
the effects of which refuse to go away. Where do Muslims stand
today? Note that I do not ask about Islam; Islam is an
abstraction. Maulana Abdus
pointed out that Islam holds very different meaning for
different people. Within my own family, hugely different kinds
of Islam are practiced. The religion is as heterogeneous as
those who believe and follow it. There is no "true Islam."
Today, Muslims number 1 billion. Of the 48 countries with a full
or near Muslim majority, none has yet evolved a stable
democratic political system. In fact, all Muslim countries are
dominated by self-serving corrupt elites who cynically advance
their personal interests and steal resources from their people.
None of these countries has a viable educational system or a
university of international stature.
Reason, too, has been waylaid.
You will seldom see a Muslim name as you flip through scientific
journals, and if you do, the chances are that this person lives
in the West. There are a few exceptions: Pakistani Abdus Salam,
together with Americans Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow, won
the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979. I got to know Salam
reasonably well; we even wrote a book preface together. He was a
remarkable man, terribly in love with his country and his
religion. And yet he died deeply unhappy, scorned by
Though genuine scientific achievement is rare in the
contemporary Muslim world, pseudo-science is in generous supply.
A former chairman of my department has calculated the speed of
heaven: He maintains it is receding from Earth at one centimeter
per second less than the speed of light. His ingenious method
relies upon a verse inthe Islamic holy book, which says that
worship on the night
on which the book was revealed is worth a thousand nights of
ordinary worship.
He states that this amounts to a time-dilation factor of 1,000,
which he puts into a formula of Einstein's theory of special
relativity.
A more public example: One of two Pakistani nuclear engineers
recently arrested on suspicion of passing nuclear secrets to the
Taliban had earlier proposed to solve
Today's sorry situation contrasts starkly with the Islam of
yesterday. Between the 9th and 13th centuries -- the Golden Age
of Islam the only people doing decent work in science,
philosophy or medicine
were Muslims. Muslims not only preserved ancient learning, they
also made substantial innovations. The loss of this tradition
has proven tragic for Muslim peoples.
Science flourished in the Golden Age of Islam because of a
strong rationalist and liberal tradition, carried on by a group
of Muslim thinkers known as the Mutazilites.
But in the 12th century, Muslim orthodoxy reawakened,
spearheaded by the Arab cleric Imam Al-Ghazali. Al-Ghazali
championed revelation over reason,
predestination over free will. He damned mathematics as
being against Islam, an intoxicant of the mind that weakened
faith.
Caught in the viselike grip of orthodoxy, Islam choked. No
longer would Muslim, Christian and Jewish scholars gather and
work together in the royal courts. It was the end of tolerance,
intellect and science in the Muslim world. The last great Muslim
thinker, Abd-al Rahman Ibn Khaldun, belonged to the 14th
century.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world moved on. The Renaissance
brought an explosion of scientific inquiry in the West. This
owed much to translations of Greek works carried out by Arabs
and other Muslim contributions, but they were to matter little.
Mercantile capitalism and technological progress drove Western
countries in ways that were often brutal and at times genocidal
-- to rapidly colonize the Muslim world from
Despite widespread resistance from the orthodox, the logic of
modernity found 19th-century Muslim adherents. Some seized on
the modern idea of the nation-state. It is crucial to note that
not a single Muslim nationalist leader of the 20th century was a
fundamentalist.
However, Muslim and Arab nationalism, part of a larger
anti-colonial nationalist current across the
Pressed from outside, corrupt and incompetent from within,
secular Muslim governments proved unable to defend national
interests or deliver social justice. They began to frustrate
democracy to preserve their positions of power and privilege.
These failures left a vacuum that Islamic religious movements
grew to fill -- in
The lack of scruple and the pursuit of power by the
The rest is by now familiar: After the Soviet Union collapsed,
the
What should thoughtful people
infer from this whole narrative?
For Muslims, it is time to stop wallowing in self-pity:
Muslims are not helpless victims of conspiracies hatched by an
all-powerful, malicious West. The fact is that the decline of
Islamic greatness took place long before the age of mercantile
imperialism. The causes were essentially internal. Therefore
Muslims must be introspective and ask what went wrong.
Muslims must recognize that their societies are far larger, more
diverse and complex than the small homogeneous tribal society in
Muslims must not look to the likes of bin Laden; such people
have no real answer and can offer no real positive alternative.
To glorify their terrorism is a hideous mistake: The unremitting
slaughter of Shiites, Christians and Ahmadis in their places of
worship in
The
Americans will also have to accept that their triumphalism and
disdain for international law are creating enemies everywhere,
not just among Muslims. Therefore they must become less arrogant
and more like other peoples of this world our collective
survival lies in recognizing that religion is not the solution;
neither is nationalism. We have but one choice: the path of
secular humanism,
based upon the principles of logic and reason. This alone offers
the hope of providing everybody on this globe with the right to
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
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