 ...But even as it took Europe many more centuries to finally compete with the Muslims in the military sphere, the quality of intellect within the Muslim world had begun to decline. The rejection of reason coupled with schools of fiqh led to an intellectual stalemate from which the Muslims have failed to recover so far.
| Until you accept the utility of reason, your thought processes remain... ummm... unreasonable. All else follows from that... |
By the 19th century most Muslim countries had been subjugated.
The movements for revival, instead of understanding the real reasons for the decline of the Muslims, took the easy route and ascribed the regression to lack of faith among the faithful. Faith was to be the magic wand, even in the absence of everything else, which would somehow raise the fallen and make them outrun everyone else. Small wonder then that even after 200 years this has not happened. If anything, Muslims are today worse off civilisationally than they were even during the heyday of classical Western imperialism when some of them tried to go back to reason, Syed Ahmed Khan being a prime example in the subcontinent.
| More shariah doesn't cut it, huh? |
It is therefore heart-rending to see that Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, the imam of Kaaba, had nothing significant or visionary to offer the over two million people who had congregated in Mecca for Haj this year. He resorted to the same platitudes about the Muslims not being good Muslims. He still wants Muslim women to remain confined to their homes because that is supposed to be their highest calling; he wants an Islamic economic system when there is no such thing in the global capitalist environment; he wants Muslims to stay away from the Western civilisation because of its 'nefarious' influence on Muslim youth; he refuted the Western charge that Islamic preachers preach violence and so on. Well, he is wrong on almost all counts.
| Wrong as wrong can be. Spectacularly wrong. Probably intentionally wrong. But he's the one who gets to share his opinion with a couple million of the faithful, having them hang on his words as though they made sense... |
It is easy to talk about all Muslims getting together. But how does one do it? Pan-Islamists have never told us that magic formula which, when applied, would bring all the Muslim states together in every conceivably significant way. Of course, in their present state, if they did, it would only add to their collective darkness rather than bring any light to the Islamic world. The Islamists do not even believe in the nation-state.
| ... unless you consider the caliphate to be a glorified nation state. |
No one suggests that to get to that kind of grand alliance, we will first have to improve the performance of the nation-states themselves. Not only has this never happened in Islamic history before, some cases of external military support notwithstanding, but today there is not one Muslim state that can fulfil the conditions of a core state that is so important for any such alliance to come into existence. The Islamic economic system is another spent argument that the imam chose to dwell upon. But let us face the truth. Even within Islam, there is not much agreement on some of the fundamentals of the system, including zakat. Moreover, even if one were to move in that direction, it would, at the minimum, call for ijtihad in light of today's complex financial dealings and systems. But if the issue of riba, as decided by the courts in Pakistan, is anything to go by, ijtihad does not come easy to us. Instead, we are inclined to sail in the boat of existing fiqh and deduce from it rather than apply inductive logic. Empirical evidence shows how poorly most notions of Islamic banking and finance have fared. In Pakistan, we have seen mudarbas and musharakas fail miserably. The story is the same wherever else states have tried to institute the Islamic economic system that has not risen beyond its medieval roots.
| That could be because it's just as artificial as the Soviet system was. Maybe more artificial, come to think of it... |
The imam's logic on women's empowerment (more appropriately women's disempowerment) is again a known factor among the Muslim clergy. They just want to lock them up and claim that Islam has the best solution to the problem of the sexes. Even as the West has come out of the Biblical depiction of Eve being born from Adam's ribs and enticing him into disobeying God, Muslims seem to have swallowed the logic of woman's inferiority and her nefarious charms, hook, line and sinker. The irony is that this goes completely against Quranic teaching.
| He's got a point there. Mohammad's wives seem to have had more personality than the current Islamic woman is allowed. |
Finally, the imam wants Muslims to stay away from Western civilisation. Presumably, for the imam, as for many Muslims, Western civilisation is about obscenity and degeneration. Well, nothing could be further from truth. Western civilisation, as Samuel Huntington correctly wrote in his controversial work on Clash of Civilisations, is not about Magna Mac, it's essentially about Magna Carta. And the memory of Magna Carta evokes more pain because it should remind us of one of bitter facts — we have not been able to develop a political theory and a succession principle. Today, not one Muslim country can boast of internal stability and a mechanism that aggregates the interests of its citizens. The darkness in the West that the imam has implied actually exists within us, which is why most Muslims would much rather be Western citizens and have rights than enjoy the "light" in their own states.
| It's built into the religion. You're not allowed to stop being a Moose limb and become something else. By extension, you're not allowed to have your own opinions. You're not allowed to be responsible for your own actions. You're obliged to sacrifice yourself in jihad. You're nothing but a resource to be disposed of as others see fit. With no individual liberties you're just cattle. |
It's time to wake up. It's time to let go of the platitudes. It's time to look within and see what has gone wrong with us. It's time to put things in a perspective. It's time to get out of our fatalism and take responsibility for our actions. It's time to realise that it is not a lack of Islam but a surfeit of literalism that has chained us to our medieval roots. |