Discovering Islam…

 

 

 

[Akbar Ahmed : The Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies and Professor
of International Relations, American University, Washington, D.C.]

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The images of Islam prevalent in the world are of brutality, fanaticism, hatred and disorder: Libyans killing policewomen in London, Palestinians hijacking passenger planes, Iranians seizing foreign embassies and Indonesians blowing up the Borobudur temple in Java. The very names of the Muslim leaders of our times—Khomeini, Gaddafi, Arafat—have become symbols of these images. It is V.S.Naipaul’s vision of Islam and Muslims (Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, 1981): ‘Rage was what I saw…Muslims crazed by their confused faith.’

 

These images stem partly from a lack of understanding of Islam among non-Muslims and partly from the failure by Muslims to explain themselves. The results are predictable: the hatred feeds on hatred. I saw ‘kill a Muslim for Christmas’ written in the London underground stations. Following a nuclear holocaust, American science fiction writer Robert Heinlein has the white survivors enslaved, men castrated and baby girls eaten by Black Muslims, neatly fusing religious and racial prejudices (Farnham’s Freehold, first published in the 1960s). The Muslim leaders, hated and despised, are reduced to Walt Disney villains: ‘Kho Maniac, Wacky Kaddafi, Yucky Arafat’ (‘Garbage pail adults’, MAD, back cover, September 1986). The repugnance is contagious. Even the staid London Economist is not immune and panders to the stereotype: ImamKhomeini was ‘Savonarola’ and Colonel Gaddafi ‘the Devil’s godfather’ on its covers. The colours, red and black, were striking and indicated hell; both men appeared minatory and forbidding.

 

For Muslims therefore, it is a good time to pause, to reflect, and to attempt to re-locate the main features of, to re-discover, Islam. We therefore take stock, not because we have arrived at any significant stage of the Islamic journey but because the sheer range of trajectories and approaches, and consequent confusion, obliges us to attempt clarification. The problem is not that there are too few answers but that there are too many.

 

We need answers to other related issues in the Islamic world: how are we to make sense in Turkey of the tensions generated by the pull of an Islamic identity on the one hand and a European one on the other? Of the seemingly endless Shia revolution in Iran? Of the ongoing process of Islamization in Pakistan? Are there common themes linking these societies, universal principles that we can discern? Or is each society responding to earlier, atavistic obsessions reflected in the complex relationship of Christian Europe to Turkey, in the history of Shiaism in Iran, and in the relation of Hinduism to South Asian Muslims, the inheritors of Pakistan? Can we make any sense of Muslim history? Or is it all random dates, the rise and fall of despots and dynasties living in marble buildings and gilded harems? Is the past dead, ossified in mechanical ritual and neglected holy texts? Or is it part of our lives?

 

For me personally—in an Islamic sense when I have just turned 40, the critical age for Muslims—it is an appropriate time to attempt the exercise. The voyage in search of Islam is a journey into my own past. It is a voyage that opens doors to the past taking me straight to the seventh century. It is also a voyage of self-discovery. The attempt to peer into myself, my culture and my roots was stimulating and gratifying, but also disturbing.

 

In order to help answer the questions posed above I will create a key, a model, an ideal-type. Max Weber’s concept of the ideal or pure type is a useful one. But we must bear in mind its limitations. It depicts an average derived over time which reflects combinations, mixtures and modifications. It is only an approximation of, not a substitute for, reality.

 

With these qualifications, we base our ideal in seventh-century Arabian society. The device will assist in explaining Muslim society and history from the inception of Islam to our times, and over space from one kind of society on one continent to another on a different one. As we apply it we will learn about different places and times.

 

The two key elements of Islam, supporting and inter-locking, are firmly and unequivocally located in one book and one life. The holy Quran is the single divine Book of the Muslims and the life is that of Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, which constitutes the sunna—his behaviour, practice, sayings and values. Together they form the Shariah, the ‘path’ for Muslims. Further instruction is obtained from the lives of the Prophet’s companions. The Prophet’s own position is central to Islam. The fundamental Islamic declaration of faith rests in belief in Allah and acceptance of Muhammad as the Prophet.

 

Together the two, a book and a life—‘we are calling out to you with the Quran in our right hand and the sunna in our left’ Hassan al-Banna would proclaim in Egypt—define and inspire the Muslim, affecting his life from birth to death. They are the primary sources of Islam. They provide us with a good idea of how a person ought to conduct himself to be called a Muslim. The ideal aims at paradise in the next world and satisfaction, if not success, in this one. We thus have not only a way of looking at the world but of living in it.

 

The Western perception of the revivalism, rediscovery or resurgence of Islam is faulty, as the West links it with Arab oil, PLO guerillas and Imam Khomeini. This is a mistake. The phenomenon has been in motion since the seventh century, continually emphasizing the drive to return to the Golden Age, the ideal times of the Prophet. Non-Muslims would usefully understand the return in the context of striving for the ideal and its values, not a turning back of the clock to remote, earlier times.

 

Certain fundamental problems which accompanied Islam’s rapid expansion and universal message, particularly the persistence of pre-Islamic social and cultural systems also need consideration. In the following chapters we will see how Islamic notions of society, history and politics were imposed on local structures and organizations, sometimes merging, sometimes clashing with them.

 

Islam comes with definite, specific ideas and does not encourage duality. We thus see the tension in the villages, away from the centres of Islamic learning, between the Islamic macro world-view and the day-to-day humdrum values dealing with kin and cattle of village society. It is the stress in society between what social scientists call the Great Tradition of a world religion and the Little Tradition of local, regional, village culture. We will define the latter as ethnicit and illustrate through cases how it is an important source of stress in contemporary Muslim society.

 

In certain ways Muslims are the same everywhere, and yet their societies are different everywhere,’ I wrote in an earlier book (Religion and Politics in Muslim Society, 1983). Confronted by the wide range and diversity of Muslim societies, the present generation of writers suggests their categorization thus: Moroccan Islam (Dale Eickelman, 1976), Pakistani Islam, Malay Islam and so on. ‘One is bound to conclude that there is not one Islam but many Islams’ (Edward Mortimer, Faith and Power: the Politics of Islam, 1982). But the categorization is not new. It is at least as old as European colonization: for instance, Indian Islam, by Murray Titus

 

(1930). This is the easy way out. And it not only simplifies grossly, it also distorts. It is no answer. We will attempt an answer below. For as it is true that in the thought of Muslim scholars and in their texts there is clarity, and a broad consensus regarding the ideal, it is also equally true that the way Muslims order their lives is sometimes far from the ideal. Economic, political and ethnic—social, cultural—pressures act to compromise notions of the ideal, thereby creating ambiguity around it. The demarcation of Muslim societies is therefore not a division between white ideal and black non-ideal but an ongoing relationship between the two marked by areas of grey. Taken together the arguments raised above will assist us in our search for a world-view, an Islamic world-view of society and history.

 

 

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