Islam is the religion that gave birth to the western Enlightenment, says Atif Iqbal Malik - so why do Muslims now find themselves in conflict with the west?

What starts off as a beautiful idea, with a hope of mollifying the pain of a bewildered mankind, soon degenerates into a rotting mass of rituals. These rituals then play into the hands of what the Quran calls zalimin – the people who exercise their repressive stranglehold over the unsuspecting, wishful ‘believers’. Is Islam a mere idea, lying moribund in the reminiscences of Cordova, Istanbul and Delhi architectures, or does it have a different identity? The whole view of the Islam-West dichotomy is a farce, a criminal intervention on the part of ‘western intellectuals’ into what would (or should) have been a symbiotic relationship between the two.

Western Civilisation

Briffault, in his Making of Humanity, credits Roger Bacon as the harbinger of western civilisation. Bacon introduced the scientific method of investigation, which ushered in the age of enlightenment and paved the way for renaissance in Europe.

Bacon was educated in Muslim universities in Andalusia. It was there that he learnt empirical methods of investigating the universe. His Arab teachers had developed this method and had used them in diverse fields of enterprise: Ibn-e Sina in human physiology; Ibn-e Rushd in mathematics and jurisprudence; and Ibn-e Khalladun in sociology. All epitomise the Arab mind of the Middle Ages – a sceptical, observant and rational mind that would not give in to dogma in its unrelenting and diligent pursuit of truth. The fact that Ibn-e Rushd was exiled by Caliph Mansur for his heretical views is a case in point.

What was the spirit behind this sceptical worldview, so uncharacteristic of that age? For someone who has read the Quran, this question is not at all baffling: “Do they not look at camels, how they have been created; and towards the sky, how it has been hoisted; and towards mountains, how they have been fixated; and towards earth, how it has been spread.” This Quranic spirit of free enquiry found its way from the people of the desert to Roger Bacon and then to Europe, culminating in the enlightenment that is attributed to John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Francis Bacon.

European Renaissance, therefore, owes itself to the Quran – a fact vehemently promulgated by Allama Iqbal. Therefore what is ethnocentrically professed as western civilisation is in fact an Islamic civilisation, albeit a contorted one.

Islamic Civilisation

Islam, at least in theory, claims to provide a cure to all the ailments of today’s man, forcing its way into the social, political, physical and metaphysical spheres of life, all at the same time. This claim is not baseless if we keep in mind the fact that the word used by the Quran for Islam is deen, and not madhab. While the former is almost impossible to translate into English with a single word, the latter, being the literal translation of the word ‘religion’ connotes a dogmatic countenance that stands incompatible with the dynamic, progressive, and all-encompassing paradigms laid forth by some of the greatest thinkers produced by Islam – Ghazali, Ibn-e Khaldun, and Allama Iqbal to name a few.

One thing that prevented Islam from evolving into such a vibrant, dynamic, life-giving force is the western perception of Islam as an endemic ideology. Many Americans, for instance, can be heard referring to Muslims in general as Arabs. This perception runs counter to the pluralistic character of Islam which recognises no boundaries of geography, race, colour or language. If Islam is not bound by any of these demarcations, what, then, is the essence and definition of Islamic civilisation?

Umar bin Khattab, the second caliph of Islam, ruled one of the greatest empires of all times. Regarded by Gibbon as the greatest administrator in the history of Islam, he worked hard to preserve the pluralistic character of Islam. Arab conquerors under his reign were ordered not to acquire lands in the conquered territories. The conquered were treated on a par with the conquerors, and their cultures and rituals preserved through conscious state efforts. As a consequence, Islam found its way into their lives by choice rather than by force. Peace and serenity was the order of the day. Umar is quoted saying that if a dog starved to death on the banks of the Tigris, “Umar would be held responsible” for it.

Let us go further back in time when Islam was a stranger. The Prophet of Islam (PBUH), just before migration to Yathrib, in the times when persecution of Makkan non-believers was greatest, was sitting under the shade of Ka’bah. One companion approached him and complained of the unbearable hardships meted out by the non-believers. The Prophet, enraged at this impatience, said that in older times people had to face greater hardships, but never refrained from the path of truth. Then the Prophet proceeded with words which describe the basis of Islamic civilisation more than any other definition of the creed of Islam: “verily, a day will come, when a woman will travel from Hadarmaut to Sin’aa, alone on camel-back, and will be afraid of none but Allah.”

The Prophet did not say that a time will come when everyone will say prayers five times a day, or everyone will have a long beard just like the prophet’s, or everyone will start wearing their trousers above their ankles. He emphasised only peace and security as worth fighting for, and worth dying for. What greater security can be imagined than a woman travelling alone on camel-back for months and months and being afraid on none but God in a society where womanhood was the most persecuted?

Islamic civilisation rests upon principles of social equality, security, peace, and freedom of choice and action – the secular principles – not for one race, or one country, but for the whole mankind. The way forward for the modern Muslim, therefore, is not preoccupation with rituals but of revivification of Islamic values in the light of these principles. No society, however ritualistic and theocratic, can be regarded Islamic unless these principles are upheld at a larger socio-institutional scale.

Why the Islam-West antagonism?

The principles laid forth by Umar bin Khattab were not followed by his successors. The caliphate amongst Omayyads, following Omar bin Abdul Aziz, had turned into a hereditary monarchy, losing its democratic valour of earlier times. With the accession of Al-Saffah, the first Abbasid ruler, to the throne, the monarchy assumed an extremely despotic character, previously unheard of in Islamic history. Thenceforth, Arab imperialism overshadowed all the achievements of earlier Arabs. Now, Arabs not only started acquiring lands in the conquered territories, but they also built cantonments in bigger cities to symbolise and perpetuate their imperialism.

The moral degeneration of Arab rulers gave rise to the Sufi movement that served, on the one hand, to preserve the essence of the message of the Prophet amongst Muslims, and on the other hand to attract non-believers into the fold of Islam. The rise of Islam in the subcontinent can be exclusively attributed to the Sufis.

The character of Muslim expansionism from eleventh century onwards was bereft of the humanistic and missionary zeal of the earlier times. Jihad, thenceforth, was conducted for the sake of monarchs, and not for the sake of Muhammad’s message. This was the single most significant factor that contributed towards tarnishing the image and essence of the most dynamic concept in Islam. Although the Sufis, as pristine as ever, endeavoured hard to promulgate the true meaning of Jihad – an incessant effort against the shortcomings of one’s own self and one’s society – monarchs assisted by clergy incarcerated it to the brutal realm of territorial expansionism which has left a lasting imprint on the minds of non-Muslims.

The hatred thus engendered against Islam was dutifully kept up on the western front by ‘Orientalist Scholars’. During the mid-nineteenth century, when most of the Muslim world languished under the despotic reins of Britain, several learned societies were founded. The Société Asiatique, the Royal Asiatic Society, the American Oriental Society, to name a few, were all founded to serve one purpose: to alienate and compartmentalise the uncivilized world (the Muslim world, more specifically) for the scrutiny of the civilised world. The literature produced by the most learned western minds of post-renaissance period stereotyped the Oriental culturally, geographically, and linguistically to widen the rift between “East” and “West” – both of which comprised men of essentially the same nature – to justify and prolong their political enslavement and to ‘unravel’ the ‘mysterious East’ for the lay westerner as an abode of despicable culture and evil ideologies. Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque Orientale, rated by the western intellectuals of the eighteenth century as the most comprehensive and accurate account of the ‘Orient’, presented Islam as a blasphemed and contorted version of Christianity. This text served as a reference for other books on Islam and thus started a never-ending spree of Islam-bashing in the West.

Muslim intelligentsia at that time, and more so now, were driven to a defensive position of ‘reviving Islam to meet the challenges of the new age’, and were all along unwitting of the fact that Islam was as dynamic and progressive as ever. It was a natural consequence of the mental enslavement of the West that Muslims were relegated to a position where they, just like their masters, failed to see Islam in the wholeness of human experience and consequently embarked upon the task of justifying their inferior position by denying the importance of Jihad and various other ‘nuisances’ of Islam.

The modern Muslim has to let go of his preoccupation with rituals and rediscover his own self on an individual as well as a national basis. This requires a realisation that until the secular principles of justice, equality, empowerment of women etc are enforced on a social level, all attempts at ‘reviving Islam’ will fail. Unless Muslims enable themselves to stand on a better socioeconomic level than the West, all cries of Islam being the ‘complete code of life’ will sound like nothing but the hubris of the defeated and the enslaved.

An extended version of this article can be read at atifimalik.wordpress.com. Atif Iqbal Malik is an MBA student of Pakistani nationality studying at Manchester Business School, and can be contacted at atifimalik@hotmail.com