Islam and Postmodernism Essays

Islam and Postmodernism Essays Islam and Postmodernism Essay Islam and Postmodernism Essay p. 119. 19. Personal interview via e-mail, 23 October 2001. 20. Distorted Imagination: Lessons from the Rushdie Affair, Grey Seal, London, 1990. 21. Malise Ruthven, A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Wrath of Islam, The Hogarth Press, London, 1990; revised edition, p. 186. 22. Postmodernism and the Other, Pluto Press, London, 1998. 23. Sardar with Merryl Wyn Davies and Ashis Nandy, Barbaric Others: A Manifesto on Western Racism, Pluto Press, London, 1993; Westview Press, Boulder, Colo. 1993, p. 3. 24. Ziauddin Sardar, ‘On Serpents, Inevitability and the South Asian Imagination’, Futures, 24 (9), pp. 942–9 (November 1992). 25. ‘When the Pendulum Comes to Rest’, in Sheila M. Moorcroft (editor), Visions for the 21st Century, Adamantine Press, London, 1992, p. 101. 26. Distorted Imagination, p. 276. 27. See Ziauddin Sardar, ‘Development and the Location of Eurocentism’, in Ronaldo Munck and Denis O’Hearn (editors) Critical Devel opment Theory: Contributions to a New Paradigm, Zed Books, London, 1999. 28. Ziauddin Sardar, ‘alt. civilisation. aq: cyberspace as the darker side of the West’, in Ziauddin Sardar and Jerome R. Ravetz (editors), Cyberfutures: Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway, Pluto Press, London, 1996; also David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (editors), The Cyberspace Reader, Routledge, London, 2000, pp. 723–52. 29. Ziauddin Sardar, ‘Asian Cultures: Between Programmed and Desired Futures’, in Eleonora Masini and Yogesh Atal (editors), The Futures of Asian Cultures, Unesco, Bangkok, 1993; and Unesco, The Futures of Cultures, Unesco, Paris, 1994. 30. Personal interview via e-mail, 23 October 2001. 31. Ziauddin Sardar, ‘Paper, Printing and Compact Discs: The Making and Unmaking of Islamic Culture’, Media, Culture, Society, 15, pp. 43–59 (1992); see also Chapter 6 of this book. 32. Ibid. , p. 46. 33. ‘Currying Favour With Tradition’, Herald (Glasgow), 29 April 1998, p. 27. 34. Postmodernism and the Other, p. 281. 35. Ziauddin Sardar, ‘What Makes a University Islamic? ’, in Sardar (editor) How We Know: Ilm and the Revival of Knowledge, Grey Seal, London, 1991. 36. Ziauddin Sardar, ‘Waiting for Rain’, New Scientist, 15 December 2001. 37. Originally published in Arts and the Islamic World, 21, pp. 5–7 (Spring 1992); a revised version appeared in New Renaissance, 8 (1), pp. 14–16, 1998. 38. ‘Currying Favour With Tradition’. Islam 1 Rethinking Islam Serious rethinking within Islam is long overdue. Muslims have been comfortably relying, or rather falling back, on age-old interpretations for much too long . This is why we feel so painful in the contemporary world, so uncomfortable with modernity. Scholars and thinkers have been suggesting for well over a century that we need to make a serious attempt at ijtihad, at reasoned struggle and rethinking, to reform Islam. At the beginning of the last century, Jamaluddin Afghani and Muhammad Abduh led the call for a new ijtihad; and along the way many notable intellectuals, academics and sages have added to this plea – not least Muhammad Iqbal, Malik bin Nabbi and Abdul Qadir Audah. Yet, ijtihad is one thing Muslim societies have singularly failed to undertake. Why? The ‘why’ has acquired an added urgency after 11 September. What the fateful events of that day reveal, more than anything else, is the distance we have travelled away from the spirit and import of Islam. Far from being a liberating force, a kinetic social, cultural and intellectual dynamic for equality, justice and humane values, Islam seems to have acquired a pathological strain. Indeed, it seems to me that we have internalised all those historic and contemporary western representations of Islam and Muslims that have been demonising us for centuries. We now actually wear the garb, I have to confess, of the very demons that the west has been projecting on our collective personality. But to blame the west, or a notion of instrumental modernity that is all but alien to us, would be a lazy option. True, the west, and particularly America, has a great deal to answer for. And Muslims are quick to point a finger at the injustices committed by American and European foreign policies and hegemonic tendencies. However, that is only a part, and in my opinion not an insurmountable part, of the malaise. Hegemony is not always imposed; sometimes, it is invited. The internal situation within Islam is an open invitation. We have failed to respond to the summons to ijtihad for some very profound reasons. Prime amongst these is the fact that the context of our sacred texts – the Qur’an and the examples of the Prophet Muhammad, our absolute frame of reference – has been frozen in history. One can only have an interpretative relationship with a text 27 28 Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures – even more so if the text is perceived to be eternal. But if the interpretative context of the text is never our context, not our own time, then its interpretation can hardly have any real meaning or significance for us as we are now. Historic interpretations constantly drag us back to history, to frozen and ossified contexts of long ago; worse, to perceived and romanticised contexts that have not even existed in history. This is why, while Muslims have a strong emotional attachment to Islam, Islam per se, as a worldview and system of ethics, has little or no direct relevance to their daily lives apart from the obvious concerns of rituals and worship. Ijtihad and fresh thinking have not been possible because there is no context within which they can actually take place. The freezing of interpretation, the closure of ‘the gates of ijtihad’, has had a devastating effect on Muslim thought and action. In particular, it has produced what I can only describe as three metaphysical catastrophes: the elevation of the Shari’ah to the level of the Divine, with the consequent removal of agency from the believers, and the equation of Islam with the state. Let me elaborate. Most Muslims consider the Shari’ah, commonly translated as ‘Islamic law’, to be divine. Yet, there is nothing divine about the Shari’ah. The only thing that can legitimately be described as divine in Islam is the Qur’an. The Shari’ah is a human construction; an attempt to understand the divine will in a particular context. This is why the bulk of the Shari’ah actually consists of fiqh or jurisprudence, which is nothing more than legal opinion of classical jurists. The very term fiqh was not in vogue before the Abbasid period when it was actually formulated and codified. But when fiqh assumed its systematic legal form, it incorporated three vital aspects of Muslim society of the Abbasid period. At that juncture, Muslim history was in its expansionist phase, and fiqh ncorporated the logic of Muslim imperialism of that time. The fiqh rulings on apostasy, for example, derive not from the Qur’an but from this logic. Moreover, the world was simple and could easily be divided into black and white: hence, the division of the world into dar al-Islam and dar al-harb. Furthermore, as the framers of law were not by this stage managers of society, the law became merely theory which could not be modified – the framers of the law were unable to see where the faults lay and what aspect of the law needed fresh thinking and reformulation. Thus fiqh, as we know it today, evolved on the basis of a division between those who were governing and set themselves apart from society and those who were framing the law; the epistemological Rethinking Islam 29 assumptions of a ‘golden’ phase of Muslim history also came into play. When we describe the Shari’ah as divine, we actually provide divine sanctions for the rulings of bygone fiqh. What this means in reality is that when Muslim countries apply or impose the Shari’ah – which is what Muslims from Indonesia to Nigeria demand – the contradictions that were inherent in the formulation and evolution of fiqh come to the fore. That is why wherever the Shari’ah is imposed – that is, fiqhi legislation is applied, out of context from the time when it was formulated and out of step with ours – Muslim societies acquire a medieval feel. We can see that in Saudi Arabia, the Sudan and the Taliban Afghanistan. When narrow adherence to fiqh, to the dictates of this or that school of thought, whether it has any relevance to real world or not, becomes the norm, ossification sets in. The Shari’ah will solve all our problems’ becomes the common sentiment; and it becomes necessary for a group with vested interests in this notion of the Shari’ah to preserve its territory, the source of its power and prestige, at all costs. An outmoded body of law is thus equated with the Shari’ah, and criticism is shunned and outlawed by appealing to its divine nature. The elevation of the Shari’ah to the divine level also means the believers themselves have no agency: since the law is a priori given, people themselves have nothing to do except to follow it. Believers thus become passive receivers rather than active seekers of truth. In reality, the Shari’ah is nothing more than a set of principles, a framework of values, that provide Muslim societies with guidance. But these sets of principles and values are not a static given but are dynamically derived within changing contexts. As such, the Shari’ah is a problem-solving methodology rather than law. 1 It requires the believers to exert themselves and constantly reinterpret the Qur’an and look at the life of the Prophet Muhammad with ever changing fresh eyes. Indeed, the Qur’an has to be reinterpreted from epoch to epoch – which means that the Shari’ah, and by extension Islam itself, has to be reformulated with changing contexts. 2 The only thing that remains constant in Islam is the text of the Qur’an itself – its concepts providing the anchor for ever changing interpretations. Islam is not so much a religion as an integrative worldview: that is to say, it integrates all aspects of reality by providing a moral perspective on every aspect of human endeavour. Islam does not provide ready-made answers to all human problems; it provides a moral and just perspective within which Muslims must endeavour to 30 Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures find answers to all human problems. But if everything is a priori given, in the shape of a divine Shari’ah, then Islam is reduced to a totalistic ideology. Indeed, this is exactly what the Islamic movements – in particularly Jamaat-e-Islami (both Pakistani and Indian varieties) and the Muslim Brotherhood – have reduced Islam to. Which brings me to the third metaphysical catastrophe. Place this ideology within a nation-state, with divinely attributed Shari’ah at its centre, and you have an ‘Islamic state’. All contemporary ‘Islamic states’, from Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan to aspiring Pakistan, are based on this ridiculous assumption. But once Islam, as an ideology, becomes a programme of action of a vested group, it looses its humanity and becomes a battlefield where morality, reason and justice are readily sacrificed at the altar of emotions. Moreover, the step from a totalistic ideology to a totalitarian order where every human situation is open to state arbitration is a small one. The transformation of Islam into a state-based political ideology not only deprives it of all its moral and ethical content, it also debunks most of Muslim history as un-Islamic. Invariably, when Islamists rediscover a ‘golden’ past, they do so only in order to disdain the present and mock the future. All we are left with is messianic chaos, as we saw so vividly in the Taliban regime, where all politics as the domain of action is paralysed and meaningless pieties become the foundational truth of the state. The totalitarian vision of Islam as a state thus transforms Muslim politics into a metaphysics: in such an enterprise, every action can be justified as ‘Islamic’ by the dictates of political expediency as we witnessed in revolutionary Iran. The three metaphysical catastrophes are accentuated by an overall process of reduction that has become the norm in Muslim societies. The reductive process itself is also not new; but now it has reached such an absurd state that the very ideas that are supposed to take Muslim societies towards humane values now actually take them in the opposite direction. From the subtle beauty of a perennial challenge to construct justice through mercy and compassion, we get mechanistic formulae fixated with the extremes repeated by people convinced they have no duty to think for themselves because all questions have been answered for them by the classical ulema, far better men long dead. And because everything carries the brand name of Islam, to question it, or argue against it, is tantamount to voting for sin. The process of reduction started with the very notion of alim (scholar) itself. Just who is an alim? hat makes him an authority? Rethinking Islam 31 In early Islam, an alim was anyone who acquired ilm, or knowledge, which was itself described in a broad sense. We can see that in the early classifications of knowledge by such scholars as al-Kindi, alFarabi, ibn Sina, al-Ghazzali and ibn Khauldun. Indeed, both the definition of knowledge and its classification was a major intellectual activity in classical Islam. 3 So all learned men, scientist s as well as philosophers, scholars as well as theologians, constituted the ulema. But after the ‘gates of ijtihad’ were closed during the Abbasid era, ilm was increasing reduced to religious knowledge and the ulema came to constitute only religious scholars. Similarly, the idea of ijma, the central notion of communal life in Islam, has been reduced to the consensus of a select few. Ijma literally means consensus of the people. The concept dates back to the practice of Prophet Muhammad himself as leader of the original polity of Muslims. When the Prophet Muhammad wanted to reach a decision, he would call the whole Muslim community – then, admittedly not very large – to the mosque. A discussion would ensue; arguments for and against would be presented. Finally, the entire gathering would reach a consensus. Thus, a democratic spirit was central to communal and political life in early Islam. But over time the clerics and religious scholars have removed the people from the equation – and reduced ijma to ‘the consensus of the religious scholars’. Not surprisingly, authoritarianism, theocracy and despotism reign supreme in the Muslim world. The political domain finds its model in what has become the accepted practice and metier of the authoritatively ‘religious’ adepts, those who claim the monopoly of the exposition of Islam. Obscurantist mullahs, in the guise of the ulema, dominate Muslim societies and circumscribe them with fanaticism and absurdly reductive logic. Numerous other concepts have gone through a similar process of reduction. The concept of ummah, the global spiritual community of Muslims, has been reduced to the ideals of a nation state: ‘my country right or wrong’ has been transposed to read ‘my ummah right or wrong’. So even despots like Saddam Hussein are now defended on the basis of ‘ummah consciousness’ and ‘unity of the ummah’. Jihad has now been reduced to the single meaning of ‘Holy War’. This translation is perverse not only because the concept’s spiritual, intellectual and social components have been stripped away, but because it has been reduced to war by any means, including terrorism. So anyone can now declare jihad on anyone, without any ethical or moral rhyme or reason. Nothing could be 32 Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures more perverted, or pathologically more distant from the initial meaning of jihad. Its other connotations, including personal struggle, intellectual endeavour, and social construction have all but evaporated. Istislah, normally rendered as ‘public interest’ and a major source of Islamic law, has all but disappeared from Muslim consciousness. And ijtihad, as I have suggested, has now been reduced to little more than a pious desire. But the violence performed to sacred Muslim concepts is insignificant compared to the reductive way the Qur’an and the sayings and examples of the Prophet Muhammad are bandied about. What the late Muslim scholar Fazlur Rahman called the ‘atomistic’ treatment of the Qur’an is now the norm: almost anything and everything is justified by quoting individual bits of verses out of context. 4 After the September 11 event, for example, a number of Taliban supporters, including a few in Britain, justified their actions by quoting the following verse: ‘We will put terror into the hearts of the unbelievers. They serve other gods for whom no sanction has been revealed. Hell shall be their home’ (3:149). Yet, the apparent meaning attributed to this verse could not be further from the true spirit of the Qur’an. In this particular verse, the Qur’an is addressing the Prophet Muhammad himself. It was revealed during the battle of Uhad, when the small and ill-equipped army of the Prophet faced a much larger and better-equipped enemy. He was concerned about the outcome of the battle. The Qur’an reassures him and promises that the enemy will be terrified by the Prophet’s unprofessional army. Seen in its context, it is not a general instruction to all Muslims; it is a commentary on what was happening at that time. Similarly hadith are quoted to justify the most extreme behaviours. And the Prophet’s own appearance, his beard and clothes, have been turned into a fetish: so now it is not just obligatory for a ‘good Muslim’ to have a beard, but its length and shape must also conform to dictates! The Prophet has been reduced to signs and symbols – the spirit of his behaviour, the moral and ethical dimensions of his actions, his humility and compassion, the general principles he advocated, have all been subsumed by the logic of absurd reduction. The accumulative effect of the metaphysical catastrophes and endless reduction has transformed the cherished tenets of Islam into instruments of militant expediency and moral bankruptcy. For over two decades, I have been arguing that Muslim civilisation is now so fragmented and shattered that we have to rebuild it, ‘brick by brick’. It is now obvious that Islam itself has to be rethought, idea by idea. Rethinking Islam 33 We need to begin with the simple fact that Muslims have no monopoly on truth, on what is right, on what is good, on justice, nor on the intellectual and moral reflexes that promote these necessities. Like the rest of humanity, we have to struggle to achieve them using our own sacred notions and con cepts as tools for understanding and reshaping contemporary reality. The way to a fresh, contemporary appreciation of Islam requires confronting the metaphysical catastrophes and moving away from reduction to synthesis. Primarily, this requires Muslims, as individuals and communities, to reclaim agency: to insist on their right and duty, as believers and knowledgeable people, to interpret and reinterpret the basic sources of Islam: to question what now goes under the general rubric of Shari’ah, to declare that much of fiqh is now dangerously obsolete, to stand up to the absurd notion of an Islam confined by a geographically bound state. We cannot, if we really value our faith, leave its exposition in the hands of undereducated elites, religious scholars whose lack of comprehension of the contemporary world is usually matched only by their disdain and contempt for all its ideas and cultural products. Islam has been permitted to languish as the professional domain of people more familiar with the world of the eleventh century than that of the twenty-first century we now inhabit. And we cannot allow this class to bury the noble idea of ijtihad in frozen and distant history. Ordinary Muslims around the world who have concerns, questions and considerable moral dilemmas about the current state of affairs of Islam must reclaim the basic concepts of Islam and reframe them in a broader context. Ijma must mean consensus of all citizens leading to participatory and accountable governance. Jihad must be understood in its complete spiritual meaning as the struggle for peace and justice as a lived reality for all people everywhere. And the notion of the ummah must be refined so it becomes something more than a mere reductive abstraction. As Anwar Ibrahim has argued, the ummah is not ‘merely the community of all those who profess to be Muslims’; rather, it is a ‘moral conception of how Muslims should become a community in relation to each other, other communities and the natural world’. Which means ummah incorporates not just the Muslims, but justice-seeking and oppressed people everywhere. 6 In a sense, the movement towards synthesis is an advance towards the primary meaning and message of Islam – as a moral and ethical way of looking at and shaping the world, as a 4 Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures domain of peaceful civic culture, a participatory endeavour, and a holistic mode of knowing, being and doing. If the events of 11 September unleash the best intentions, the essential values of Islam, the phoenix will truly have arisen from the ashes of the twin towers. Notes 1. For a more elaborate exposition, see ‘The Shari’ah as Problem-Solving Methodology’, Cha pter 5 of Ziauddin Sardar, Islamic Futures: The Shape of Ideas to Come, Mansell, London, 1985. 2. I first argued this thesis in The Future of Muslim Civilisation, Croom Helm, London, 1979; second edition, Mansell, London, 1987. 3. See Franz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, Brill, Leiden, 1970. 4. Fazlur Rahman, Major Themes of the Qur’an, Biblioteca Islamica, Chicago, 1980. 5. Ziuaddin Sardar, The Future of Muslim Civilisation. 6. Anwar Ibrahim, ‘The Ummah and Tomorrow’s World’, Futures, 23 (3), pp. 302–10 (April 1991). Source: Originally published in Seminar, 509, January 2002, pp. 48–51. 2 Reconstructing Muslim Civilisation When thinking and writing about Islam, most Muslim intellectuals, both modernists and traditionalists, work within a very narrow and confining canvas. Islam is often presented as a religious outlook: the modernists are happy to confine Islam to the boundaries of personal piety, belief and rituals: while the traditionalists always describe Islam as ‘a complete way of life’. What is meant by the phrase is that Islam touches all aspects of human living – particularly the social, economic, educational and political behaviour of man. However, while these approaches to the study of Islam are extremely useful, they are restrictive. Each approach itself determines the boundary of exposition: note that in their monumental output, both Maulana Maududi and Syed Qutb find no space for discussing epistemology and science, technology and environment, urbanisation and development – all burning, indeed pressing, issues for contemporary Muslim societies as well as for the dominant west. Moreover, the picture of the ‘Islamic way of life’ that emerges from these authors is a very atomised and segregated one. While Islam is presented as a complete way of life, the various aspects of human living, economic activity, political behaviour, educational development, are treated in isolation from each other as though each had no real bearing on the others. There is no integrated, interdisciplinary methodology in action in Maulana Maududi’s or Syed Qutb’s work. The result is that while it is repeatedly emphasised that Islam is a ‘complete way of life’, nowhere is it really represented as an integrated, holistic worldview. More recently, Sayyid Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr and Sheikh Murtada Mutahhari showed much promise in developing an interdisciplinary methodology from within the realms of traditional scholars. Sayyid Baqir al-Sadr did much work on an integrated Islamic political economy. Sheikh Mutahhari, with his strong background in philosophy and irfan (gnosis) tried to apply these to contemporary sociopolitical realities. Both these scholars were martyred in their forties, cutting short their promising initiatives. In a different vein, this time from the ranks of modern scholars, Ali 35 36 Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures Shariati devoted much effort to developing a multidisciplinary base for an Islamic worldview. His hectic schedule and early death did not allow him to systematise his thoughts into a theory and his ideas remain scattered in numerous articles and lectures. The more avant-garde Muslim intellectuals have sought to project Islam as an ethical system. For example, in his essay ‘Islam, the concept of religion and the foundation of ethics and morality’, Naqib al-Attas argues that din of Islam can be reduced to four primary significations: indebtedness, submissiveness, judicial power and natural inclination. He then proceeds to present Islam as a ‘natural’ social and ethical system. Parvez Manzoor equates the Shari’ah to an ethical system and has used his analysis to develop a contemporary Islamic theory of the environment. 2 The exposition of Islam as an ethical system takes us a step further. An underlying ethical system can permeate all human endeavours an d questions of ethics can be raised in all contemporary situations whether they involve the impact of science on Muslim societies or of technology on the natural environment or of planning on the built environment. And, because everything is examined from the perspective of a total ethical system, a more integrated and coherent exposition of Islam comes to the fore. However, reducing Islam to one denominator, namely ethics, is still very confining. The excessive concern with ethics generates an illusion of moral superiority and ignorance of power realities. In Islam, ethics is a pragmatic concern: it must shape individual and social behaviour. But methodologically, discussion and analysis of ethical criteria – what is right and wrong, what are our duties and obligations – produces a strange mirage. It leads to the erroneous belief that by doing right, by being righteous, by fulfilling our duty, Muslim societies, and hence Islam, will triumph and become dominant. Ethical analysis substitutes piety for pragmatic policy, morality for power, and righteousness for bold and imaginative planning. Piety, morality, righteousness are the beginning of Islam: they are not an end in themselves. Ethics is our navigational equipment: it is not the end of our journey. Ethics ensures that we tread the right path, avoiding pitfalls and quicksand, and reach our intended destination. But within the ethical geography, there are no limitations to where we take ourselves and our societies. We can only give our imagination and intellect full reign, something that is demanded of us by God, if we think, conceive and study Islam as a living, dynamic civilisation of the future. Only by Reconstructing Muslim Civilisation 37 approaching Islam as a civilisation can we really do full justice to the din of Islam. It is worth noting that when Naquib al-Attas discusses the many manifestations of din, he stops short of noting that one connotation of din is medina, the city state which marked the beginning of Islamic civilisation. From Medina onwards, Islam ceased to be just a religion or an ethical system or even a political institution – it became a civilisation. And it has continued to be a civilisation since: Islam was a civilisation as much in its ‘Golden Age’ as during its nadir under colonialism; and, it continues to be a civilisation now that the Muslim world has been divided into 50 or so Muslim ‘nation-states’. However, whenever Muslim writers and intellectuals have discussed Islam as a civilisation, it has always been as a historic civilisation; never as a contemporary or a future civilisation. By limiting the civilisational aspects of Islam to history, they have neglected its future. Moreover, they have concentrated discussion on either the self-evident aspects of Islam such as ethics and belief or further increased the fossilisation of the already stagnant body of jurisprudence, legal thought and scholastic philosophy. Unless we break this suffocating mould, Muslim societies are doomed to a marginalised existence. Furthermore, only by presenting Islam as a living, dynamic civilisation, with all that that entails, can we really meet the challenge that comes to us from the west. Encounters in the arena of religion and theology, philosophy and ethics, may generate good intellectual writings, but, essentially, they are marginal. But an encounter of two civilisations, seeking rapprochement as well as asserting their own identities, is a completely different phenomenon. Only such an engagement can produce a beneficial dialogue and mutual respect between two equals. At this juncture of our history, however, we are not in a position to present Islam as a total civilisation. Having failed to do our homework in this area, we find ourselves as a rather truncated and limping civilisation. Many of our essential civilisational features, having been neglected for over four centuries, are dormant and in urgent need of serious surgery. Islam and Muslim societies are like a magnificent but old building on which time, and years of neglect, have taken their toll. The foundations are very solid, but the brickwork needs urgent attention. We need to reconstruct the Muslim civilisation; almost brick by brick, rebuilding the House of Islam from the foundations upwards. 38 Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures The reconstruction of Muslim civilisation is essentially a process of elaborating the worldview of Islam. The ‘complete way of life’ group of scholars are content with restating the classical and traditional positions as if the old jurists and scholars had solved all the problems of humanity for all time! The avant-garde seems to believe that casting contemporary concerns in ethical moulds is enough. We need to go beyond all this and produce distinctively Islamic alternatives and solutions to the vast array of problems faced by our societies. We need to do this by producing a whole array of theoretical alternatives and by demonstrating these alternatives practically. I am talking not of abstract, metaphysical theories: we have enough of these. I am talking about a pragmatic theoretical edifice that gives contemporary meaning to the eternal guidelines laid down in the Qur’an and the Sunnah. I am talking about a body of theory that can be translated into policy statements and produce practical models that can guide us towards a complete state of Islam. The reconstruction of Muslim civilisation is both a theoretical and a practical process, each feeding on the other; theory shaping practice and behaviour and practice polishing the theory. But even before we take the initial steps towards reconstruction of our civilisation, we must begin to think, individually and collectively, like a civilisation. Our commitment and aspirations should be directed not towards some parochial objectives, but towards a civilisational plane. We, the Muslim ummah, are a holistic aggregate – despite the fact that we at present live in different polities, come from a kaleidoscope of ethnic backgrounds, hold and express a complex array of opinions and ideas, are united by a ingle worldview, the hallmark of our civilisation. That means that our political differences are only temporary; and we should behave as though they are temporary. It also means that the old differences of opinion and expression between us should be placed on the lowest rung of history. While history should always be with us, we should not live in it. In general, civilisations have been studied in terms of large historic units. For example, in his A Study of History, A. J. Toynbee3 points to 21 civilisations in the known history of the world, each with distinctive characteristics, but all sharing certain features or qualities which enable them to be distinguished as members of the same category. Sociologists speak of ‘modern civilisation’, by which is meant contemporary urban and industrialised societies. These approaches to the study of civilisation ‘fix’ them to a particular Reconstructing Muslim Civilisation 39 historic epoch. Thus, by definition, civilisation becomes a historic entity with a finite lifetime. Ibn Khaldun spoke of the rise and fall of civilisations thus presenting a cyclic view of history. 4 But Muslim civilisation is no more fixed to a particular historic epoch or geographical space than the teachings of the Qur’an and the Sunnah. The Muslim civilisation is a historic continuum; it has existed in the past, it exists today and it will exist in the future. Each step towards the future requires a further elaboration of the worldview of Islam, an invocation of the dynamic principle of ijtihad which enables the Muslim civilisation to tune in to the changing circumstances. Whether it is rising or declining, or indeed purely static, depends on the effort exerted by the Muslim ummah to understand and elaborate the teachings of Islam to meet the new challenges. There are essentially seven major challenges before us. However, none of these can be tackled in isolation. If we were to describe the Muslim civilisation as a flower-shaped schema, then we can identify the seven areas which need contemporary elaboration. The centre of the flower, the core, represents the Islamic worldview: it produces seeds for future growth and evelopment. The core is surrounded by two concentric circles representing the major manifestations of the Islamic worldview: epistemology and the Shari’ah or law. The four primary petals represent the major external expressions of the Weltanschauung: political and social structures; economic enterprise; science and technology; and environment. The flower also has a number of secondary petals representing such areas as architecture, art, education, community development, social behaviour and so on, but here we will limit our discussion to the primary petals. A detailed elaboration of the ‘flower’ and hence the development of a theoretical edifice, practical models and distinctive methodologies is an essential prerequisite for the reconstruction of Muslim civilisation. For example, the worldview of Islam needs to be continuously elaborated so that we can understand new developments vis-a-vis Islam. Essentially, the worldview of Islam consists of a few principles and a matrix of concepts to be found in the Qur’an and the Sunnah. The principles outline the general rules of behaviour and development and chalk out the general boundaries within which the Muslim civilisation has to grow and flourish. The conceptual matrix performs two basic functions: it acts as a standard of measure, a barometer if you like, of the ‘Islamicness’ of a particular situation, and it serves as a basis for the elaboration of the worldview of Islam. 40 Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures Figure 2. 1 The challenges before us The principles of the Islamic worldview, largely related to social, economic and political behaviour, have been well discussed in Islamic literature. For example, the principle forbidding riba (all forms of usury) has been written about extensively. However, to turn it into a fully-fledged theory, and develop working models from it, we need to operationalise and develop a contemporary understanding of the relevant concepts from the conceptual matrix. For example, we need to have a detailed and analytical understanding of such concepts as shura (co-operating for the good), zakah (alms), and zulm (tyranny). Each one of these and many other concepts needs to be elaborated so that it becomes a fully developed body of knowledge from which further theoretical understanding can be derived and practical models developed. The most interesting feature of the worldview of Islam is that it presents an interactive and integrated outlook. Therefore, a contemporary understanding of one concept, say istislah (public Reconstructing Muslim Civilisation 41 interest), may lead to a theoretical understanding of economics, science, technology, environment and politics. Similarly, lack of understanding of a key concept may thwart developments in all these fields. A primary task, without which all future work will be hampered, is the development of a contemporary theory of Islamic epistemology. Epistemology, or theory of knowledge, is in fact nothing more than an expression of a worldview. All great Muslim scholars of the ‘Golden Age’ devoted their talents and time to this task: for epistemology permeates all aspects of individual, societal and civilisational behaviour. 5 Without a distinct epistemology, a unique civilisation is impossible. Without a way of knowing that is identifiably Islamic we can neither elaborate the worldview of Islam nor put an Islamic stamp on contemporary issues. For the Muslim scholars of the past, an Islamic civilisation was inconceivable without a fully-fledged epistemology; hence their preoccupation with the classification of knowledge. Without the same concern amongst contemporary Muslim scholars and intellectuals, there is little hope of a Muslim civilisation of the future. Why is epistemology so important? Epistemology is vital because it is the major operator which transforms the vision of a worldview into a reality. When we think about the nature of knowledge, what we are doing is indirectly reflecting on the principles according to which society is organised. Epistemology and societal structures feed on each other: when we manipulate images of society, when we develop and erect social, economic, political, scientific and technological structures, we are taking a cue from our conception of knowledge. This is why the Islamic concept of knowledge, ilm, is so central to the Muslim civilisation. However, for some reason, thinking about the nature of knowledge in western societies has been an abstract and obscure endeavour; it has led the western philosophers to a paralysis of mind. But as the history of Islam demonstrates so clearly, issues of Islamic epistemology are pragmatic issues; and we need to develop a highly pragmatic, contemporary epistemology of Islam. Classical scholars like al-Ghazzali, al-Baruni, al-Farabi, al-Khawarizmi, and others, have laid a solid foundation for a practical epistemology of Islam. Their work has to be dragged from history and given a dynamic, modern form. It is one of the most urgent tasks awaiting the attention of Muslim scholars. 42 Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures The Shari’ah, or Islamic law, too is a pragmatic concern. Shari’ah, rather than theology, has been the primary contribution of Muslim civilisation to human development. Like epistemology, the Shari’ah touches every aspect of Muslim society. It is law and ethics rolled into one. As Parvez Manzoor says, all contradictions of internalised ethics and externalised law, of concealed intentions and revealed actions are resolved in the allembracing actionalism of the Shari’ah because it is both a doctrine and a path. It is simultaneously a manifestation of divine will and that of human resolve to be an agent of that will. It is eternal (anchored in God’s revelation) and temporal (enacted in human history); stable (Qur’an and Sunnah ) and dynamic (ijma and ijtihad); din (religion) and muamalah (social interaction); divine gift and human prayer all at once. It is the vary basis of the religion itself: to be Muslim is to accept the injunction of the Shari’ah. 6 Yet, we have allowed such a paramount and all-pervasive manifestation of the Islamic worldview to become nothing more than an ossified body of dos and don’ts. Without a deep and detailed contemporary and futuristic understanding of the Shari’ah, Muslim societies cannot hope to solve their local, national and international problems. The belief that the classical Schools of Islamic Thought have solved all societal problems is dangerously naive. We need to go beyond the classical schools and build a contemporary structure on the foundations laid down by earlier jurists. What is needed is not a reworking of the classical works in the realm of prayer and ritual, personal and social relations, marriage and divorce, dietary laws and rules of fasting: these have been taken care of admirably. What is needed is the extension of the Shari’ah into contemporary domains such as environment and urban planning, science policy and technology assessment, community participation and rural development. In many instances this amounts to reactivating hitherto dormant Shari’ah concepts and institutions and giving them a contemporary life. For example, the Shari’ah injunctions about water laws need to be studied from the perspective of modern environmental problems, and such Shari’ah institutions as harem (inviolate zones of easement), hima (public reserves), and hisbah (office of public inspection) have to be given a living form. Moreover, the Shari’ah needs to be extended beyond law and turned into a dynamic problem-solving methodology. Most jurists Reconstructing Muslim Civilisation 43 would agree that the chief sources of the Shari’ah are the Qur’an; the Sunnah, or the authentic traditions of the Prophet Muhammad; ijma, or the consensus of opinion; qiyas, or judgement upon juristic analogy and ijtihad, or independent reasoning by jurists. The supplementary sources of the Shari’ah are said to be istihsan, that is prohibiting or permitting a thing because it serves or does not serve a ‘useful purpose’; istislah, or public interest; and urf or custom and practice of a society. Classical jurists used ijma, qiyas, ijtihad, istihsan, istislah and urf as methods of solving practical problems. It is indeed tragic that their followers have abandoned the methods and stuck to the actual juristic rulings despite that fact their benefits were obviously limited to a particular historic situation. The blind following of these rulings has not only turned the body of the Shari’ah into a fossilised canon but now threatens to suffocate the very civilisation of Islam. Relegating the pronouncements of classical jurists into eternal principles and rules is not only belittling the Shari’ah, it is detrimental to Muslim societies as well. The reconstruction of Muslim civilisation begins by setting the Shari’ah free from this suffocating hold and giving it the status it truly deserves in the Muslim civilisation; a dynamic problem-solving methodology which touches every aspect of human endeavour. We now come to the four external expressions of the Islamic Weltanschauung. All four areas have received attention in modern Islamic literature: political theory and economics have received extensive attention for almost 30 years now; science, technology and the environment have only recently begun to be studied from the Islamic perspective. Thus, there is plenty of original scholarship here to build upon and to streamline within a civilisational framework. Islamic economics, in particular, has developed considerably in the last decade. However, much of modern work in Islamic economics has been descriptive; and most of it has been trapped in western epistemological concerns and economic frameworks. Indeed, with the sole exception of Nawab Haider Naqvi’s Ethics and Economics: An Islamic Synthesis,7 works on Islamic economics have used description (excessive in the work of Nejatullah Siddiqui) and reduction (overdone in the writing of Monzar Kahf). Moreover, Islamic economics has been developed as a ‘discipline’ (a shadow of western economics perhaps? ) and not as an integrated field destined to become a pillar of the Muslim civilisation. Note that Nejatullah Siddiqui’s Muslim Economic Thinking: A Survey of Contemporary 44 Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures Literature8 does not contain a single citation linking economics to political theory, science and technology or the environment. Considering that technology is the backbone of modern economics, information a prime commodity, environmental degradation a major outcome, it is indeed surprising that the advocates of Islamic economics are silent on these issues. The atomised development of Islamic economics as a unitary discipline, and an obsessive concern with western epistemology, have elegated it to a marginalised existence. Perhaps this is an unfair criticism. But the fact remains that any major advances in Islamic economics can only be made if it becomes a truly interdisciplinary field of endeavour pursued within a civilisational framework. Much the same criticism can be made of the recent works on Islamic political structures and social organisations. M ost of the writings here are trapped in the mould cast by the nation-state and such concepts of western political theory as nationalism, democracy, socialism, bureaucracy and the like. Such works as The Nature of the Islamic State by M. Hadi Hussain and A. H. Kamali9 beg the obvious question: Is Islam a state? Is the nation-state the only expression of an Islamic polity? When it comes to the issue of governance, Muslim political scientists reveal themselves to be true victims of history; only monarchy or Caliphate, best exemplified by Maulana Maududi’s (as yet not translated into English) controversial Urdu treatise, Caliphate or Mulukiat (Caliphate or Kingship? )10 appear to be the viable options to most authors! In the vast universe of ideas that is Islam, is there no other method of governance? Apart from political theory, social structures have also received little interdisciplinary attention. Syed Qutb and Ali Shariati are among the very few who seem to have realised that social exploitation is a dominant theme in Muslim society (an excellent treatment of which is to be found in Syed Qutb’s Social Justice in Islam). 11 The related issues of population and urban decay, the blatant exploitation of women, community development and cultural awareness are conspicuously absent from the social analysis of modern Muslim writers. Both in the fields of political and social structures and of economics, we need interdisciplinary theories, models and methodologies which synthesise these fields with Islamic epistemology and the Shari’ah as well as with the other main external expressions of the worldview of Islam: science and technology and the environment. Very little has been written about the environmental perspective of Islam. However, the few works on the subject are of exceptionally Reconstructing Muslim Civilisation 45 good quality and concentrate on conceptual analysis. For example, various papers of Othman Llewellyn on ‘Desert Reclamation and Islamic Law’12 and Parvez Manzoor’s ‘Environment and Values: The Islamic Perspective’13 provide good indications that a totally contemporary, conceptual as well as pragmatic Islamic theory of the environment can be developed relatively easily and translated into pragmatic policy statements. Similarly, Waqar Ahmad Husaini’s attempt to develop a modern theory of Islamic Environmental Systems Engineering,14 although requiring much elaboration, demonstrates that the conceptual matrix of the worldview of Islam can be fruitfully used for analytical purposes. Science and technology, on the other hand, have not fared so well. In this field, the hold of western epistemology and social models on the minds of Muslim scientists and technologists is almost total. The link between what purports to be a scientific ‘fact’ and epistemology is not easy to grasp. The point that ‘scientific facts’ are not something we can take for granted or think of as solid rocks upon which knowledge is built is, to a modern scientist working in western paradigms, slightly mind-boggling. The epistemological and methodological point is that facts, like cows, have been domesticated to deal with run-of-the-mill events. Hence, the connection between facts and values is not always obvious; and the notion that knowledge is manufactured and not discovered is not appreciated by many Muslim scientists. Thus, the bulk of the literature of ‘Islam and science’ is pretty naive; and some works like Maurice Bucailles’s The Bible, the Qur’an and Science15 are highly dangerous (what can be proved by science can also be disproved by the same science; where does that leave the Qur’an? ) The process of reconstruction of the Muslim civilisation amounts to meeting the seven challenges outlined above. Muslim societies have to think about and study their future not in terms of a resurgence, but as a planned and a continuous process of reconstruction of their civilisation. This process involves, not ‘Islamising’ this or that discipline, but casting the external expressions of Muslim civilisation in the epistemological mode of Islam and the methodology of the Shari’ah. It involves elaborating the worldview of Islam and using the conceptual matrix that is at the heart of the Qur’an and the Sunnah. The mental outlook of this process is based on synthesis and interdisciplinarity. What is the