Islamism - 4

[acharya]

<b>Muslim response to post-modernism</b>
Feuilleton

Prof Khwaja Masud

Some sixty-five years ago, I read a poem whose two verses remain etched indelibly in my mind.

The verses are:

<i>Under the fell clutch of circumstance
My head is bloody but unbowed</i>

I have been tossed hither and thither by strong intellectual and spiritual minds. Now, it is post-modernism that is posing a formidable challenge not only to me, but many like me, who have spent their lives in pursuit of truth and have suffered for it.

Now it is post-modernism that stares us in our face. Post-modernism has nothing to do about a period or an epoch. The post-modern is not what exists after modernity. In fact, post-modernism is a term which implies certain philosophical, intellectual and cultural tendencies.

Modernity was born by what are called Grand Narratives in the jargon of the post-modernists. In simple language, Grand Narratives are big ideas which give sense and direction in life. Such ideas are truth, reason, tradition, morality, religion, ideology etc. The post-modernists argue that these notions — Grand Narratives — do not live up to analytical scrutiny, hence are meaningless.

According to the post-modernists, all worldviews that claim absolute notions of truth — religion, science etc. — are artificial constructions that are totalitarian by their very nature.

As Richard Rorty, the American post-modernist, puts it: “Everything is a product of time and chance, everything is relative.”

The post-modernists accept nothing as absolute. If truth and reason are dead, what becomes of knowledge? Post-modernists consider all types of knowledge as well as sources of knowledge with equal scepticism. For a post-modernist like Feyerabend, there is hardly any difference between science and magic. For a post-modernist, knowledge is acquired not through inquiry but through imagination, As such, fiction rather than philosophy provides a better guide to human behaviour.

Wittgenstein and later on Derrida argue that all we have is language and its representation of reality is at best approximate and faulty. Hence, the post-modernists maintain that we see what we want to see. We see what our position in time and space allows us to see.

According to Lyotard, the standard-bearer of post-modernism, there is a paradigm shift in philosophy — it is a shift away from reason, and, above all, from philosophical certainty of Grand Narratives.

Lyotard’s major hypothesis maintains that the status of knowledge is changed as society enters the post-industrial stage — the age of cybernites, informatics, computers, TV and videos.

Baudrillard views the objectivity of societies, nation-states and history as simulacra (image). Media practices have rearranged our senses of space and time. What is real is no longer our direct contact with the world but what we are given on the screen: TV is the world. TV is dissolved into life and life is dissolved into TV. The fiction is realised and the reality becomes in-fictitious.

McLuhan is right when he says: “Medium is the message,” meaning not the content but the form of the medium is important. The function of TV is to prevent response, to privatize individuals, to place them into a world of simulacra (images) where it is impossible to distinguish between the spectacle and the real.

Post-modernism is the sensibility that arises when the credibility of the Grand Narratives is questioned. All theories claiming universality are rejected. Hence there are no universal solutions to the conclusion arrived at by post-modernism, which is characterised by multiplicity of discourses and pluralism.

When nothing is sacred, as the post-modernists claim, then fundamentalism arises as an attempt to resolve how to live in a world of radical doubt. In short, post-modernism ideologically paves the way for fundamentalism which is the religions garb of fascism.

The Muslim response to post-modernism is the same as it was to modernism, retreat accompanied by expressions of explosive wrath. But, retreat is not possible. Hence the paradox of the Muslims expressing their Muslim-ness in an essentially un-Islamic way. Algeria was turned into a killing field. The sectarian deaths in Pakistan are another example. Terrorism is no way to counter post-modernism.

The Muslims suffer from Andulas-syndrome: the sense of loss of which the Muslims became a carrier, when our civilisation collapsed in Spain in 1492, leaving a permanent trauma and a sense of bewilderment.

Milan Kundera calls it “litost” — a feeling which is synthesis of grief, sympathy, remorse and indefinable longing. We have lost the capacity to locate ourselves historically; hence we are bereft of self-respect and self-determination.

Islam appeared as a Grand Narrative, reflected in the principle of adl (balance), ihsan (compassion) with a thirst for ilm (knowledge), tolerance and pluralism as the guiding principle as laid down in the Quranic verse: “for you, your religion; for me, mine.”

In sharp contrast, the Muslims all over the world are involved in small narratives, reflected in their castrated, undemocratic politics, dependent economics and intellectual sterility. The Muslim intelligentsia has failed in communicating Islam’s relevance to modern life and its ability to meet the challenge of post-modernism.

I started off with verses from the poem whose last verses end on a defiant note:

<i>It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.</i>

The writer is a former principal of Gordon College, Rawalpindi
Email: khmasud22@yahoo.com