Islamism - 5

[Naresh]

<b>Islam and modern times</b>

Reconciliation of Islam with modernity is the need of time present. Modernization is the avowed goal of China: including modernization of economy, modernization of defence, modernization of science. In the words of Deng Zao Ping it does not matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice. By all accounts our friendly neighbour China is well on the road to emerging as a superpower while the Muslim World lags far behind. To quote one statistic Israel has more scientists than the entire Arab League.

Despite the resources, fossil fuels, and wealth no Muslim state can be counted among the ranks of advanced nations. Many attempts have been made to reconcile Islam with modernity. The best known is Turkey. Kemal Ataturk rebuilt Turkey as a modern nation state from the ashes of the collapse of the five-century old Ottoman Empire. Roman alphabets replaced the Arabic Script, the Fez was banned, the veil lifted as Turkey embarked on the policy of becoming an European State yet the doors have not been opened to allow Turkey to enter the European Union. Recent referendums on the new European Constitution rejected by voters in France and the Netherlands were in essence a vote against Turkish membership of the EU.

Another example of a failed modernization is that of the pre-revolutionary Iran of caviar, nightclubs and the precious liquid flowing in the nightclubs of Tehran under the Shah. The Shah of Iran moved Iran too fast down the bend of modernity crowned by the festivities where he anointed himself as Arya Mehr evoking the ancient memory of pre Islamic Iran of the Shahnama of Firdausi. This was too much for a socially conservative society. The pillars of Persepolis were shaken by Ayatullah Khomeini who launched a Revolution of have-nots and unarmed masses as earthshaking as the French Revolution living on the floor of the seminary at Qum and not the Peacock Throne, subsisting on an ascetic diet of yogurt. Paradoxically Iranians of today reading Lolita in Tehran are more modern than most Muslim Sates with eighty percent literacy, the best known birth control pill, and a high degree of empowerment of Women who are found everywhere at work.

Soekarno’s Indonesia and Egypt under Nasser had an anti imperialist, socialist and progressive orientation but the succession to Suharto and Mubarak reversed the trends and both countries fell prey to naked dictatorship without an ideology with the sole objective of cronyism and the perpetuation of power. Malaysia represents a ray of hope with its democratic civilian supremacy and modern productive forces in a plural society; yet it is a laboratory and its human rights credentials are open to question after the experience of its rebel Deputy Prime Minister. The rest of the Muslim World lives in darkness at noon under three types of dictatorships: dynastic one-party rule, absolute monarchs and military dictators.

Pakistan was achieved by the ballot not the bullet. The turning point was the election to the Constituent Assembly in the Winter of 1945-46 in which the Muslim League won all of the thirty seats reserved for Muslims. Yet most of the Founding Fathers including the Premiers of Punjab, Bengal and Sindh were disqualified from Public Office by the Electoral Bodies Disqualification Order of 1960 promulgated in the wake of the First Martial Law in our troubled history. The list of those disqualified includes Hussain Shaeed Suhrawardy, Iftikhar Hussain Mamdot, Mian Mumtaz Daultana, Feroze Khan Noon, Kh Nazimuddin, Khan Abdul Qayyum Khan, Col Abid Hussain.

Every military ruler since then has eliminated the political leaders of the time leading to a devaluation of the political process. One can only wonder about the course of history if George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the authors of the Federalist James Madison and Alexander Hamilton had been disqualified. Modernity demands a system of Government by Institution and not by Individuals. It is for Pakistan to provide the solution for the reconciliation between Islam and the Modern Age. It is our duty to history.
Modernization is part of our heritage. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was the pioneer of the Movement for reconciling Islam with modernity. He was not the only one. Khan Bahadur Effendi in Sindh, Sir Abdul Qayyum in the Frontier, and Iqbal in Lahore led the Movement for a synthesis between modern education, science and technology within the framework of Islamic values and culture. Lahore was to this Muslim Renaissance what Florence was to the Italian. Iqbal and Faiz in the 20th Century Lahore were the harbingers of the Muslim Renaissance.

The solution to the problem of reconciliation of Islam with modern time is to be found in Iqbal’s lectures on the Reconstruction of Muslim Thought as also in the popular Idiom of his Urdu poems shikwa and jawa-i-shikwa.

According to Iqbal empiricism is the essence of Islam as it is of modernity. His exegesis of the Holy Quran is that the message of Islam is empiricist. Iqbal expounds on the repeated message of the Holy Koran to study the movement of the stars and planets, to observe and deduce from experience. If Iqbal was like Dante, the humanist Faiz was our Petrach. Though Faiz wrote about clerks and tongawallas and the wretched of the earth, his lyricism bore the stamp of classicism. Hence the first collection of poems by Faiz bears the title naksh-i-fariady. In his essay on the quest for Identity in Culture Faiz writes of the predicament of the Muslim intelligentsia after the extinction of the Moghul.

The decline of the Muslim Power coincided with the dawn of great folk classics, heroic or mystical, such as Khushal Khan Khattak (1613-91) Shah Abdul Latif (1690-1757), Waris Shah 1722-? And Bulleh Shah (1688 -1728). In another Essay on Cross Cultural Encounters Faiz writes about the religious confrontation between Western Christianity and Eastern Islam and observes: “The legendary figure of Alexander first emerges as a prototype of all subsequent heroes of medieval romance: young, handsome, brave and invincible, ruthless in battle magnanimous in victory. And second as a common protagonist of both Eastern and Western national and religious causes. Religious commentators identified him with Zulqarnain mentioned in the Holy Koran, who stemmed the onslaught of Gog and Magog “

Faiz describes Sir Syed Ahmed Khan as the Leader of the Muslim Reformist Movement and quotes Sir Syed: “We want the Indian Muslims to give up their prejudices and false notions and advance towards culture and civilization”.

The Valley of the Indus is the meeting point between East and West where Alexander, the pupil of Aristotle, the source of Western thought, once strode leaving to posterity the Ghandara Civilization. Gandhara blended Hellenism with the early Buddhist period when three things happened writes Faiz “Firstly, the rise of Taxila as the seat of Government, secondly, the rise of cities on the trade routes, and thirdly, the importation of classical cultural influences from Persia and Greece and later on from Rome”. In the same vein Iqbal in one of his letters to Jinnah writes about the common message of social democracy and equality in Islam and Buddhism

Lahore during the 20th Century was another Gandhara in the making. This beloved city became the center-point of Urdu Literature during the Twentieth Century. It was also the city of the painters Chugtai, Allah Bux, Shakir Ali, Amrita Sher Gill, Khurshid Anwar in music and Noorjehan’s songs in Heer Ranjha. Professor Dr. Abdul Salam, the only Pakistani to win the Nobel Prize, was a Ravian. Galileo supported the Copernican theory that the planets revolved around the sun, invented the pendulum for keeping time, proved the law of uniform acceleration of falling bodies by throwing rocks of uneven weight from the leaning tower of Pisa which fell to the bottom at the same time contrary to the conventional wisdom of the time that rate of gravity depends upon the weight of the falling body and thus earned the ire and imprisonment of the Pope. Galileo developed the astronomical telescope and showed that the milky-way was composed of stars. At the time of his premature death Dr. Salam was working on the Unified Theory of the Universe forced into self imposed exile by discrimination.

The population of Pakistan was 35 million in 1947, today it has multiplied by five times. Shortages of land and water and the exploding population breed unemployment. <b>Thus the discontents of our civilization arise from our illiteracy and ignorance.</b> The Muslim World needs An Age of Reason in order to survive and prosper in Modern Times. Since no other Muslim State has succeeded in reconciling Islam with modernity the burden falls upon the people of Pakistan.

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