Rethinking Islam & the West

by Ahmed Keeler

  As they formulated the sharia, the scholars drew upon the Revelation, as well as the sayings and conduct of the Prophet, in order to legislate for everything from ablution, prayer, charity and pilgrimage, to trade, property rights, agricultural ethics, marriage and inheritance, as well as every other aspect of human life, whether personal or social. Their issuing of legal edicts to address particular, sometimes wholly new problems, was another of the scholar’s important roles. From advising the faithful on their marital obligations, to admonishing a ruler to desist from a war not authorised by sharia, the scholar as politically-neutral interpreter of revelation held a position of immunity that the ruler only violated at his peril.

  At the heart of Islamic civilisation is the term adab, which is sometimes translated as ‘manners’ or ‘etiquette’. These words, however, suggest a kind of surface polishing to a person’s conduct, something artificial even, which is far from the true meaning of adab. RA Nicholson, the celebrated translator of Arabic and Persian literature, rendered the term adab in English as ‘spiritual culture’, and this expression does capture something of the essential nature of adab, which is a deeply-rooted spirituality and sense of the sacred that infuses a person’s inner demeanour as well as their outer conduct. To have adab is to have an inbuilt sense of propriety such that one gives each person, each act and each thing its due. There is said to be an adab towards God, an adab towards one’s fellow human beings and an adab towards one’s self. The word derives from the Arabic root which has the meaning of educating, training and discipline, as indicated in a saying of the Prophet, from whose example all adab is said to derive, ‘My Lord educated me and made my education (adab) beautiful’.

  The three ways of life, urban, rural and nomadic, also reached a state of mīzān within the world of Islam. The interplay between city and nomad is brilliantly observed in Ibn Khaldun’s 15th century work, The Muqadimmah – an Introduction to History. Ibn Khaldūn explains how the nomadic way of life fostered the martial spirit and self-reliance. The nomads come out of the desert, conquer the cities and sultanates and establish their ruling dynasties. In time, the life of the city corrupts and softens the rulers who are in their turn conquered by other nomads who set up their dynasties and the cycle is repeated. The two great areas of nomadism, the southern deserts inhabited by the Arabs, and the northern Steppes of Eurasia, inhabited by the Turks and Mongols, provided most of the ruling dynasties of the central lands of Dār al-Islām.

  The simplicity and austerity of the nomadic way of life connected deep into the fabric of Islamic civilisation. The carpets on which they sat and the tents that sheltered them were all made from the wool and hair of their flocks of sheep and goats, and herds of camels. The carpet, in palace, home and mosque, became a defining feature of the civilisation. The nomads played a key role in trade, providing the transportation, cameleers and guides. As well as rearing animals which produced meat for the cities, they were breeders of horses and camels for the armies of the dynasties, and provided an endless supply of recruits for the military.

  Most people lived on the land and grew the food and materials they needed to support themselves, whilst the surplus was traded in the cities or delivered as tax to the authorities. A symbiosis existed in many areas between the farmers and nomads that greatly benefitted the land; nomads would run their animals over the lands of the farmers, feeding on the stubble and fertilising the soil, after which the farmers would plant their crops.

  The city was the centre of Islamic civilisation, with its markets, craft workshops, educational institutions, spiritual centres, law courts and governor’s palace. From the cities, through trade and the example of the pious merchant, Islam reached the furthest points of Afro-Eurasia, and through the spread of the Sufi orders, deep into the countryside. What is clear is that Islam spread remarkably easily and once established, was loved and cherished by city dwellers, nomads and villagers alike.

  Islam succeeded in creating a stable, sustainable, universal civilisation which maintained the mīzān through the process of dynamic equilibrium. Generations of Muslims cherished their Holy Book, loved their Prophet, were happy in their religion, were at home in their culture and found peace in their civilisation.

  THE WEST

  Jesus Christ was born in a province of the Roman Empire at a time when it was reaching its height. For three hundred years, Christianity was an underground movement, sometimes tolerated and at other times persecuted. The Christian Church became a self-contained spiritual society within the civilisation of Rome. The Roman Empire was divided between the Greek-speaking East and the Latin-speaking West. When the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 312, he moved the centre of gravity to the East and founded the new capital of Constantinople, which became known as the second Rome. By the beginning of the 5th century, the Western Roman Empire had collapsed and was divided up between a number of Germanic tribes.

  In the East, in what became known as Byzantium, Christianity transformed a living Roman Empire with all its civilised administration and framework in place. In the West, Christianity had to contend with a tribal village world to which it brought a belief system and way of life. With the Crusades, beginning with the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, Western Christendom began to engage with the worlds of both Islam and Byzantium. Urbanisation increased with markets rapidly developing and cities forming. However, the monastic Christianity of the West did not have the framework for the transition from a mainly rural society to a fully developed urban civilisation. So there took place the strangest of events: the Renaissance. A civilisation that had been dead and buried for a thousand years, was disinterred and co-opted to fulfil this role.

  The Greco-Roman ‘Classical World’, as it was now called, was believed to have reached the summit of civilisation and became the ideal that had to be emulated. Religion and culture became separated: the warrior replaced the saint at the apex of society; the Greek and Latin classics replaced the Bible at the centre of education; museums were built to house the remains of the Classical World so that they could be preserved and studied; classical architecture replaced the vernacular forms that had grown up naturally within Christendom, creating an orderly, but contrived environment; the artist brought the Gods down from heaven into the human dimension, and the glorification of God and the saints was replaced by the glorification of Man. Man now became ‘the measure of all things’.

  But it was a new detached being that looked out upon the world. No longer belonging to an organic culture, this being was mesmerised by a dead world, which through the imagination had been brought back to life and idealised. Culture was no longer formed from inside, it would now be acquired from outside, from a source that was dead. We pass from an age when the Christian was formed through an integrated process, to one in which civilisation was acquired through learning about another world that existed in another time. This produced a new kind of ‘civilised’ being who, living in an idealised imaginary world, was more at home with dead cultures and civilisations than with those that were alive.

  The social impact of the Renaissance was to separate the elite from the rest of society. Classical education and culture had no meaning for the mass of society, which had no access to it. However, it provided the framework for the creation of a warrior caste. The martial virtues of courage, self-sacrifice and discipline were elevated and celebrated, eclipsing the Christian virtues of love, forgiveness and humility. In literature, the lives of the saints were replaced by the exploits of the heroes. Statues of the great warriors and statesmen were erected in the squares and public spaces, and their ‘Roman’ palaces dominated city and countryside. Finally, in death, the Church honoured them, housing their tombs and memorials in churches and cathedrals.

  The Roman Empire became the model and inspiration for the newly-formed sovereign states to create their own empires. Unable to conquer their neighbours, they went overseas and imposed upon the
world their version of civilisation, destroying the living worlds they encountered and placing the remains of their artefacts in the newly-created museums where they could be studied.

  Meanwhile, the Renaissance wreaked havoc within the Christian Church and penetrated deep into the Papacy. For a hundred years, from the middle of the 15th to the middle of the 16th century, a series of popes, steeped in the new humanism, behaved like the most decadent of Roman emperors to the disgust of the pious. They set about recreating the grandeur of Rome and rebuilding St Peter’s in the classical style. To fund this grandiose scheme, the popes issued indulgences; the faithful could pay for their loved ones and themselves to have their time in Purgatory reduced. This was the fuse that set off the explosion that led to the Reformation and the ripping apart of Christendom.

  The next great change came about at the end of the 18th century, when revolutions rocked America and France, resulting in humanism changing from being the study and emulation of the classical world into a subjective definition of the rights of each and every human being. These revolutions were the result of the exploitation of colonies, the injustice of absolute monarchs, the excesses and venality of their courts, the gulf that had grown between the ruling classes and the people, and the hypocrisy and intolerance of the churches. The successful revolutionaries wished to sweep away the old order and its hierarchies and create a new world which would benefit all people. A utopian future was envisaged in which heaven would be brought down to earth. Surveying the past in his book Rights of Man, Thomas Paine saw three clear stages unfolding:

  First, Superstition. Secondly, Power. Thirdly, the common interest of society, and the common rights of man. The first was a government of priest craft, the second of conquerors, and the third of reason.

  A new narrative was forming in which the Christian Millennium was reduced to an age of darkness and superstition, followed by the tyranny of the kings. The revolutionaries, guided by pure reason, would now create the just society. The American Declaration of Independence famously captures this aspiration:

  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

  The French Revolution echoed this with its anthem of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’ and the rights of humanity took centre stage. However, once the Creator was removed from the equation, what had been relative terms, employed in the response to tyranny, were transformed into absolutes. Fraternity became the foundational principle for the socialist doctrines that emerged out of the horrors of the Industrial Revolution, and freedom and equality became the twin pillars of humanism in what came to be known as the ‘modern world’.

  However, the secular understanding of freedom and equality took on an altogether different meaning in humanism than it had within Christianity. In Christianity, as in Islam, freedom is achieved when the carnal self is conquered. For the Christian, it is only through Christ that this is made possible, and it is only the saints who are truly free.

  But now you are free from the power of sin. You have become a servant for God. Your life is set apart for God-like living. The end is life that lasts forever. (Romans, 6:22)

  Likewise, it is only under God and in Christ that we are equal.

  There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male or female, for you are all one in Christ. (Galatians, 3:28).

  Human rights came to the fore again after World War II when, responding to the barbarity of what had taken place, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was enshrined in the United Nations Charter. This then became the model for legislation to be enacted in the European Union and many nation states.

  Whilst the post-colonial nations were grappling with real problems of tyranny, exploitation and fundamental human freedoms, the affluent post-war West was taking freedom and equality into an altogether different sphere with the enshrinement of the sovereignty of the self, the Sexual Revolution of the 1960’s, and the moral relativism of post-modernism. The pursuit of happiness, freed from its Christian moorings, would produce a sybaritic society with the freedom to indulge itself in whatever ways that could be manufactured and marketed by the new corporations.

  To summarise, Western Christendom’s inability to make the transition from a rural to an urban civilisation ushered in the Renaissance, and the idealisation of a dead world. With ‘Man becoming the measure of all things’ humanism was born. In that which now regarded itself as the civilised world, humanism aspired to the virtues of the classical age. With the descent into our modern world, humanism has been transformed into the rights demanded by, and granted to, the sovereign individual.

  3

  KNOWLEDGE

  ISLAM

  Within a hundred years of the establishment of the community in Medina, the Muslims had control of an empire that stretched from Spain to India and the borders of China, and contained within it the richest provinces of the Byzantine Empire and the entire Persian Empire. As it encountered a world of many ancient cultures and civilisations in various stages of decay, a remarkable process of synthesis took place. The West mistook these early centuries, when the knowledge of the world was being sifted and sorted, for the ‘Golden Age of Islam’. It was, in fact, the formative stage, and what was remarkable was the universal civilisation that would later emerge.

  At this point, it is important to understand the difference between the Islamic and modern understanding of what constitutes verifiable knowledge. For the modern mindset that traces its origins to the revolutions of the 16th and 17th centuries, verifiable knowledge has been reduced to what can be discovered through the scientific method and is limited to the material realm. Everything else belongs to the imagination and is entirely subjective. In Islam, verifiable knowledge is understood to exist in all three realms of the unseen, human and material, and can be attained through the Revelation and correct reasoning. This is where Islam differed fundamentally from Christianity. In Christianity, certain doctrines have come to require the setting aside of reason, whereas in Islam, it is an obligation that the Revelation be affirmed through reason.

  The Qur’an and the life of the Prophet are the foundations on which Islamic civilisation was built. During his life, every action of the Prophet was recorded by his companions, and a science was developed to ensure that the proper transmission of this knowledge from generation to generation took place. Muslim scholars expended much effort in preserving, transmitting and interpreting the Revelation. The twenty-three years of prophecy and revelation are traditionally known as ʿasr al-saʿāda, which can be translated as the ‘age of bliss’. When this blessed period came to an end and the scholars, both men and women, were left to fend for themselves, an immense intellectual ferment took place.

  This was the time when the mereological principle that ‘the whole can contain the part, but the part cannot contain the whole’ was tested. Among the restrictive positions taken during this formative period were those of the Muʿtazilites, who claimed for reason the ultimate authority, the Hashwiyya, who insisted on the literal interpretation of the text, and the Bātinists who sought only to understand the inner or symbolic meaning of the Qur’an. However, the parts claiming the whole were gradually drawn into the upward trajectory, and the mereological principle realised. In time, philosophers and theologians were to discover the synthesis in which the four fundamental sources of knowledge: revelation (naql), mystical cognition (dhawq), reason (ʿaql) and sensation (ihsās), were brought into a state of mīzān, and the unity at the heart of Islam was unveiled.

  This journey of discovery involved the contribution of many great thinkers. Foremost among these were: Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, d. 1037), who transformed philosophy and developed a universal science of metaphysics that could encompass all of the sciences and simultaneously attain the height
s necessary for an adequate intellectual treatment of the Revelation; Imam al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), whose monumental work recognized the mystic path as reaching the highest knowledge of God attainable within a framework that acknowledged the value and relationality of every field of human knowledge; Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1209), who by applying his epoch-making intellectual power to a synthesis of Avicennan general metaphysics and the revelatory principles of speculative theology (kalām), created a new all-encompassing theology in which every branch of knowledge was shown to be part of a single truth, and paved the way for the great summas of the 14th and 15th centuries; and Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240), known forever as ‘the Greatest Master’, who for the first time fully encompassed philosophy within his mystical vision and thus contracted a sublime marriage between them. By the 15th century, a synthesis of Akbārian, Avicennan and Rāzian thought was complete – powerfully exemplified in the works of later thinkers like Mulla Fenari (d. 1431) and Taşköprüzade (d. 1560) in the Ottoman world – and a hierarchy of knowledge had been established that took in the revealed sciences alongside all of the branches of philosophy and mysticism. This hierarchy would come to be adopted in the higher educational systems of both the Ottoman Empire and the Mughal Empire in India.