Re: How Islam Lost Its Way
I Hate muzzies Like Faris Jawad and Arash Gharahmadani
ano...@yahoo.com wrote:
> How Islam Lost Its Way
>
> By Pervez Amir Ali Hoodbhoy
> Sunday, December 30, 2001; Page B04
>
> ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- If the world is to be spared what future
> historians may call the "century of terror," we will have to chart a
> perilous course between the Scylla of American imperial arrogance and
> the Charybdis of Islamic religious fanaticism. Through these waters,
> we must steer by a distant star toward a careful, reasoned,
> democratic, humanistic and secular future. Otherwise, shipwreck is
> certain.
>
> For nearly four months now, leaders of the Muslim community in the
> United States, and even President Bush, have routinely asserted that
> Islam is a religion of peace that was hijacked by fanatics on Sept.
> 11.
>
> These two assertions are simply untrue.
>
> First, Islam -- like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism or any other
> religion -- is not about peace. Nor is it about war. Every religion is
> about absolute belief in its own superiority and the divine right to
> impose its version of truth upon others. In medieval times, both the
> Crusades and the Jihads were soaked in blood. Today, there are
> Christian fundamentalists who attack abortion clinics in the United
> States and kill doctors; Muslim fundamentalists who wage their
> sectarian wars against each other; Jewish settlers who, holding the
> Old Testament in one hand and Uzis in the other, burn olive orchards
> and drive Palestinians off their ancestral land; and Hindus in India
> who demolish ancient mosques and burn down churches.
>
> The second assertion is even further off the mark. Even if Islam had,
> in some metaphorical sense, been hijacked, that event did not occur
> three months ago. It was well over seven centuries ago that Islam
> suffered a serious trauma, the effects of which refuse to go away.
>
> Where do Muslims stand today? Note that I do not ask about Islam;
> Islam is an abstraction. Maulana Abdus Sattar Edhi, Pakistan's
> preeminent social worker, and the Taliban's Mohammad Omar are both
> followers of Islam, but the former is overdue for a Nobel Peace Prize
> while the latter is an ignorant, psychotic fiend. Palestinian writer
> Edward Said, among others, has insistently pointed out that Islam
> holds very different meaning for different people. Within my own
> family, hugely different kinds of Islam are practiced. The religion is
> as heterogeneous as those who believe andfollow it. There is no "true
> Islam."
>
> Today, Muslims number 1 billion. Of the 48 countries with a full or
> near Muslim majority, none has yet evolved a stable democratic
> political system. In fact, all Muslim countries are dominated by
> self-serving corrupt elites who cynically advance their personal
> interests and steal resources from their people. None of these
> countries has a viable educational system or a university of
> international stature.
>
> Reason, too, has been waylaid.
>
> You will seldom see a Muslim name as you flip through scientific
> journals, and if you do, the chances are that this person lives in the
> West. There are a few exceptions: Pakistani Abdus Salam, together with
> Americans Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow, won the Nobel Prize for
> Physics in 1979. I got to know Salam reasonably well; we even wrote a
> book preface together. He was a remarkable man, terribly in love with
> his country and his religion. And yet he died deeply unhappy, scorned
> by Pakistan, declared a non-Muslim by an act of the Pakistani
> parliament in 1974. Today the Ahmadi sect, to which Salam belonged, is
> considered heretical and harshly persecuted. (My next-door neighbor,
> an Ahmadi physicist, was shot in the neck and heart and died in my car
> as I drove him to the hospital seven years ago. His only fault was to
> have been born into the wrong sect.)
>
> Though genuine scientific achievement is rare in the contemporary
> Muslim world, pseudo-science is in generous supply. A former chairman
> of my department has calculated the speed of heaven: He maintains it
> is receding from Earth at one centimeter per second less than the
> speed of light. His ingenious method relies upon a verse inthe Islamic
> holy book, which says that worship on the night on whichthe book was
> revealed is worth a thousand nights of ordinary worship. He states
> that this amounts to a time-dilation factor of 1,000, which he puts
> into a formulaof Einstein's theory of special relativity.
>
> A more public example: One of two Pakistani nuclear engineers recently
> arrested on suspicion of passing nuclear secrets to the Taliban had
> earlier proposed to solve Pakistan's energy problems by harnessing the
> power of genies. He relied on the Islamic belief that God created man
> from clay, and angels and genies from fire; so this highly placed
> engineer proposed to capture the genies and extract their energy.
>
> Today's sorry situation contrasts starkly with the Islam of yesterday.
> Between the 9th and 13th centuries -- the Golden Age of Islam -- the
> only people doing decent work in science, philosophy or medicine were
> Muslims. Muslims not only preserved ancient learning, they also made
> substantial innovations. The loss of this tradition has proven tragic
> for Muslim peoples.
>
> Science flourished in the Golden Age of Islam because of a strong
> rationalist and liberal tradition, carried on by a group of Muslim
> thinkers known as the Mutazilites.
>
> But in the 12th century, Muslim orthodoxy reawakened, spearheaded by
> the Arab cleric Imam Al-Ghazali. Al-Ghazali championed revelation over
> reason, predestination over free will. He damned mathematics as being
> against Islam, an intoxicant of the mind that weakened faith.
>
> Caught in the viselike grip of orthodoxy, Islam choked. No longer
> would Muslim, Christian and Jewish scholars gather and work together
> in the royal courts. It was the end of tolerance, intellect and
> science in the Muslim world. The last great Muslim thinker, Abd-al
> Rahman Ibn Khaldun, belonged to the 14th century.
>
> Meanwhile, the rest of the world moved on. The Renaissance brought an
> explosion of scientific inquiry in the West. This owed much
> totranslations of Greek works carried out by Arabs and other Muslim
> contributions, but they were to matter little. Mercantile capitalism
> and technological progress drove Western countries -- in ways that
> were often brutal and at times genocidal -- to rapidly colonize the
> Muslim world from Indonesia to Morocco. It soon became clear, at least
> to some of the Muslim elites, that they were paying a heavy price for
> not possessing the analytical tools of modern science and the social
> and political values of modern culture -- the real source of power of
> their colonizers.
>
> Despite widespread resistance from the orthodox, the logic of
> modernity found 19th-century Muslim adherents. Some seized on the
> modern idea of the nation-state. It is crucial to note that not a
> single Muslim nationalist leader of the 20th century was a
> fundamentalist.
>
> However, Muslim and Arab nationalism, part of a larger anti-colonial
> nationalist current across the Third World, included the desire to
> control and use national resources for domestic benefit. The conflict
> with Western greed was inevitable. The imperial interests of Britain,
> and later the United States, feared independent nationalism. Anyone
> willing to collaborate was preferred, even the ultraconservative
> Islamic regime of Saudi Arabia. In 1953, Mohammed Mosaddeq of Iran was
> overthrown in a CIA coup, replaced by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
> Britain targeted Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser. Indonesia's Sukarno was
> replaced by Suharto after a bloody coup that left hundreds of
> thousands dead.
>
> Pressed from outside, corrupt and incompetent from within, secular
> Muslim governments proved unable to defend national interests or
> deliver social justice. They began to frustrate democracy to preserve
> their positions of power and privilege. These failures left a vacuum
> that Islamic religious movements grew to fill -- in Iran, Pakistan and
> Sudan, to name a few.
>
> The lack of scruple and the pursuit of power by the United States
> combined fatally with this tide in the Muslim world in 1979, when the
> Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. With Pakistan's Mohammed Zia ul-Haq
> as America's foremost ally, the CIA openly recruited Islamic holy
> warriors from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Algeria. Radical Islam
> went into overdrive as its superpower ally and mentor funneled support
> to the mujaheddin; Ronald Reagan feted them on the White House lawn.
>
> The rest is by now familiar: After the Soviet Union collapsed, the
> United States walked away from an Afghanistan in shambles. The Taliban
> emerged; Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda made Afghanistan their base.
>
> What should thoughtful people infer from this whole narrative?
>
> For Muslims, it is time to stop wallowing in self-pity: Muslims are
> not helpless victims of conspiracies hatched by an all-powerful,
> malicious West. The fact is that the decline of Islamic greatness took
> place long before the age of mercantile imperialism. The causes were
> essentially internal. Therefore Muslims must be introspective and ask
> what went wrong.
>
> Muslims must recognize that their societies are far larger, more
> diverse and complex than the small homogeneous tribal society in
> Arabia 1,400 years ago. It is therefore time to renounce the idea that
> Islam can survive and prosper only in an Islamic state run according
> to sharia, or Islamic law. Muslims need a secular and democratic state
> that respects religious freedom and human dignity and is founded on
> the principle that power belongs to the people. This means confronting
> and rejecting the claim by orthodox Islamic scholars that, in an
> Islamic state, sovereignty belongs to the vice-regents of Allah, or
> Islamic jurists, not to the people.
>
> Muslims must not look to the likes of bin Laden; such people have no
> real answer and can offer no real positive alternative. To glorify
> their terrorism is a hideous mistake: The unremitting slaughter of
> Shiites, Christians and Ahmadis in their places of worship in
> Pakistan, and of other minorities in other Muslim countries, is proof
> that all terrorism is not about the revolt of the dispossessed.
>
> The United States, too, must confront bitter truths. The messages of
> George W. Bush and Tony Blair fall flat while those of bin Laden,
> whether he lives or dies, resonate strongly across the Muslim world.
> Bin Laden's religious extremism turns off many Muslims, but they find
> his political message easy to relate to: The United States must stop
> helping Israel in dispossessing the Palestinians, stop propping up
> corrupt and despotic regimes across the world just because they serve
> U.S. interests.
>
> Americans will also have to accept that their triumphalism and disdain
> for international law are creating enemies everywhere, not just among
> Muslims. Therefore they must become less arrogant and more like other
> peoples of this world.
>
> Our collective survival lies in recognizing that religion is not the
> solution; neither is nationalism. We have but one choice: the path of
> secular humanism, based upon the principles of logic and reason. This
> alone offers the hope of providing everybody on this globe with the
> right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
>
> Pervez Hoodbhoy is a professor of nuclear and high-energy physics at
> Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.
aras...@yahoo.com
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