Islam and
the New Millennium
by Abdal Hakim Murad
Whoever is
not thankful for graces
runs the risk of losing them;
and whoever is thankful,
fetters them with their own cords.
(Ibn Ata'illah, Kitab al-Hikam)
'Islam and the New Millennium'
- rather a grandiose subject for an essay, and one which, for
Muslims, requires at least two caveats before we can even
begin.
Firstly, the New Millennium -
the Year 2000 - is not our millennium. Regrettably, most Muslim
countries nowadays use the Christian calendar devised by Pope
Gregory the Great, and not a few are planning celebrations of
some kind. Many confused and secularised people in Muslim
countries are already expressing a good deal of excitement: in
Turkey, there is even a weekly magazine called Iki Bin'e Dogru
(Straight to 2000). This semi-hysteria should be of little
interest to us: as Muslims we have our own calendar. The year
2000 will in fact begin during the year 1420 of the Hijra. So
why notice the occasion at all? Isn't this just another example
of annoying and irrelevant Western influence?
This point becomes still
sharper when we remember that according to most modern
scholars, Jesus (a.s.) was in fact born in the year 4 B.C. Thus
1996, not 2000, marked the second millennium of his advent. The
celebrations in two years time will in fact mark an entirely
meaningless date: a postmodern festival indeed.
The second, more imponderable
reservation, concerns our ability to speak reliably about the
future at all. In this paper I propose to speculate about the
directions which Islam may take following the great and
much-hyped anniversary. But the theological question is a sharp
one: can we do this in a halal way? The future is in the ghayb,
the Unseen; it is known only to Allah. And it may well be that
the human race will not reach the year 2000 at all. Allah is
quite capable of winding the whole show up before then. The
hadith of Jibril describes how the angel came to the Prophet
(Allah bless him and give him peace) asking when the Day of
Judgement would come, and he only replied, 'The one questioned
knows no more of it than the questioner.' But as the Holy
Qur'an puts it, 'the very heavens are bursting with it.' It may
well be tomorrow.
Apocalyptic expectations are
not new in Islamic history: they appeared, for instance, in
connection with the Islamic millennium. Imam al-Suyuti, the
greatest scholar of medieval Egypt, was concerned about the
nervous expectations many Muslims had about the year 1000 of
the hijra. Would it herald the end of the world, as many
thought?
Imam al-Suyuti allayed these
fears by examining all the hadith he could find about the
lifetime of this Umma. He wrote a short book which he called
al-Kashf an mujawazat hadhihi al-umma al-Alf ('Proof that this
Umma will survive the millenium'). He concluded that there was
no evidence that the first millenium of Islam would end human
history. But rather soberingly for our generation, he
speculates that the hadiths at his disposal indicate that the
signs which will usher in the return of Isa (a.s.), and the
Antichrist (al-Masih al-Dajjal), are most likely to appear in
the fifteenth Islamic century; in other words, our own.
But all these speculations
were submissive to the Imam's deep Islamic awareness that
knowledge of the future is with Allah; and only Prophets can
prophesy.
What I shall be doing in the
pages that follow, then, is not forecast, but extrapolate.
Allah ta'ala is capable of changing the course of history
utterly, through some natural disaster, or a series of
disastrous wars. He can even end history for good. If that
happens in the next three years, then my forecasts will be
worthless. All I am doing is, in a sense, to talk about the
present, inasmuch as present trends, uninterrupted by
catastrophe, seem set to continue in the coming few years and
decades.
Why is it useful to reflect on
these trends? Because I think we all recognise that the Muslims
have responded badly and largely unsuccessfully to the
challenges of the twentieth century; in fact, of the last three
centuries. Faced with the triumph of the West, we have not been
able to work out which changes are inevitable, and which can be
resisted.
For instance, in the early
nineteenth century the Ottoman empire lost a series of
disastrous wars against Russia. The main reason was the
superior discipline and equipment maintained by modern European
armies. But the ulema, and the janissary troops, resisted any
change. They believed that battles were won by faith, and that
firearms and parade grounds diminished the virtue of futuwwa,
the chivalric, almost Samurai-like code of the individual
Muslim warrior. To shoot at an enemy from a distance rather
than look him in the eye and fight with a sword was seen as a
form of cowardice. Hence the Ottoman army continued to sustain
defeat after defeat at the hands of its better-equipped
Christian enemies.
Another case in point was the
controversy over printing. Until the eighteenth century a
majority of ulema believed that printing was haram. A text,
particularly one dealing with religion, was something numinous
and holy, to be created slowly and lovingly through the
traditional calligraphic and bookbinding crafts. A ready
availability of identical books, the scholars thought, would
cheapen Islamic learning, and also make students lazy about
committing ideas and texts to memory. Further, it was thought
that the process of stamping and pressing pages was
disrespectful to texts which might contain the name of the
Source of all being.
It took a Hungarian convert to
Islam, Ibrahim Muteferrika, to change all this. Muteferrika
obtained the Ottoman Caliph's permission to print secular and
scientific books, and in 1720 he opened Islam's first printing
press in Istanbul. Muteferrika was a sincere convert,
describing his background and religious beliefs in a book which
he called Risale-yi Islamiyye. He was also very concerned with
the technical and administrative backwardness of the Ottoman
empire. Hence he wrote a book entitled Usul al-Hikam fi Nizam
al-Umam, and published it himself in 1731. In this book he
describes the governments and military systems prevailing in
Europe, and told the Ottoman elite that independent Muslim
states could only survive if they borrowed not only military
technology, but also selectively from European styles of
administration and scientific knowledge.
Ibrahim Muteferrika's warnings
about the rise of European civilisation were slowly heeded, and
the Ottoman state set about the controversial business of
modernizing itself, while attempting to preserve what was
essential to its Islamic identity.
Muteferrika's story reminds us
that unless Muslims are conscious of the global trends of their
age, they will continue to be losers. My own experience of
Muslims has suggested that we are endlessly fascinated by
short-term political issues, but are largely ignorant of the
larger tendencies of which these issues are simply the passing
manifestations.
This ignorance can sometimes
be astonishing. How many leaders in the Islamic world are
really familiar with the ideas which underpin modernity? I have
met some leaders of activist factions, and have been
consistently shocked by their lack of knowledge. How many can
even name the principal intellectual systems of our time?
Structuralism, post-modernism, realism, analytic philosophy,
critical theory, and all the rest are closed books to them.
Instead they burble on about
the 'International Zionist Masonic Conspiracy', or 'Baha'ism',
or the 'New Crusader Invasion', or similar phantasms. If we
want to understand why so many Islamic movements fail, we should
perhaps begin by acknowledging that their leaders simply do not
have the intellectual grasp of the modern world which is the
precondition for successfully overcoming the obstacles to
Islamic governance. A Muslim activist who does not understand
the ideologies of modernism can hardly hope to overcome them.
A no less lamentable ignorance
prevails when it comes to non-ideological trends in the late
twentieth century, and which are likely to prevail in the new
millennium. And hence I make no apologies for discussing them in
this paper. Like Ibrahim Mutefarrika three centuries ago, I am
concerned to alert Muslims to the realities which are taking
shape around them, and which are moulding a world in which
their traditional discourse will have no application
whatsoever. It is suicidal to assume that we will be insulated
from these realities. Increasingly, we live in one world, thanks
to a mono-culturising process which is accelerating all the
time. There is a mosque in Belfast now, and there is also a
branch of MacDonalds in Mecca. We may be confident in our faith
and assumptions, but what of many of our young people? What
happens to the young Muslim student at an American university?
He learns about post-modernism and post-structuralism, and that
these are the ideologies of profound influence in the modern
West. He asks the Islamic activist leaders how to disprove
them, and of course they cannot. So he grows confused, and his
confidence in Islam as a timeless truth is shaken. Under such
conditions, only the less intelligent will remain Muslim: a
filtering process which is already painfully evident in some
activist circles.
It is, therefore, an
obligation, a farida, to understand the processes which are
under way around us.
To summarise the leading
trends of our age is beyond the ambitions of this short paper.
I will focus, therefore, on just a few representative issues,
not because I can deal with them fully, but simply to suggest
the nature of the challenges for which the Umma should prepare
over the next few decades. These three issues are: demography,
religious change, and the environment.
Let me deal with the
demographic issue first, because in a sense it is the most
inexorable. Population trends are easily extrapolated, and the
statistics are abundant for the past hundred years at least.
Projections are reliable unless catastrophe supervenes:
epidemics, for instance, or destructive wars. I will assume
that neither of these things will assume sufficient proportions
to affect the general picture.
Here are some figures taken
from D. Barrett's World Christian Encyclopedia, published by
Oxford University Press in 1982. I will set them out in text
rather than tabular form, in case the format does not survive
Web downloading.
In 1900, 26.9% of the world's
population was Western Christian, while Islam accounted for
12.4%. In 1980 the figures were 30% and 16.5% respectively. The
projection for 2000 is 29.9% and 19.2%. Percentages for other
religions are fairly static, and since 1970 the total of
atheists has, surprisingly perhaps, experienced a slow decline.
These figures are of
considerable significance. Over the course of this century, the
absolute proportion of Muslims in the world has jumped by a
quite staggering amount. This has come about partly through
conversion, but more significantly through natural increase.
And the demographic bulge in the modern Muslim world means that
this growth will continue. Here, for instance, is the forecast
of Samuel Huntington in his new and resolutely Islamophobic
book The Clash of Civilizations (pp.65-6):
"The percentage of Christians
in the world peaked at about 30 percent in the 1980s, leveled
off, is now declining, and will probably approximate about 25%
of the world's population by 2025. As a result of their
extremely high rates of population growth, the proportion of
Muslims in the world will continue to increase dramatically,
amounting to 20 percent of the world's population about the
turn of the century, surpassing the number of Christians some
years later, and probably accounting for about 30 percent of
the world's population by 2025." It is not hard to see why this
is happening. America and Europe have increasingly aging
populations. In fact, one of the greatest social arguments of
the new millennium will concern the proper means of disposing
of the elderly. Medical advances ensure an average lifetime in
the high seventies. However active lifetimes have not grown so
fast. At the turn of the century, a Westerner could expect to
spend an average of the last two years of life as an invalid.
Today, the figure is seven years. As Ivan Illich has shown,
medicine prolongs life, but does not prolong mobility nearly as
well. These ageing populations with their healthcare costs are
an increasing socio-economic burden. The UK Department of
Health recently announced that a new prescription drug for
Alzheimer's Disease is available on the National Health Service
- but its cost means that it is only available to a selected
minority of patients. In the West's population is top-heavy,
that of Islam is the opposite. Today, more than half the
population of Algeria, for example, is under the age of twenty,
and the situation is comparable elsewhere. These young
populations will reproduce, and perpetuate the percentage
increase of Muslims well into the next millennium.
Hence, to take an example, in
the Maghrib between 1965 and 1990, the population rose from
29.8 million to 59 million. During the same period, the number
of Egyptians increased from 29.4 million to 52.4 million. In
Central Asia, between 1970 and 1993, populations grew at annual
rates of 2.9 percent in Tajikistan, 2.6 percent in Uzbekistan,
2.5 percent in Turkmenistan, and 1.9 percent in Kyrgyzia. In
the 1970s, the demographic balance in the Soviet Union shifted
drastically, with Muslims increasing by 24 percent while
Russians increased by only 6.5 percent. Almost certainly this is
one reason why the Russian empire collapsed: Moscow had to
detach its Muslim areas before their numbers encouraged them to
dominate the system. Even in Russia itself, Muslims (Tatars,
Bashkirs, and Chuvash, as well as immigrants) are very visible,
accounting for over 10 percent of the populations of both Moscow
and St Petersburg.
This reminds us that the
increase in the Muslim heartlands will have a significant
impact in Muslim minority areas as well. In some countries,
such as Tanzania and Macedonia, the Muslims will become a
majority within twenty years. Largely through immigration, the
Muslim population of the United States grew sixfold between 1972
and 1990. And even in countries where immigration has been
suppressed, the growth continues. Last year, seven percent of
babies born in European Union countries were Muslims. In
Brussels, the figure was a staggering 57 percent. Islam is
already the second religion of almost every European state -
the only exceptions being those European countries such as
Azerbaijan and Albania where it is the majority religion. If
current trends continue, then an overall ten percent of
European nationals will be Muslim by the year 2020.
What is the significance of
this global change? Does it in fact entail anything at all?
After all, there is a famous hadith narrated by Abu Daud on the
authority of Thawban, which says that the day will come when the
Muslims will be numerous, but will be like froth and flotsam
(ghutha') carried along by a flash-flood.
It is true that sheer weight
of numbers counts for much less today than it did, say, a
couple of hundred years ago, when military victories depended
as much on numbers as on technology. Napoleon could say that
'God is on the side of the larger battalions' - but nowadays,
when huge numbers of soldiers can be eliminated by push-button
weapons, this is no longer the case; a fact demonstrated by
Saddam Hussein's hopeless and absurd defiance during the recent
conflict over Gulf oil supplies.
The rapid increase in Muslim
numbers does, however, have important entailments. But for
this, the UN would not have chosen Cairo, the world's largest
Muslim city, as the site of its 1994 Population Conference.
There is still some safety in numbers. But more significant
than mere numbers is the psycho-dynamic of population profiles.
Aging populations become introspective and flaccid. Young
populations are more likely to be energetic, and encourage
national political assertiveness.
The new millennium will dawn
over a Muslim world with disproportionately young populations.
Moreover, these populations will be increasingly urban. And
such situations historically have always bred instability,
turmoil, and reform. One explanation for the Protestant
reformation in Europe is based on the preponderance of young
people in urban sixteenth-century Germany, the result of new
agricultural and political arrangements. The growth of fascism
in Central Europe in the 1930s is also attributed in part to the
growth in the number of young people. And in Islamic history,
one thinks of the example of the Jelali rebellions in the
sixteenth and seventh century: once the great Ottoman conquests
had ceased, the young men who would have been occupied in the
army found themselves at a loose end, and launched a variety of
sectarian or social protest movements that devastated large
areas of Anatolia.
The Islamic revival over the
past few years has faithfully reflected this trend. One of the
first Muslim countries to reach a peak proportion of youth was
Iran, in the late 1970s (around 22% of the population), and the
revolution occurred in 1979. In other countries the peak was
reached rather later: in Algeria this proportion was reached in
1989, just when the FIS was winning its greatest support.
Following the millennium, this
youth bulge will continue in many Muslim societies. The number
of people in their early twenties will increase in Egypt,
Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, and several other countries. As
compared to 1990, in the year 2010 entrants to the jobs market
will increase by about 50% in most Arab lands. The unemployment
problem, already acute, will become intolerable.
This rapid growth is likely to
render some states difficult to govern. The bunker regimes in
Cairo and Algiers are already confronting rebellions which have
clear demographic as well as moral and religious dimensions. So
the first probable image we have of the next millenium is: in
the West, aging and static populations, with stable,
introspective political cultures; and in the Islamic world, a
population explosion, and established regimes everywhere under
siege by radicals.
The next consideration has to
be: will the bunker regimes survive? This is harder to comment
upon, although many political scientists with an interest in
the Islamic world have tried. Before the modern period, peasant
revolts stood a good chance of success, because manpower could
carry the day against the ruler's army. Today, however,
advances in technology have made it possible for military
regimes to survive indefinitely in the face of massive popular
discontent. Spend enough money, and you can defeat even the
most ingenious infiltrator or the most populous revolt. This
technology is becoming cheaper, and is often supplied on a
subsidised basis to the West's favoured clients in the Third
World. Similarly, techniques of interrogation and torture are
becoming far more refined, and have proved an effective weapon
against underground movements in a variety of places.
Let me give you an example.
Last year's Amnesty International report explains that in
January 1995, the US government licenced the export to Saudi
Arabia of a range of security equipment including the so-called
'taser' guns. 'These guns shoot darts into a victim over a
distance of up to five metres before a 40-50,000 volt shock is
administered. These weapons are prohibited in many countries,
including the UK.
Another example, also
documented by Amnesty, is the export in 1990 of a complete
torture chamber by a UK company, which was installed in the
police special branch headquarters in Dubai. This is known in
the Emirates as the 'House of Fun'. The Amnesty report
describes it as 'a specially constructed cell fitted with a
terrifyingly loud sound system, a white-noise generator and
synchronized strobe lights designed to pulse at a frequency that
would cause severe distress.'
These are just two examples of
the increasing sophistication of torture equipment now being
supplied to the bunker regimes. One could add to this list the
improving techniques of telecommunications surveillance.
But what about the Internet?
Isn't the Internet the ultimate freedom machine, allowing the
pervasion of all types of dissent, from anywhere in the world,
to anywhere in the world?
At the moment the Internet is
only available in a few Muslim countries.
Already there are indications
that monitoring of the phone lines which carry the signals is
in progress. The centralizing nature of the Internet is in fact
tailormade for intrusive regimes. A fairly straightforward
programme on a mainframe computer logged on to the telephone
net can inform the security forces instantaneously if a
forbidden site is being accessed. Once that is established,
investigation and arrest are a matter of course. I believe that
as technology improves, including ever more massive
surveillance systems, it seems quite likely that the regimes
will be able to suppress any amount of dissent, on one
condition - that it does not spread to the armed forces. The
Shah fell because his army turned against him, not because of
the protests on the streets. But in Algeria the revolution has
been suppressed, largely because the radicals think they can
overwhelm a modern state without support from the armed forces.
The societies governed in this
way are now experiencing severe traumas and cultural
distortions. They are sometimes called 'pressure-cooker
cultures'. The consequences for the human soul of being
subjected to this kind of pressure are quite alarming, and
already in the Muslim world we see manifestations of extreme
behaviour which only a decade ago would have been unthinkable.
This is not the context for
providing full details of the problem of 'extremism', or what
traditional Islam would call ghuluww. But it is clearly a
growing feature of our religious landscape, and I will have to
deal with it in passing. In early Islam the movement known as
Kharijism fought against the khalifa Ali for the sake of a
utopian and purist vision of Muslim society. Today, tragically,
the Khawarij are with us once more. I have in mind incidents
such as the 1994 shooting in Omdurman, when Wahhabi activists
opened fire on Friday worshippers in the Ansar al-Sunna mosque,
killing fourteen. Ironically, the mosque was itself Salafi, but
followed a form of Wahhabism that the activists did not
consider sufficiently extreme.
In Algeria, too,
throat-slittings and massacres of villagers, and fighting
between rival groups, have transformed large areas of the
country into a smoking ruin.
We sometimes like to dismiss
these movements as marginal irrelevancies.
However, the signs are that
until the conditions which have bred them are removed, they
will continue to grow. The mainstream Islamic movements are
seen to have failed to achieve power, and desperate young people
are turning to more radical alternatives. It is fairly clear
that a growing polarisation of Muslim society, and of the
Muslim conscience, will be a hallmark of the coming century.
What is the defining symptom
of Kharijism? In a word, takfir. That is, declaring other
Muslims to be beyond the pale, and hence worthy of death. This
tendency was attacked vigorously by the ulema of high classical
Islam. For instance, Imam al-Ghazali, in his book Faysal
al-Tafriqa bayn al-Islam wa'l-Zandaqa explained that it is
extremely difficult to declare anyone outside Islam for as long
as they say La ilaha illa'Llah, Muhammadun rasulu'Llah. And
today, Sunni schoolchildren in many countries still memorise
creeds such as the Jawharat al-Tawhid of Imam al-Laqqani, which
include lines like:
idh ja'izun ghufranu
ghayri'l-kufri
fa-la nukaffir mu'minan bi'l-wizri
since forgiving what is not unbelief is possible,
as we do not declare an unbeliever any believer on account of a
sin.
wa-man yamut wa-lam yatub min
dhanbihi
fa-amruhu mufawwadun li-rabbihi
Whoever dies and has not repented of his sin,
his matter is turned over to his Lord.
The legitimation of
differences in fiqh was rooted in the understanding of ijtihad.
And differences in spiritualities were justified by the Sufis
in terms of the idea that al-turuq ila'Llah bi'adadi anfas
al-khala'iq ('there are as many paths to God as there are human
breaths'). As Ibn al-Banna', the great Sufi poet of Saragossa
expressed it, ibaraatuna shatta wa-husnuka wahidun, wa-kullun
ila dhak al-jamali yushiru ('our expressions differ, but Your
beauty is one, and all are pointing towards that Beauty').
Diversity has always been a characteristic of Islamic cultures.
It was only medieval Christian cultures which strove to
suppress it. However, there is a growing tendency nowadays
among Muslims to favour totalitarian forms of Islam. 'Everyone
who disagrees with me is a sinner, cries the young activist,
'and is going to hell'.
This mentality recalls the
Kharijite takfir, but to understand why it is growing in the
modern umma, we have to understand not just the formal history,
but the psychohistory of our situation. Religious movements are
the expression not just of doctrines and scriptures, but also
of the hopes and fears of human collectivities. In times of
confidence, theologies tend to be broad and eirenic. But when
the community of believers feels itself threatened, exclusivism
is the frequent result. And never has the Umma felt more
threatened than today.
Even in the UK, the takfir
phenomenon is growing steadily. There are factions in our inner
cities which believe that they are the only ones going to
Heaven. 99% of people who call themselves Muslims are, in this
distasteful insult to Allah's moral coherence, not Muslims at
all.
We can understand this psychic
state more easily when we recognise that it exists universally.
Not just in Islam, but in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and
Buddhism, there is a conspicuous tendency towards factional
excluvisism. In Christianity, one has to look no further than
the Branch Davidians of David Koresh, 89 of whom died when
their ranch in Texas was stormed by US troops three years ago.
The Davidians believed that they were the sole true Christians
- everyone else would burn in Hell.
In Japan, even the usually
peaceful religion of Buddhism has been re-formed by this
tendency. In early 1995, the Aum Shinrikyo sect released Sarin
nerve gas onto the Tokyo underground system, killing eleven
people and sending 5,500 to hospital. Their guru, Shoko
Asahara, had for ten years been preaching the need to overthrow
the corrupt order in Japan, and transform the country into the
true Shambala. As he said, 'Our sphere shall extend throughout
the nation, and foster the development of thousands of
right-believing people.' In his book From Destruction to
Emptiness he explains that only those who believe in authentic,
pristine Buddism as taught by Aum can expect to survive the
corruption and destruction of the world. Non-Aum Buddhists are
not true Buddhists at all.
On the basis of this kind of
takfir, he and his 12,000 followers bought a factory complex on
the slopes of Mount Fuji, where they successfully manufactured
nerve gas and the botulism virus. The sinners of Japan's
un-Buddhist culture would be the first to suffer, they thought,
but they also laid extensive plans for terrorist actions in
North America. It is claimed that had the sect been allowed to
operate for another six months, tens of thousands of people
might have died from the sect's attacks in the United States,
which was seen as the great non-Buddhist source of evil
darkening the world.
It is important to note the
close parallels between Aum Shinryo-kyo and the modern takfir
groups in the Middle East. The diagnosis is the same: the pure
religion has been ignored or distorted by an elite, and the
process has been masterminded by Americans. Hence the need to
retreat and disown society - the idea of Takfir wa'l-Hijra that
informed Shukri Mustafa's group in late 1970s Egypt. In
secretive inner circles, the saved elect gather to plan
military-style actions against the system. They are indifferent
to the sufferings of civilians - for they are apostates and
deserve death anyway. Such attacks will prefigure, in some
rather vague and optimistic fashion, the coming to power of the
true believers, and the suppression of all other
interpretations of religion. This idea of takfir wa'l-hijra is
thus, in structural terms, a global phenomenon. Its members are
usually educated, almost always having science rather than arts
backgrounds. Technology is not disowned, but sedulously
cultivated. Bomb-making becomes a disciplined form of worship.
I believe that this tendency,
which has been fostered rather than eliminated by the
repressiveness of the regimes, will grow in relative
significance as we traverse the end of the century. It will
continue to besmirch the name of Islam, by shooting tourists,
or blowing up minor targets in pinprick attacks that strengthen
rather than weaken the regimes. It will divide the Islamic
movement, perhaps fatally. And it will provide the regimes with
an excuse further to repress and marginalise religion in
society.
The threat of neo-Khariji
heresy is thus a real one. It will exist, however, against the
backdrop of an even more worrying transformation. It is time
now to look at the last of our three themes: the apparently
disconnected subject of the degradation of the natural
environment, one of the great neglected Islamic issues of our
time - arguably even the most important of all.
There are a whole cluster of
questions here. Clearly, as we leave the second millennium, the
planet is in abjectly poor physical shape as compared to the
year 1000. Materialism, enabled by Reformation notions of the
world as fallen, and by protestant capitalistic ethics, has
presided over the gang rape of Mother Earth. Everywhere the
face of the planet is scarred. Megatons of tons of toxic waste
are now circulating in the oceans, or hovering in the
stratosphere. Hormone and plastics pollution has resulted in a
50% drop in male fertility in the UK. Every day, another 12
important species become extinct. Every form of life apart from
our own, and perhaps domestic animals, has been decimated by
the holocaust of modernity. The BSE disaster is a hint of what
may be in store: Government analysts have confirmed that as
many as 30,000 British people may contract Creuzfeld-Jakob
disease as a result of eating contaminated beef. As technology
advances, similar scientific blunders may well wipe out large
sections of the human race.
But the most urgent and
undeniable environmental issue which we carry with us into the
new millennium is that of global warming. For a hundred years
we have been pumping greenhouse gases into the skies, and are
now beginning to realise that a price has to be paid. We need
to focus close attention on this issue, not least because it
will affect the Islamic countries far more radically than the
West. Worryingly few people in the Muslim world seem interested
in the question; and it is hence urgently necessary that we
remind ourselves of the seriousness of the situation.
For years government
scientists mocked the idea of global warming. But the Rio Earth
Summit in 1992 revealed to an anxious world that the scientific
facts were now so clear as to brook no argument. The world is
heating up. The industrial gases in the atmosphere are turning
our planet into a greenhouse, reflecting heat back in rather
than allowing it to be dissipated into space.
Here in England, global
warming is noticed even by the ordinary citizen. Temperature
records go back over three hundred years, but the 10 hottest
years have all occurred since 1945, and three of the five
hottest (1989, 1990 and 1995), have been in the past decade.
Water supply is equally erratic. January of 1997 was the driest
for 200 years. Storms at sea have become so bad that the North
Sea oil industry is now laying pipelines because the seas are
too rough for tankers.
What are the exact figures?
Surprisingly, they seem tiny. The rise in average temperature
between 1990 and 2050 will be 1.5 degrees Centigrade, which
appears negligible. But the temperature rise which 4000 years
ago ended the last ice age was only 2 degrees Centigrade.
Research has proved that the polar ice caps are already
beginning to melt, which is why the sea level is now creeping
up by five millimetres a year. In places like the North Norfolk
coast the EU is spending millions of pounds on new concrete
defences to keep the sea out. How long even the most elaborate
defences can be maintained is not clear.
However, for the West, the bad
news is mixed with good. Rising temperatures would probably be
welcomed by most people. It will, in thirty years, be possible
to grow oranges in some parts of southern England. Already, the
types of seeds bought by farmers reflect the awareness that
summers are warmer, and winters are dryer. But no great
catastrophe seems to threaten.
What is the situation,
however, in the Muslim world? At the Rio summit, many Islamic
countries showed themselves indifferent in the issue. In fact,
the countries which campaigned most strongly against
environmental controls were often Muslim: the Gulf states,
Brunei, Kazakhstan and others. The reason was that their
economies depend on oil. Cut back emissions on Western roads,
or switch electricity generating to sustainable sources like
tidal or wind power, and those countries lose out.
There is still inadequate
awareness in Muslim circles of the great climatic calamity that
is looming in the next millennium. But just consider some
precursors of the catastrophe that have already come about. In
the Sahel countries of Africa - Chad, Mali and Niger, which
have over 90% Muslim populations, rainfall is declining by ten
percent every decade. The huge Sahara Desert is becoming ever
huger, as it overwhelms marginal pasture and arable land on its
southern fringes. The disastrous drought which recently
afflicted the Sudan ended with catastrophic floods.
Any climatic map will show
that agriculture in many Muslim countries is a marginal
business. In Algeria, a further 15% decline in rainfall will
eliminate most of the remaining farmland, sending further waves
of migrants into the cities. A similar situation prevails in
Morocco, where the worst drought in living memory ended only in
1995. The Yemen has suffered from the change in monsoon
patterns in the Indian Ocean - another consequence of global
warming. In Bangladesh the problem is not a shortage of water -
it is too much of it. Floods are now normal every three or four
years, largely because of deforestation in the Himalayas which
limits soil retention of water.
Dr Norman Myers of Oxford
University predicts that by 2050 'the rise in sea level and
changes in agriculture will create 150m refugees. This includes
15m from Bangladesh, and 14m from Egypt.'
However, this figure does not
include migrants generated by secondary consequences of
climatic change. These huge waves of humanity will destabilise
governments and produce wars. The modern nation-state does not
facilitate migration: Bangladeshis before 1948 could move to
other parts of India, but with Partition, they are stuck within
their own borders. Epidemics, also, are likely to be
widespread. Some island nations, such as the Maldives or the
Comoros, will disappear completely beneath the waves, and their
populations will have to be accommodated elsewhere.
Again, I repeat that these
forecasts are not doomsday scenarios. Those are much worse. I
merely cite the predictions of mainstream science, as set forth
in European Union and UK Department of the Environment reports.
It is true that measures are beginning to be taken to limit
greenhouse gas emission. But even if no more gases were to be
released into the skies at all, temperatures would continue to
rise for at least a hundred years, because of the gases already
circulating in the atmosphere.
Let me close with some
reflections on the above three themes.
Are these developments on
balance cause for optimism, or for disquiet? Well, we know that
the Blessed Prophet (s) liked optimism. He also taught tawakkul
- reliance upon Allah's good providence. However, he also taught
that tying up our camels is a form of relying on Allah. So how
should Muslims consider their options over the next few
decades?
There are a number of issues
here. Perhaps the most important is the cultivation of an
informed leadership. I mentioned earlier that most Muslim
leaders cannot provide the intellectual guidance needed to help
intelligent young people deal with the challenges of today. Ask
the average Muslim activist how to prove a post-modernist
wrong, and he will not be able to help you very much. Our heads
are buried in the ground. However, it is not only intellectual
trends which we ignore. The environment, too, is an impending
catastrophe which has not grabbed our attention at all. Perhaps
our activists will still be choking out their rival rhetoric on
the correct way to hold the hands during the Prayer, while they
breath in the last mouthful of oxygen available in their
countries. They seem wholly oblivious to the problem.
All this has to change. In my
travels in the Islamic world, I found tremendous enthusiasm for
Islam among young people, and a no less tremendous
disappointment with the leadership. The traditional ulema have
the courtesy and moderation which we need, but lack a certain
dynamism; the radical faction leaders have fallen into the
egotistic trap of exclusivism and takfir; while the mainstream
revivalist leaders, frankly, are often irrelevant. Both
ponderous and slightly insecure, trapped by an 'ideological'
vision of Islam, they do not understand the complexity of
today's world - and our brighter young people see this soon
enough. Institutions, therefore, urgently need to be
established, to train young men and women both in traditional
Shari'a disciplines, and in the cultural and intellectual
language of today's world. Something like this has been done in
the past: one thinks of the Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad where
Ghazali taught, which encouraged knowledge not only of fiqh,
but of philosophical theology in the Greek tradition. We need a
new Ghazali today: a moderate, spiritually minded genius who
can understand secular thought and refute it, not merely rant
and rave about it.
The creation of a relevant
leadership is thus the first priority. The second has to be the
evolution of styles of da'wa that can operate despite the
frankly improbable task of toppling the bunker regimes. The FIS
declared war on the Algerian state, and has achieved nothing
apart from turning much of the country into a battleground.
Unless the military can be suborned, there is no chance of
victory in such situations. Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and the rest
are similar cases.
An alternative da'wa strategy
already exists in a sense. In many of these countries,
particularly in Egypt, the mainstream Ikhwan Muslimin operate a
largescale welfare system, which serves to remind the masses of
the superior ethical status of indigenous Islamic values. That
model deserves to be expanded. But there is another option,
which does not compete with it, but augments it. That is the
model of da'wa activity to the West.
New Muslims like myself are
grateful to Allah for the ni'ma of Islam - but we cannot say
that we are grateful to the Umma. Islam is in its theology and
its historical practice a missionary faith - one of the great
missionary faiths, along with Christianity and Buddhism. And
yet while Christianity and Buddhism are today brilliantly
organised for conversion, Islam has no such operation, at least
to my knowledge. Ballighu anni wa-law aya ('Convey my message,
even though a single verse') is a Prophetic commandment that
binds us all. It is a fard ayn, and a fard kifaya - and we are
disobeying it on both counts.
Ten years ago a book appeared
in France called D'Une foi l'autre, les conversions a l'Islam
en Occident. The authors, both career journalists, carried out
extensive interviews with new Muslims in Europe and America.
Their conclusions are clear. Almost all educated converts to
Islam come in through the door of Islamic spirituality. In the
middle ages, the Sufi tariqas were the only effective engine of
Islamisation in Muslim minority areas like Central Asia, India,
black Africa and Java; and that pattern is maintained today.
Why should this be the case?
Well, any new Muslim can tell you the answer. Westerners are in
the first instance seeking not a moral path, or a political
ideology, or a sense of special identity - these being the
three commodities on offer among the established Islamic
movements. They lack one thing, and they know it - the
spiritual life. Thus, handing the average educated Westerner a
book by Sayyid Qutb, for instance, or Mawdudi, is likely to
have no effect, and may even provoke a revulsion. But hand him
or her a collection of Islamic spiritual poetry, and the
reaction will be immediately more positive. It is an
extraordinary fact that the best-selling religious poet in
modern America is our very own Jalal al-Din Rumi. Despite the
immeasurably different time and place of his origin, he outsells
every Christian religious poet.
Those who puzzle over the
da'wa issue in the West generally refuse to take this on board.
All too often they follow limited, ideological versions of
Islam that are relevant only to their own cultural situation,
and have no relevance to the problems of educated modern
Westerners. We need to overcome this. We need to capitalise on
the modern Western love of Islamic spirituality - and also of
Islamic art and crafts. By doing so, we can reap a rich
harvest, in sha' Allah. If the West is like a fortress, then we
can approach it from its strongest place, by provoking it
politically and militarily, as the absurd Saddam Hussein did;
in which case we will bring yet more humiliation and
destruction upon our people. Or we can find those areas of its
defences which have become tumbledown and weak. Those are,
essentially, areas of spirituality and aesthetics. Millions of
young Westerners are dissatisfied both with the materialism of
their world, and with the doctrines of Christianity, and are
seeking refuge in New Age groups and cults. Those people should
be natural recruits for Islam - and yet we ignore them.
Similarly, and for the same
constituency, we need to emphasise Islam's vibrant theological
response to the problem of conservation. The Qur'an is the
richest of all the world's scriptures in its emphasis on the
beauty of nature as a theophany - a mazhar - of the Divine
names.
As a Western Muslim, who
understands what moves and influences Westerners, I feel that
by stressing these two issues, Islam is well-placed not merely
to flourish, but to dominate the religious scene of the next
century. Only
Allah truly knows the future.
But it seems to me that we are at a crossroads, of which the
millennium is a useful, if accidental symbol. It will either be
the watershed which marks the final collapse of Islam as an
intellectually and spiritually rich tradition at ease with
itself, as increasingly it presides over an overpopulated and
undernourished zone of chaos. Or it will take stock, abandon
the dead end of meaningless extremism, and begin to play its
natural world role as a moral and spiritual exemplar.
As we look around ourselves
today at the chaos and disintegration of the Umma, we may ask
whether such a possibility is credible. But we are living
through times when the future is genuinely negotiable in an
almost unprecedented way. Ideologies which formerly obstructed
or persecuted Islam, like extreme Christianity, nationalism and
Communism, are withering. Ernest Gellner, the Cambridge
anthropologist has described Islam as 'the last religion' - the
last in the sense of truly believing its scriptural narratives
to be normative.
If we have the confidence to
believe that what we have inherited or chosen is indeed
absolute truth, then optimism would seem quite reasonable. And
I am optimistic. If Islam and the Muslims can keep their nerve,
and not follow the secularising course mapped out for them by
their rivals, or travel the blind alley of extremism, then they
will indeed dominate the world, as once they did. And, we may I
think quite reasonably hope, they will once again affirm
without the ambiguity of worldly failure, the timeless and
challenging words, wa kalimatuLlahi hiya al-ulya - 'and the word
of God is supreme'.
This essay is based on a
lecture given at the Belfast Central Mosque in March 1997
|
