1500 Years Later
Dr Muzaffar Iqbal
Islam and Muslims are not only the most written about topics in
the media; they are also the most sought-after subjects in the academic world.
One needs only to browse through books in print to ascertain that Islam and
Muslims have become one of the highest priorities of major western publishers.
Most of this coverage is negative, hysterical, and filled with fear, but that
aside, their basic obsession is similar to that of the powerful clans of
Quraysh some 1500 years ago.
On that fateful day
of September 622, some 1500 lunar years ago, when the Prophet of Islam (ﷺ)
left his beloved Makkah on a journey that would simultaneously mark the
beginning of his Hijrah (migration for the sake of Allah) and the birth
of the first Muslim state in Madinah, Islam had already become the obsession of
those who found it against their beliefs and ways of life. Neither the number
of Muslims in Makkah at the time of Hijrah nor their material power was
of any real threat, but the powerful, rich, and well-armed clans of Quraysh felt
threatened by the very message to such an extent that they decided to kill the
Prophet to solve the "problem of Islam" once and for all.
This obsession with
Islam and Muslims has once again become the most apparent characteristic of
those who do not accept it, though there
are significant differences between the two times as well as important
parallels. In 622, those who found Islam unacceptable had reached a state of
desperation; they could neither live with it nor eliminate it. In 2021, we are
in the same situation. In 622, Muslims were weak, poor, and far less equipped
than their enemies; in 2021, we have the same situation. In 622, Islam was a
stranger; there were less than five hundred Muslims in the world; in 2021,
Islam has once again become a stranger, though in not quite the same manner.
Islam can be said to
have become a stranger once again even though every fifth person now living on
earth is a Muslim, in a manner foretold by the Prophet (ﷺ). He
is reported to have said to one of his Companions: "Islam began as a
stranger, and a time will come when it will again become a stranger." This
aspect of Islam is reflected in all spheres of contemporary life — from politics to armed conflicts and from
interpersonal relations to the major issues of world economies and statecraft.
Islam is a stranger
today not only in lands where Muslims are a minority but also in the
traditional lands of Islam where Muslims have lived for centuries. This is true
of all places, even of Makkah and Madinah; exceptions may only be found in
some remote villages, deserts, and oases where Bedouins still live according
to their centuries-old pattern of life.
Islam is a stranger
today because the contemporary world has been shaped by forces unleashed by
man-made ideologies which regard the worldview based on revelation as old
fables which hark back to a time when humanity was still in a primitive stage
of development. This evolutionary view of history — a characteristic product of the
post-Renaissance era — is built upon beliefs and ideologies which consider
human reason to be the ultimate arbitrator of all affairs. This view was
unleashed in Europe along with the two powerful revolutions
that now shape our world: the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century
and the intellectual revolution that we now call humanism. These two
revolutions attempted to remove the last traces of the Divinity from the world
of nature and affairs of humanity.
It is these two
revolutions that have made Islam a stranger in the contemporary world, even
for many Muslims. During the course of the twentieth century, the Muslim world
has embraced the underpinnings of these two revolutions, if not their overt
manifestations, to such an extent that Islamic space has become an extinct
entity even in the heartland of Islam. The directional forces and ideologies
produced by these two revolutions govern public and private life; even though
Islam is practised in many parts of the Muslim world, its practice is compartmentalised
to such an extent that it has been effaced as a governing force. From Makkah — the most sanctified place on earth — to the
farthest region of the world where Muslims live, all are subsumed into the same
race: become modern, catch up with the times, adopt and become like those who
have shaped the world in which we live.
The aim of these
movements is variously called enlightenment, modernity, development, and the
like, but these are merely different labels for the same product: a world
shaped by ideologies and beliefs foundationally alien to Islam. At the heart of
this maddening race to catch up to the rest of the world, which is essentially
a race to become like the West, is the grand failure of Muslim intellectuals
and scholars who lived during that cataclysmic era when the two aforementioned
revolutions in Europe were taking shape.
As if immersed in
some impenetrable siesta, Muslim leaders of the sixteenth and the seventeenth
centuries remained totally oblivious to the forces being unleashed in the
Europe of their times — forces which soon
arrived at their shores with material power they could not match. But more than
the material power of the European colonisers, it was their own slumber that
enchained Muslims and made them easy prey to the thousand and one way of
manipulation by those who wished to enslave them in order to reconstruct the
world in their own manner.
Whatever the causes of that grand failure, is the contemporary
obsession of the West with Islam and Muslims. Islam and Muslims are not only
the most written about topics in the media; they are also the most sought-after
subjects in the academic world. One needs only to browse through books in
Print to ascertain that Islam and Muslims have become one of the highest
priorities of major western publishers. Most of this coverage is negative,
hysterical, and filled with fear, but that aside, their basic obsession is like
that of the powerful clans of Quraysh some 1500 years ago.
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