ISLAM AND THE MODERN VALUES

 ISLAM AND THE MODERN VALUES

DR. SYED ALI ASHRAF

Islamic culture may be viewed at two levels—theoretical and practical. At the theoretical level it means spiritual, social and moral values for the individual and the group. At the practical level it means the culture of the spiritual community known as "Al-Ummah" or "Ummat-e-Muhammadiah" or "Al-Ummat-al-Islamiyah". As such it is synonymous with what Christopher Dawson calls social culture and defines as "The way of life for a spiritual community which owes its unity to common beliefs and common ways of thought far more than to any uniformity of physical type". (Religion and Culture, pp. 48-49).

 

The interpenetration of these two levels created a community which accepted life based on faith as the final aim of humanity in this world. The Qur'an came to be accepted as the primary source of all personal and social laws at the very early stage of the spread of Islam. The Sunnah was also regarded as the most legitimate, appropriate and correct primary interpretation of the Qur’an. As these two have, specially the former, retained an unalloyed and pure character for the last fourteen hundred years, they have not only helped the growth of universality in this culture, but also preserved the traditions remarkably successfully.

The basic characteristics of these traditions may be summed up as the interpenetration of faith and culture or what may, in other words, be termed as the spiritual and the secular sphere of human activity. Unlike Christianity, Islam does not believe in the bifurcation of human life into divine and mundane, spiritual and secular, religious and worldly. The aim of man, in Islam, is the realisation of the divine in the mundane, the spiritual in the secular, the religious in the worldly and thereby transform mundane into divine, the secular into the spiritual and the worldly into the religious. Thus that which is considered merely an etiquette in the West is regarded as a virtue in Islam. "Be good to your parents, relations and neighbours, speak well with men, do good to the orphans and the poor " —these are the injunctions of the Qur'an exemplified in the life of the Holy Prophet (ﷺ)  of Islam.

 

That is why the Qur'an lays down the basic codes of social behaviour, civil and criminal laws—the principles governing the relation between man and man, man and woman, the individual and the society and the individual and God. The attitude thus inculcated makes a Muslim society organise its life creatively. The conflicts that we notice today between science and faith, humanism and religion were absent in early Islam, because the attitude of man produced by this community was such that a Muslim considered it a religious act to investigate into the mysteries of creation and understand the greatness of the universe with the help of intellect, the supreme faculty which God has granted man.

 

Thus the ideal man produced by this community is he who does hot deny the demands of the flesh and the world but restricts them and trains the senses and the faculties in order that they may remain within limits and at the same time realize the supremacy of the spirit over the body. The Holy Prophet has provided us with this ideal. Similarly the ideal society is that which allows the full fruition of man within the limits set by God. And the society established during the life-time of the Holy Prophet (ﷺ) and the Khulafa-i-Rashideen provides us with that example.

 

The next important characteristic of this culture thus arises out of the creative nature of the traditions of this society. The Qur'an and the Sunnah did not idolize man as Western humanism has done, but put man in the centre of the universe and gave him the directive to realize his greatness in the world. Faith in revelation means faith in the essential goodness and greatness of man, in the supremacy of intellect, because revelation is the highest reach by human experience though given only to a chosen few.

 

As our Prophet was the last in the line of these chosen few, he perfected religion and allowed human intellect the freedom to build the edifices of its own glory within the limits set by the revealed injunctions of Islam. Reason is, therefore, considered not to be anti-thetical to faith but to be a corroborator of faith. With the establishment of Abbasid empire, Islam became dissociated from Arab ethucentricism and thus realized its universal character by accepting within its fold varied existing cultures like those of Greece, Persia and India. But the Qur'an and the Sunnah maintained unity in variety. Though in later per­iods the purity, austerity and vigour of the culture noticeable during the Khilafat-e-Rashidah period gave place to luxury and grandeur, the ideals of religious purity and of the true Momin were kept alive by the religious leaders—the Ulema and the Sufis. The guardianship of cannon-law passed away from the hands of hereditary rulers to the hands of these two groups.

 

As a result Islamic laws began to be formulated very early in its history. Moreover, consequent upon the preachings and. the practice of the Sufis, Islam spread to the East and the West and also developed liberalism in its wake. But it was a liberalism essentially different from what we understand by the same word in European tra­dition. The Sufis were not liberal as regards their basic dogma—they were more tolerant of individual practices and .local rituals. However, both these tendencies, the liberal and the orthodox, went on together and occasionally re­inforced each other as in the cases of well-known refor­mer-Sufis like Hadrat Mohiuddin Abdul Qader Gilani, Hadrat Mujaddid Alf-e-Thani Shaikh Ahmed Sirhindi and Hadrat Shah Waliullah. Thus the Ummah had great leaders whose ideas and practices were representative of the ideas and practice of the Holy Prophet (ﷺ).

 

It is in the 20th Century that this pattern of our culture is severely disturbed and an ever-widening gap is notice­able between theory and practice. In the early days of our glory we considered ourselves so much superior to other communities that we tested Greek and Persian thoughts and ideas in the light of Islam and accepted them after re-fashioning or rather Islamizing them. In the 20th Century, the spiritual degeneration has made most of us more apologetic than desirable, and we are testing our values in the light of the values derived from Western humanism and liberalism. This has given rise to two class­es of people—the new intellectual class educated according to the Western system and the masses of the half-educated people with the old Ulema and the Sufis as their leaders. The former group is secularly minded and is inclined to believe in the Western dichotomy of the spiritual and the mundane whereas the latter is unable to appreciate the problems of the modern world and of the modern Muslim enthralled by the glamour of the West. This challenge to the basic pattern of Islamic Culture can, therefore, be summed up briefly as follows :—

 

(a) An attempt to separate the mundane and the spiritual spheres to such an extent as to imply that one has nothing to do with the other;

 

(b) Secondly, therefore, to reduce Islam merely into a faith in God and to introduce the Western technique of civilization and the Western way of life into Islam.

 

(c) Thirdly, as a corollary, to minimize the importance of the Shariah and hence of Sunnah; in extreme cases, as in the case of "Ahle-Quran" society, to exclude the Sunnah from consideration.

 

In addition to this, technology, which is being inc­reasingly introduced in Muslim countries, is bringing in its wake all the problems which the West is already facing today. Being completely amoral and even inhuman in its basic attitude and approach, it lacks a unifying spiritual aim. It has already produced a far-reaching secularization in the West and created a con­flict between transcendent, permanent spiritual values and transient, evolutionary, expedient rules and regu­lations. Thus, the unguided freedom of speculation has produced nightmares even in the mind of an atheist like Bertrand Russell. In this connection it is also ad­visable to remember Einstein's statement that a modern scientist can accept the ethical code inherent in a religion but is unable to accept a belief in an omnipotent deity who may intervene in time and space and change the course of Nature.

 

Thus, technology, coupled with this attitude have challenged the existence of faith in God and some transcendental morality. It is thus not actually the investigations of the scientist but the scientific attitude that truth must be found out through experiments and generalization and not from a dogma that has created all these problems.

 

These are the two most serious challenges to Islamic Culture. Secularism will ultimately destroy the very basic characteristic of the Islamic Culture. The Ummah will also degenerate into national groups and thus lose its Muslim character. Neither is the attempt to reduce faith into rationalistic formula any solution because faith arises out of experience, which may be rationally justi­fiable but is not rational in character. That is why the rejection of the Sunnah is also untenable because of the justification of the truth of Revelation is in the life and activities of the Holy Prophet. Therefore, to reject him the only authentic interpretation of the Qur’an. What we need is a re-understanding on our own part of Islam and the basic nature of our limitations and freedom.

 

The challenge can be met by the reorientation of edu­cation and introduction at a very early stage of religious instruction which should be not merely a teaching of how to read the Qur'an and recite the prayer, but which should also include in its fold the teachings of ethics and day-to-day virtues and good deeds. Only by doing so, and also by making the educated conscious of the in­herent principles and values, can we realize that it is possible to accept from the West values and institutions which do not conflict with our fundamentals. Where they do, let us accept the differences and be content with our own. Thus, we may bridge down the gulf between the modern educated and the Ulema.

 

The rooting out of corruption from the society and in­sistence on righteousness, justice, cleanliness, honesty, integrity and truthfulness and such other virtues will automatically make the Ummah conscious of a direction and a goal—the spiritual goal of mankind. Most probably for this we need a new reformer, a Mujaddid who, as Iqbal said, shall have to be a "great psychopath" combining in himself the experience of a Sufi, the learning of an A'lim and the knowledge of the modern world.