<< Subj: nyc: Islam and the New Millinium - Abdul Hakim Murad Bismillah
Walhamdulillah Was Salaatu Was Salaam 'ala Rasulillah
In the Name of Allaah, The Most Gracious, The Most Kind
Hijri date: Sunday 4 RamaDHaan 1420 A.H.
As-Salaamu Alaikum wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatuhu
Ramadan Mubarak!
The following article is very, very long, but well worth reading if you
are interested in a scholarly view of events that are likely to take place
in the next few decades, insha'Allah... and the apparent relationships to
events taking place today. Try to stay with it, insha'Allah, or read it
through in a couple of sittings... My apology for suggesting your
indulgence at a time when surely our reading and reflection upon the
guidance of the Qur'an takes precedence over all other reading... so think
about saving it for reading at some other time, perhaps (smile)
ma'salaam,
NYC-Net Moderator
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 04:18:39 -0500
From: "inayet sahin" <[log in to unmask]>
Asslamau Alaykum,
Ramadan Mubarak to All! This excellently written article deliniates Islam's
view on the "New Millinium", addressing the practical, intellectual and the
spiritual spheres of this issue and the general state of the Muslim Ummah.
It is a must read for all.
http://dialspace.dial.pipex.com/masud/ISLAM/ahm/millen.htm
(text below)
About the Author:
Abdal-Hakim Murad, born 1960, London. Educated Cambridge University (MA
Arabic), and al-Azhar. Translator of al-Bayhaqi's 77 Branches of Faith.
Editor of M. Z. Siddiqi's Hadith Literature (Islamic Texts Society, 1993).
Trustee and Secretary of The Muslim Academic Trust. Director, The
Anglo-Muslim Fellowship for Eastern Europe.
Islam and the New Millennium
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.
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