MUSLIMS & THE STRAIGHT PATH: Part - 1-L - Urgent Need for Reforms

Muslims & The Straight Path  [Published 2010]

Part - 1-L

URGENT NEED FOR REFORMS

We are faced with a very delicate situation. Independent thinkers desirous of finding a solution get entangled in a mesh. If they read the history of the progress of Muslims during the initial 200 years, they see a much distorted image of Islam. Howsoever much the Muslims continue to deny that their count did not spread through sword, the historical facts are telling much the opposite. Several contradictions are evident; several impracticable solutions are visible; and the Islamic injunctions, the way they were interpreted or practiced during that period, are found unsuitable for present times.

There is no denying the fact that Islamic teachings were sabotaged in the initial 200 years. The (mis)rule of the likes of Umayyad and Abbasids can not be treated as Islamic. Yet, this is the period of greatest conquests carried out by the Muslims. There is no doubt whatsoever that these conquests and the evils that they brought along didn’t allow the real Islam to penetrate the minds of a lot many materialistic-minded neo-converts to Islam. A lot many of them succumbed to the feeling of grandeur and pomp that these rulers created around the religion so as to strengthen their seat of power. Since these rulers were being branded as ‘Caliph’, the Muslims in general tried to digest and/or ignore the misdeeds that they committed. There are a lot many Muslim maulvis who would shudder even today to think ill of a ruler like Muawiya, Haroon Rashid or Mamoon Rashid. Several supposedly learned scholars like Dr. Zakir Naik shower praises on even the worst of all rulers, Yazid, for this reason only.

But what these people do not know is that in their attempts to show these worldly rulers in good light and by portraying them as torchbearers of Islam, they are in fact harming the cause of Islam and are making it impossible for a student and pursuer of Islam to understand the real and true face of Islam.

Such is the confusion due to this that some writers like Baig, Fyzee or Professor Mujib (former Vice Chancellor, Jamia Millia Islamia) even go the extent of challenging “the permanent validity of Quran”.

In “The Status of the Individual Conscience in Islam”, Professor Mujib writes:

“…right or wrong in matters of religious belief and practices are determined by social opinion and established habits of thoughts. The conscience of individual Muslim has had to find satisfaction in adherence to one of the accepted systems of interpretation of the Quran and the Traditions.

The Quran does not prescribe any such adherence. It recognized both the community of believers and the individual believer and does not ignore the possibility of the community being in the wrong as well as the individual member:

O believers, be you securers of justice, witnesses of God, even though it be against yourself or your parents and kinsmen, whether it concerns rich or poor, for God is nearer to you than both. And do not follow caprice, so as to swerve from the truth.

(4.134)

Mujeeb then goes on boldly to challenge the permanent validity of the Quran:

“Historical situations in which certain attitudes prescribed in the Quran, or deductions made from these prescriptions, are no longer relevant . . . Are we in this situation to look for some theological authority to guide us, and to wait passively till this authority is found? Or, are we to act according to our conscience and continuously remind ourselves that we must be ‘securers of justice, witnesses for God’ not only for ourselves but the whole political community of Muslims and non-Muslims to which we belong?

There remains the question of Islam’s practicability or impracticability. It depends on whether Muslims are in a majority or minority. The moral-social system that in its totality is Islam was developed by Muslims for Muslims, and a situation such as exists in India was never envisaged by Muhammad, the Caliphs, or the great jurist-theologians in the Muslim countries of West Asia. As a result, whereas Muhammad having to deal with Jewish and Christian minorities made allowances for them, subject to jaziya, there is absolutely no guidance anywhere or by anybody on how Muslims in a minority should conform to the laws of a non-Muslim majority. This task therefore Muslims will have to undertake themselves, keeping in mind the self-evident fact that Islam in India must be reoriented through the necessary reforms in the light of the conditions prevailing in India.

As far as Islam in general is concerned, if one looks round the Muslim world today one finds that if being a Muslim means one who has “surrendered to God,” then the overwhelming majority of them are escaped prisoners.  But if being a Muslim means belonging to the Umma Muslima, then only an infinitesimal minority has found its way out of the enclosure the gates of which stand open. The reasons for this inconsistence, if hypocrisy is too strong a word, deserve deep social study. It could be, perhaps, because since Muslims, ideologically, should have no country, they have in compensation an excessive sense of community. This characteristic effectively bars assimilation in non-Muslim countries, and inhibits a practicing Muslim being an internationalist, nationalist, or humanist. The Muslim Islam makes is a transnational communalist, at home only in Muslim majority countries.”

This quoted passage reveals the extent to which various writers go while trying to find an answer to the Muslim dilemma. While their understanding of the problems afflicting the Muslims in India is correct, they have failed to analyze the true reasons why such problems arose. These writers go to the extent of saying that Muhammad’s teachings have no solutions to give to the adherents regarding how to live in non-Muslim majority countries. However, fact remains that a Muslim continues to remain a problem child even in the countries where they are in majority. While these writers have truly analyzed the present state of Muslims in general, they have failed to reach to the reasons behind this because they too saw Islam through the curtain that the 200 years of misrule drew over the Prophet’s true teachings. Had they confined themselves to the true Prophet’s teachings and Quran alone they would have seen a truly different picture of Islam? The most unfortunate part is that the Muslim maulvis keep their eyes close to the unIslamic rule that we were witnessed to in the name of Islam and Caliphate during most of the initial 200 years after the Prophet. They do not speak out owing to the apparent grandeur and physical strength that these rulers gave to Islam. But they forgot that Islam was never the religion that preached all this. These people will have to decide whether they want to continue their ‘protection’ of these pseudo-caliphs at the cost of Islam and Prophet’s image or whether they want the true face of Islam to come out of the mesh that presently overshadows it. Until we learn to do it, people will continue to cast aspersions on the contemporary relevance of several Islamic teachings and various other aspects like Islamic law and teachings.