Summary: Modern World and its Challenges

By: Muhammad Suheyl Umar

In order to talk about the modern world, its nature and relation to the world of Islam today one has to take into consideration the fact that there are specific as well as general challenges of an intellectual and spiritual order which the modern world has placed before the contemporary Muslim and to realize the role that the Islamic tradition can play in providing the means to answer these challenges.

There is a traditional Islamic saying according to which Satan hates sharp points and edges. It should never be forgotten that in the present situation any form of criticism of the modern world based upon metaphysical and religious principles is an act of charity in its profoundest sense and in accordance with the most central virtues of Islam. Also one should never forget-considering a certain attitude prevailing among some Muslims who are afraid of being critical for fear of seeming discourteous, or lacking in adab (which in the traditional Islamic languages means at once courtesy, correctness of manners, culture and literature)—that the Prophet of Islam not only possessed adab in its most perfect form but also asserted the Truth in the most straightforward and naked manner. It is this type of attitude that is needed by Muslims in their discussion of the West and its challenges to Islam. What is lacking in the Islamic world today is a thorough examination and careful criticism of all that is happening in the modern world. There are too few people in the Islamic world who can confront the West, and criticize and answer with the sword of the Intellect and the Spirit the very basis of the challenge with which the West confronts Islam. There is no logical reason why a new intellectual elite could not develop in the Islamic world, an elite which would be able to provide an objective criticism of the modern world from the point of view of the eternal verities contained within the message of the Islamic revelation, applying the God-given treasures of Islam to the wretched situation of modern man and the ever more serious plight he faces.

There are today essentially three main classes of people in the Islamic world concerned with religious, intellectual and philosophical questions: the ulama’ and other religious and traditional authorities in general (including the Sufis), and the modernists, interested in religion. Only now is a third group gradually coming into which is traditional like the ulama’ but also knows the modern world. As far as the ulama’ and other traditional spiritual authorities are concerned it usually observed that they usually do not possess a profound knowledge of the modern world and its problems and complexities. As for the second class, whose attitudes have been often analyzed by the contemporary scholars, they are the product of either Western universities or universities in the Islamic world which more or less ape the West. Now, universities in the Islamic world are themselves in a state of crisis which stems from the question of identity, for an educational system is organically related to the culture within whose matrix it functions. The crisis could not but exist because the indigenous Islamic culture is still alive. This sense of inferiority vis-a-vis the West among so many modernized Muslims, which is, moreover, shared by modernized Hindus, Buddhists and other Orientals in general who are affected by the psychosis of modern forms of idolatry, is the greatest malady facing the Islamic world, and afflicts most deeply the very group which one would expect to face the challenge of the West. The encounter of Islam with the West cannot therefore be discussed without taking into consideration that mentality which is in most cases the product of a modern university education[i] a mentality which, during the past century, has been responsible for most of the apologetic Islamic works concerned with the encounter of Islam and the West.[ii]

Endless arguments have been presented for the hygienic nature of the Islamic rites or the ‘egalitarian’ character of the message of Islam, not because such things are true if seen in the larger context of the total Islamic message, but because hygiene and egalitarianism are currently accepted ideas and norms in the West—or at least they were before the Hippie movement. For the modernized Muslims, especially more extreme among them, the ‘true meaning’ of Islam has been for some time now what the West has dictated. If evolution is in vogue, ‘true Islam’ is evolutionary. Probably, if the obvious decomposition of modern civilization, which became gradually evident after the Second World War, had become manifest after the First World War, when the traditions of Asia were much more intact, a great deal more from these traditional civilizations could have been saved. Even today, if in the Islamic world there comes to be formed a true intelligentsia at once traditional and fully conversant with the modern world, the challenge of the West can be answered and the core of the Islamic tradition preserved from the paralysis which now threatens its limbs and body.

To realize exactly how much can still be saved in the Islamic world, it is sufficient to remember that for the vast majority of Muslims even now, Islamic culture is still a living reality in which they live, breathe and die. The present-day generation of modernized Muslims is much less confident about the absolute value of Western civilization than their fathers and uncles who went to the West before them. The main problem, which is the lack of a profound knowledge of the real nature of the modern world based upon the criteria of Islamic culture, remains. There are still too few ‘occidentalists’ in the Islamic world who could perform for Islam the positive aspect of the function which ‘orientalists’ have been performing for the West since the eighteenth century.[iii]

Despite the weakening of the confidence in the West on the part of modernized Muslims, the Muslims are still on the receiving end in the realm of both ideas and material objects. Lacking confidence in their own intellectual tradition, most modernized Muslims are like a tabula rasa waiting to receive some kind of impression from the West. Moreover, each part of the Islamic world receives a different kind of baggage of ideas, depending on the part of the Western world to which it has become closely attached. The intellectual situation is as bad as the domain of women’s fashion where in many Islamic lands women remain completely passive as obedient consumers and emulate blindly whatever a few Western fashion-makers decide for them. To study in a more concrete fashion the challenges of the West to Islam, it is necessary to take as example some of the ‘isms’ which have been fashionable in the modern world today and which have affected the cultural and even religious life of the Islamic world. Today in many parts of the Islamic world there is a great deal of talk about Marxism, which, although it does not usually attack Islam directly, has an important indirect effect upon religious life-not to speak of economic and social activity. Many who speak of Marxism or socialism in general in the Islamic world do so with certain existing problems of society in mind for which they are seeking solutions. The Marxist fad has become an excuse for many young Muslims to refuse to think seriously about the problems of Islamic society from the Islamic point of view and within the matrix of their own social situation. The danger of Marxism for Islam became aggravated by the appearance in certain Islamic countries, especially within the Arab world, of a Marxism with an Islamic veneer, creating a most tempting trap for certain simple souls. The general tendency among Muslims affected by the evolutionist mentality is to forget the whole Islamic conception of the march of time.[iv] The challenge of evolutionary thought has been answered in contemporary Islam in nearly the same way as has the challenge of Marxism. Meanwhile, works of evolutionary writers, even of the nineteenth century such as Spencer, who are no longer taught as living philosophical influences in their own homeland, continue to be taught in universities far and wide in the Islamic world, especially in the Indian subcontinent, as if they represented the latest proven scientific knowledge or the latest philosophical school of the West. This way of thinking in its scientific form, did not affect the Islamic world as directly as evolutionism, and we do not know of any important and influential Muslim writers who are Freudian or Jungian, but its effect is certain to increase. It must therefore be remembered that Freudianism, as well as other modern Western schools of psychology and psychotherapy, are the by-produts of a particular society very different from the Islamic. Islam is a religion that rejects individualistic subjectivism. The spiritual ideal of Islam itself is to transform the soul of the Muslim, like a mosque, into a crystal reflecting the Divine Light.

Among older Western literary figures who are close to the Islamic perspective, one might mention first of all Dante and Goethe who, although profoundly Christian, are in many ways like Muslim writers. In modern times, one could mention, on of course another level, T. S. Eliot, who, unlike most modern writers, was a devout Christian and possessed, for this very reason, a vision of the world not completely removed from that of Islam.

Today, in fact, his ideas are opposed by Islamic elements within Persian society.

The influence of psychology and psychoanalysis, combined with an atheistic and nihilistic point of view and disseminated within the Islamic world through literature and art, presents a major challenge to Islam which can be answered only through recourse to traditional Islamic psychology and psychotherapy contained mostly within Sufism, and also through the creation of a genuinely Islamic literary criticism which would be able to provide an objective evaluation of so much that passes for literature today.

The degree of penetration of anti-Islamic psychological as well as philosophical Western ideas through literature into the Islamic World can be bee gauged by just walking through the streets near universities in various Mid Eastern cities. The space in Islamic architecture is essentially a ‘negative space’. Space in Islamic architecture and city-planning is not the space around an object or determined by that object.

Traditional Islamic [literary tastes are thereby being influenced by the completely anti-traditional ideas emanating from Jungian and Freudian circles and threatening one of the most central and accessible channels of Islamic norms and values. Because of the anti-metaphysical attitude of much of what is taught in this school and the fact that it has forgotten the meaning of Being in its traditional sense, which lies at the heart of all Islamic philosophy, spread of existentialism, especially in its agnostic vein, is a most insidious danger for the future of Islamic intellectual life.

Furthermore, there is the tendency in certain quarters to interpret Islamic philosophy itself in the light of Western modes of thought, the latest being the existential school.

The same applies on another level to man’s traditional intellectual heritage. Wherever the Islamic world is to ‘go’, it must begin from the reality of the Islamic tradition and from its own real, and not imagined, situation. This rejection is, in fact, a sign of life, an indication that Islamic culture still possesses vitality.

As far as philosophy is concerned, the countries where Muslim languages are used for university instruction are in a somewhat better position, especially Persia, where Islamic philosophy still continues as a living tradition and where it is not easy to say anything at all in the name of philosophy without being seriously challenged by the traditional intellectual elite. But of course even this part of the Muslim world has not been completely spared from condescending and apologetic studies of Islamic thought from the point of view of Western philosophy, though relatively speaking there is less philosophic influence there because of the two reasons alluded to above: language barrier and a still-living tradition of Islamic philosophy. For Muslims who have cultivated Islamic philosophy, philosophy has always been al-falsafah or al-hikmah, “the philosophy”, a vision of the truth transcending the individualistic order and derived from the Truth (al-Haqq) itself. The very appearance of such concepts and terms as ‘our philosophy’ or ‘my thought’ in Islamic languages itself reveals the degree of departure from the Islamic norm. It is against such errors that the weapon of the traditional doctrines contained in the, vast treasury of Islamic thought must be used, and answers drawn from these sources be provided, before any further erosion of Islamic intellectual life takes place.

Actually anyone who has studied traditional Islamic philosophy from Ibn Sina and Suhrawardi to the expositor of the metaphysics of being, Sadr al-Din Shirazi (Mulla Sadra) will readily understand the profound chasm which separates the traditional Islamic ‘philosophy of being’ from modern existentialism, which, even in its apparently most profound aspects, can only reach, in a fragmentary fashion, some of the rudimentary teachings contained in their fullness in traditional metaphysics. Henry Corbin, the only Western scholar who has expounded to any extent this later phase of Islamic philosophy in the West, has shown the divergence of views between Islamic philosophy and existentialism and the correctives which the former provides for the latter, in the long French introduction to his edition and translation of Sadr al-din Shirazi’s Kitab al Masha‘ir (rendered into French as Le Liver des penetrations metaphysicques.[v] One last but urgent and basic problem must be mentioned, and that is the ecological crisis, which was brought into being by Modern civilization but which is now a challenge to the very life of men everywhere, including, of course, Muslims in the Islamic world. There lies in the background of Islamic science a true philosophy of nature which, if brought to light and presented in contemporary language, can be substituted for the present false natural philosophy. Muslim scholars and thinkers must be trained to revitalize the philosophy of nature contained in the Islamic sciences and to study these sciences themselves.

It is true that Islamic science and culture were a factor in the rise of the Renaissance in the West, but Islamic elements were employed only after they were divorced from their Islamic character and torn away from the total order in which alone they possess their full meaning and significance.

Muslims should revivify the study of the Islamic sciences, first in order to demonstrate to young Muslims, so many of whom have the tendency to stop praying upon learning the first formulae of algebra, the fact that for many centuries Muslims cultivated the sciences, including most of the mathematics taught in secondary schools today, and yet remained devout Muslims; and second, to bring out, the underlying harmony of the Islamic sciences with Islamic philosophy, theology and metaphysics, a harmony that is closely related, to the -philosophy of nature alluded to above. To conclude, it must be asserted categorically once again that to preserve Islam and Islamic civilization, a conscious and intellectual defence must be made of the Islamic tradition. Moreover, a thorough intellectual criticism must be made of the modern world and its shortcomings. The truth must therefore be asserted and the intellectual defence of Islam made on every front on which it is challenged.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

[i] It must be said, however, that because of the very rapid decadence of Western society during the past two decades, some of the younger Muslims ho have experienced the Western world on an ‘intellectual’ level are far less infatuated with it than before and have in fact begun to criticize it. But of these the number that think within the Islamic framework are very limited. The various works of Maryam Jameelah contain many thoughtful pages on this theme and the whole problem of the confrontation of Islam and Western civilization. See especially her Islam versus the West, Lahore, 1968.
[ii] A few of the modernized ‘ulama’ must also be placed in this category. See W. C. Smith, Islam in Modern History, where the style and approach of such an apologetic attitude, especially as it concerns Egypt, is analysed.
[iii] We do not mean that Muslim ‘Occidentalists’ should emulate the prejudices and limitations of the Orientalists, but that they should know the West as well as possible from the Islamic point of view in the same way that the best among Orientalists have sought to know the East well, albeit within the frame of reference of the West. Of course, because of the anti-traditional nature of the modern West, such a frame of reference has not been adequate when dealing with the religious and metaphysical teachings of Oriental traditions, but that is another question, which does not concern the present comparison.
[iv] See Abu Bakr Siraj ed-Din, ‘The Islamic and Christian Conceptions of the March of Time’, Islamic Quarterly, 1954, Vol- I, Pp. 229-235.
[v] See Mulla Sadra, Kitab al-Masha‘ir (Le livre des phdirations mitaphysiques), Introduction. See also T. Izutsu, The Concept and Reality of Existence Tokyo, 1971, where a profound analysis of Islamic ontology is to be found even if in Ch. II certain comparisons are made with Western existentialism which appear difficult to accept.