DARUl - ummah
To Clash or Not To Clash?
Will there be a confrontation between Islam and the West? Mr. Huntington's clash of civilizations claims "yes", but the survey is "not convinced". It is true that the world of Islam and the West have more in common with each other than they do with the Confucian and Hindu ones, but in reality both Mr. Huntington's and Mr. Beedham's comparisons are unhelpful in understanding the reality of the matter. What Mr. Beedham's admits are important differences (Westerners not believing that God dictated the Qur'an and Muslim's not believing the Jesus is the son of God) are in fact irreconcilable differences, at least from the Muslim stand point .
"And they say the Compassionate (i.e. Allah) has taken to Himself a son. Certainly you utter a disastrous thing, whereby the heavens are almost torn asunder, and the earth split open and the mountains crumbles to ruin, that you ascribe to the Compassionate a son! When it is not befitting the majesty of the Compassionate that He should choose a son. There is none in the heavens or the earth but comes to the Compassionate as a slave." [Al-Qur'an 19:88-93]
Islam does not regard Christians who claim that Jesus is God, or the Son of God, as 'monotheists' any more than Hindus who claim that Krishna is a 'manifestation of God' or Buddhists who claim that Buddha is God. All of this is disbelief and polytheism. It is this that is the basis of conflict. It is a conflict not only sanctioned, but ordered in the Qur'an:
"Fight against those who believe not in Allah, nor the last day, nor forbid that which has been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger and those who acknowledge not the religion of truth among the people of the Book , until they pay the jizyah (i.e. protection tax) with willing submission and feel themselves subdued." [Al-Qur'an 9:29]
This is not a confrontation of civilizations, nor is it a clash of cultures. Islam does not oppose the West, or anyone else, because of revenge over past hostilities, out of a desire to restore injured pride or because of the desire to amass their wealth and lands. The fight is for one purpose only and that is to establish the religion of Islam in its totality, as the Prophet, peace be upon him, explained when a man came to him and asked: "One of us fights for booty, another for his tribe and another to be known as brave, which one is fighting jihad?" The Prophet, peace be upon him, replied: "None of them. Only the one who fights to make Allah's Word the highest is fighting jihad." It is clear to any believer acquainted with Allah's Book (i.e. the Qur'an) and His Prophet's Sunnah that jihad (i.e. struggling to the utmost of ones ability) is an intrinsic part of faith, and a duty among the duties in Islam. The Prophet, peace be upon him, said, as reported by Tariq ibn Shihab: "He who amongst you sees something evil should change it with his hand; and if he is unable he should change it with his tongue; and if he is unable to do that he should at least hate it in his heart, and that is the weakest form of faith." [Reported in Sahih Muslim, no. 79]
Jihad has three characteristics. The first form is jihad of the heart, or jihad of the self.7{= This is the internal struggle to acquire the correct creed, and to remove from one's self all doubts and misconceptions concerning this creed, and also the commands and prohibitions enjoined on the believer. It further more encompasses the purifying of the soul from base desires and acquiring noble qualities. The second level is the jihad of the tongue. This is the struggle against evil, and wrong beliefs and actions through preaching and writing books and the like. This form of jihad is characterized by its use against the deviants from among the Muslims, but also extends to the unbelievers. The final form of jihad is that of the hand, or sword, where one expends life and property. It is characterized by its use against unbelievers, but can also be used against deviant groups under the authority of the Muslim ruler. This jihad of the hand, often termed 'Holy War', is further compartmentalized into three stages. The first is that of it being forbidden, as it was in the early days of Muhammad's prophethood. If the Muslims are weak, and fighting is liable to cause only harm and no benefit, then they should desist. Such is the case of those dwelling in non-Muslim lands. The second stage is that of self-defense, or restricting the fight to "those who fight you" [Al-Qur'an 2:190], and releasing the lands of the Muslims from the control of their enemies. This is the condition of the Muslims today. The final stage is that of fighting in order to open the path for establishing Allah's rule in the lands of the unbelievers, as was done by the Prophet's companions and the Muslim rulers after them.
"And why should you not fight in the cause of Allah when there are weak and oppressed, old men, women and children whose cry is 'Oh Lord save us from those who oppress, and send to one who will aid and send to us one who will help!' " [Al-Qur'an 4:75]
Thus one the Prophet's companions, Rab'iah ibn 'Amr, went to meet Rostrum, the famous Persian general, at his request and the general offered camels, and women and asked them to return to the desert. Rab'iah refused, and Rostrum asked him why then were they fighting. Rab'iah replied: "We have come to take mankind from the darkness to the light and from the worship of the false gods to the worship of Allah, from the narrowness of this world the wide expanse of this world and the next, and from the injustices of man made religions to the justice of Islam."
So this Jihad is the peak of the matter and fulfilling it is part of fulfilling the covenant with Allah, and abandoning it is the cause of humiliation and defeat for the Muslims. As Allah said:
"If you march not forth, He will punish you with a painful torment and will replace you by another people and you cannot harm Him at all, and Allah is able to do all things." [Al-Qur'an 9:39]
And the saying of the Prophet, peace be upon him: "When you deal in al-ainiyyah (i.e. become complacent and satisfied with a domestic life) and hang on to the cows tails, and abandon jihad, then Allah will permit your humiliation at the hands of your enemies and will not lift it from you until you return to your religion." 8So today we find Muslims leading a life as if they had no prophet, nor belief in any Divine Message or Divine Revelation, nor expectation of any reckoning, nor is fear of the hereafter. They resemble the pre-Islamic nations, against whom they used to fight in the past. So they have turned on their heels as apostates from Islam and have imitated the ignorant nations in their civilization, in their social affairs, in their political systems, in their character and in the pleasures of their lives. So Allah hated them and forsook them, as He promised He would. He had warned them of this clearly in His Book, and on the tongue of His Messenger Muhammad, peace be upon him: "Soon the nations will gather to take from you the same way you invite others to share from a feast!" A person asked the Prophet, peace be upon him: "Is that because we are small in our numbers?" The Prophet, peace be upon him, answered: "No! You will be many, like the foam on the sea, but you will be rubbish, like the rubbish carried down by the flood water. And certainly Allah will remove from the breasts of your enemies the fear of you and into your breasts He will cast enervation." A person asked: "What is enervation?" The Prophet, peace be upon him, replied: "It is love of life and fear of death." This has come true exactly, as the Prophet, peace be upon him, predicted, and if there is a 'Revival of Islam', then that is because anyone with ears and eyes can see how the Muslims are humiliated - their lands a feast for their enemies, ruled by laws and ways nothing to do with that which Allah has revealed. The solution to these problems has been given by the Prophet, peace be upon him, himself one thousand four hundred years ago: "Return to your religion", enjoin what Allah has enjoined and forbid what He has forbidden, prefer the next life to this, and for the Muslims to once again struggle with their lives and properties to bring themselves and others out of the oppression of man made ways of life to the justice of that which has been revealed by the All-Knowing Creator!
So the matter of conflict between Islam and the West is not at all as the survey suggests, i.e. factors such as geography, past enmities, culture clash and so on; nor is the Islamic Revival some search for identity, coupled with some sort of inferiority complex. To the believer the conflict is one of truth against falsehood, justice against oppression, the way to Paradise against the way to Hellfire, the perfection of Allah's revealed way against the misguidance of human ignorance. Furthermore, all of this should make it clear that there is indeed an "insuperable reason why Muslims and Westerners cannot live peaceably with each other" (p. 5 c. 2). Mr. Beedham's survey, for all its optimism, has made an oft-repeated mistake. He has judged the Muslims by his own standards, believing they want, as do the West, to reach some sort of compromise. The truth is that Islam teaches its followers to seek death on the battle field, that dying whilst fighting jihad is one of the surest ways to Paradise and Allah's Good Pleasure. It is as Khalid ibn Walid, whom the Prophet, peace be upon him, called the "Sword of Allah" and hero of every good Muslim child, said in response to a Roman letter inviting him to surrender: "We have with us people who love death as you love wine." It was Ronald Reagan who quite rightly pointed out that: "How do you expect to defeat a people who believe that when you kill them they go to a paradise filled with beautiful virgins and rivers of wine?" Whether the believer sees the result in his or her life time is irrelevant, for their duty is to carry on the jihad, and so be saved from Allah's wrath in this life and the next.
The conflict will be there as long as there are those who stubbornly resist submission to their Lord and Creator. If all of this seems intransigent and fundamentalist that's because IT IS. With Islam you are dealing with absolutes. This conflict, however, may not necessarily be a violent one, in the sense of war, causing loss of life, limb and property. Islam does not necessarily demand a change through violence if the end can be effectively achieved through other means. So perhaps there is cause for the surveys optimism, but the solution can only lie in a very different direction from what it suggests! Allah has promised in His Book that if the Muslims fail to keep their covenant, and fight against the foolish disbelief, then He will destroy them and
"Replace them with a people who will love Him, and He will love them, and they will be hard against the forces of disbelief and kind to the believers, and unafraid of those who find fault." [Al-Qur'an 5:54]
And Allah speaks the truth, and His promise comes true, and this has proven so in the past, as when the Muslims left their religion, fought amongst each other, and reveled in the delights of worldly life ... then the calamity of the Tartars feel upon them, destroying utterly the Muslim lands, a and its capital Baghdad. Yet from these same conquerors, Allah made them the defenders and upholders of Islam, and from them to the Turks, who in their turn lapsed, and so Allah destroyed them at the hands of the Europeans. Thus is situation in which Muslims find themselves today. It is quite possible that history will repeat itself, and that Islam will be given its strength again through those who had formally tried to destroy it.
The whole issue of whether the West will accept Islam or not has been a topic of debate amongst Muslim scholars and thinkers. It seems unlikely that there will be any sort of military conquest of the Western world, at least in the foreseeable future, but conquest is not always through arms. Indonesia and Malaysia never saw invading Muslims armies. Islam "conquered" these lands with a different weapon altogether ... The weapon was Islam itself. The real threat from the growth of "fundamentalism" to those in the Western, and other, parts of the world who would like to see Islam far removed from influencing the way they run their countries, is not of invading hoards of Muslim militants, but rather the effect of a practical example of Islam in operation in the form of a true Islamic state. Also the probability of these same "fundamentalist" states utilizing their resources to inform the world of the reality of what Islam is, as opposed to the lies and distortions it has been fed until now! How likely, then, is it for this true Islamic state to materialize, and how do people following a religion one thousand four hundred years old possibly expect it to work in the twentieth century?9
The Strange Case of the Fundamentalists
The Muslim world is at present a patchwork of competing nation sates, ruled by political, social and judicial systems that can by no means be termed 'Islamic'. Indeed in many of these countries there are laws in direct opposition to what has been revealed by Allah to His Messenger Muhammad, peace be upon him. It seems the only Islamic quality about some of these nations is that they happen to have Muslims in them. A large portion of the Muslim World has, for the last two hundred years, been under the occupation, or 'protectorate', of one or another of the European powers, who gradually dispensed with the Shari'ah (Islamic Law) and supplemented it with various Western systems. After gaining so called "independence" these alien political and judicial systems remained, or were replaced by other Western influenced hybrids. The 'Nationalism' of Attaturk in Turkey, the 'Ba'athism' of Iraq and Syria, the 'Pan-Arab Nationalistic Socialism' of Egypt's Jamal 'Abdel-Nasr, and its various offshoots such as Qaddafi's 'Islamic Socialism'. All of these movements freely used 'Islamic' slogans when, and if, it suited their aims. The simple multitudes were caught up in the fervor of the new found 'freedom', and in order to maintain it they were told they must 'modernise'. To the so-called 'intellectual elite' this meant abandoning everything from the past, and taking on board everything that was new. Thus the 'Modernist' movement arose, lead by the likes of Muhammad 'Abduh, that explained away every miracle of the Prophet, peace be upon him, and even many of the basic acts of worship. For the first time riba' (dealing usury/interest) was legalised and the adoption of Western dress and lifestyles was encouraged. They tried to make all of this acceptable by bypassing the traditional methods of Islamic scholarship for personal 'itjihad (i.e. juristic reasoning) and interpretation of the texts.
For others, Islam itself was merely an enemy to progress, especially in the Soviet Union where veils were burnt, mosques demolished and scholars exiled to Siberia - or executed. Street walls were painted with the words: "There is no God and Lenin is His Prophet". In many places throughout the Muslim World mosques became empty, and women walked in mini-skirts on the street. Then things started to change. In the face of Western and Communist power, medicine and technological wizardry, of men on the moon and aircraft that could circle the globe in days, of weapons of mass destruction that combined were able to destroy the world seventeen times over, the computer chip and nations that seemed to have reached unrivaled material prosperity and personal freedom, there was a gradual, yet unavoidably noticeable return to Islam. Not, mind you, only by the uneducated, impoverished peasants, but the educated, prosperous, middle classes. Furthermore, this was not merely a return to the mosque five times a day, and the veil for the woman, but a call for Islam in its TOTALITY - to be re-implemented once again. For indeed the reality that Islam makes no distinction between the private and public, between the religious and political, had been apparent to Muslim scholars long before the The Economist's survey deemed to point it out. Indeed it was obvious that the situation within the Muslim countries, with their hybrid socio-judicial-political systems, was in contradiction to the very essence of Islam itself! So various movements started to seek to bring the Muslims back to the correct state of affairs. This of course met with some considerable opposition from the various governments supporting such systems. This opposition was, and still is, often brutal in the extreme. These governments received either direct, or tacit approval from their Western and Communist overseers, who in reality were more aware of the potential threat of such a Muslim revival to the status quo, and their own virtual world economic and political domination which they had striven so hard to achieve. The last thing they wanted to see were the Muslims back on their feet. Yet the revival continues ...
Perhaps the reason why the rise in Islamic fundamentalism has been so phenomenal is because the point the fundamentalists are making is so, well, FUNDAMENTAL! After all, once a Muslim has become aware that believing in the validity of laws and ways other than those ordained by Allah is to commit the unforgivable sin of "shirk", then, as the Qur'an states:
"It is not for a believing man or woman, once Allah and His Messenger have decided on a matter to have any choice therein." [Al-Qur'an 33:36] ...
". . .and their response is none else than we hear and we obey." [Al-Qur'an 24:51]
Indeed, that is exactly what makes a Muslim what he or she is: someone who submits him or herself to Will of Almighty God. Of course the incompetence, corruption and brutality of the governments, the inevitable failure of their ideologies, and their frequent national and international humiliation has made the task of the fundamentalist easier. Yet it is naive to presume that this alone has given impetus to the rise in fundamentalism. Surely, if anything, the poor and desperate condition of the Muslim masses should drive them more earnestly to 'modernization', 'Westernization' and 'Democracy', of which their countries have hardly been shining examples! Indeed, even the most common peasant sees daily a barrage of images on the television screen (that has become as essential as a bed in even the most humble households) portraying the materialistic success of the Western World!
The true reasons for this persistent rise in Islamic awareness are not at all those to which Western analysts constantly refer. The reason for their inability to understand this phenomena is part due to their submergence in the purely material. Science and the "Theory of Evolution" has given them, so they believe, proof that man is at most no more that an advanced animal, a progressive monkey, and man's basic needs are little different, fundamentally, to those of our supposed ancestors: food, drink, sleep, safety from predators and sex. Satisfy these, and man should be content. The Muslim World still has, by and large, kept more in touch with the reality of the human condition: that happiness is not at all merely a material thing, but in fact something more profound, and that understanding this is as important, perhaps more important, to the well being of the human condition, than mere material gratification. The evil results of this materialistic attitude is all too apparent in the rotting social conditions of Western society. Its effects have also become apparent in the Muslim lands themselves.