Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

THE 303 HUMAN CONDITION AND THE ROLE OF ISLAM

Since the beginning of the decade of the 1990s, a number of leading figures in the West have sought to create a universal declaration of human responsibilities to complement the one on human rights declared by the United Nations.

Many have become aware that the sole emphasis on human rights without emphasizing our responsibilities to the rest of society and also the natural environment can only accelerate the suicidal course that the modern and now postmodern world seems to be taking. One does not need to be a prophet to realize that the rapid destruction of both the natural environment and the social fabric of the most highly industrialized societies cannot but end in total disaster for the whole of humanity. Islam has a crucial role to play in bringing out the primacy of responsibilities over rights in accordance with its vision of the human being as a theomorphic being and its emphasis on the ontological reliance of human beings upon God. It can also be a major force, perhaps the most powerful on earth, to oppose the  process of the desacralization of both human beings and nature, a process the result of which is the monumental crisis we now face.

Beyond the din of political and military confrontations going on today, Muslim thinkers must address themselves to the questions of human responsibilities and human rights, joining hands with both Western and other thinkers engaged in such matters globally, bringing to the table without apology the Islamic contribution to these vital subjects and especially the emphasis upon the theocentric worldview and sacred conception of creation, which are not only Islamic but are shared in one form or another by all the historical religions. The participation on a global scale by Muslims in the creation of awareness of human responsibilities to complement and precede human rights is itself a responsibility of primary order placed by God upon the shoulders of those Muslims endowed with sufficient knowledge combined with virtue to carry out such a task.

Within the Islamic world itself, Muslim thinkers must address themselves to the ever greater understanding of human rights on the basis of the Islamic conception of the nature of the human being. All the elements of human rights as delineated in the Islamic declaration above are found within traditional Islamic sources, from the Quran andHadith to poetry, aphorisms of sages, and works of moral philosophers and Sufis. But they need to be reformulated in a contemporary context in such a way as to be able to respond to modern Western challenges and also the current situation within various Islamic societies. Why must there be respect for human life and in fact all of life? If all Muslims are equal before the law, why is this not actually the case in so many Muslim societies, and what about non-Muslims? What is the foundation of the freedom of religion and worship? To what extent is personal life sacrosanct and what is the limit of state intrusion upon personal life? Such questions must be answered in a clear and convincing manner for the present generation of Muslims, not by quoting Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke as an earlier generation of

Muslim modernists did with blatant lack of success, but by drawing from the most authentic sources of the Islamic tradition.

The Islamic understanding of human rights will not necessarily be identical with the most current Western interpretations of it, but that is not a negative matter at all. What is important is that the Islamic response be authentic and deeply rooted in the Islamic tradition. The attempt to harmonize the Islamic understanding of these matters with the current Western appraisal of these issues is not only metaphysically and religiously not always feasible, but also impossible in practice, because the Western understanding of these issues is constantly changing from decade to decade. What is important for Islam is to accept the challenge of the reality of the issues involved and then provide Islamic responses, which may in fact be also of interest to certain Western thinkers grappling with the pertinence of these issues on a global scale.

A particularly difficult task, which is also a new one requiring intellectual effort(ijtihad) on the highest level by Muslims, is determining the rights of those who do not believe in God and therefore in any responsibilities that people of faith believe they have toward God. The classical Islamic works on ethics and rights, whether written from a juridical, philosophical, or theological point of view, envisaged a universe in which there was a multiplicity of religions, as we have already discussed in the first chapter of this book. Today there is a new situation in the modern and  post-modern world that is indeed an anomaly in world history.

Since extensive secularism developed within the West itself, through a gradual process, the attitude of Western Christian thinkers could accommodate itself to secularism over time.

For Islamic theological thought, the presence of a powerful secularist force in the world appears as a great shock, despite the advent of modernism starting two centuries ago in many Islamic lands and after seventy years of domination of a good part of the Islamic world by the officially atheistic Soviet regime. Today, the mainstream of Islamic thought, both Sunni and Shi‘ite, must address itself to this question of secularism and agnosticism as it did in earlier days concerning the rights of followers of other religions within the Islamic community. Whatever understanding of human rights from the Islamic perspective comes to dominate the center of consciousness of the Islamic community in the future, it must take account not only of followers of other religions, a matter that is relatively easy in light of the Quranic doctrine of the universality of revelation, but also of those who do not believe in any transcendent or immanent Principle beyond the human. And that is more difficult to achieve in light of the Islamic conception of the human state. Yet it is a task to which the ‘ulama’, or religious scholars, who wield influence over the people and who are the guardans of theShari‘ah , as well as other Islamic thinkers must address themselves. This task will of course become easier if those within the Islamic world who have decided to leave the world of faith do not act as a fifth column for modern Western secularism. But even if this is the case, a way has to be found to protect their rights under the law along with those of non-Muslims of no religious persuasion who happen to be living within the Islamic world.

Islamic thought must also challenge on the highest intellectual level the current Western notion that the presentday Western understanding of human rights is universal, which in this context means global. Now, all values are related to the worldview, or Weltanschauung, within which they are understood, and not all worldviews are the same.

The religious worldviews have basic principles in common that they do not share with views that deny the Transcendent and the Sacred. When it comes to the question of the human state, Christians speak of people being the children of God, Muslims of their being His vicegerents on earth, and both of humans being made in the “image” or “form” of God, although with different meanings of the term “image” or “form.” Hindus speak of the sacrifice of the Primordial Man to create the world and Neo-Confucianism of the human being as an anthropocosmic being and bridge between Heaven and earth. These views can be easily correlated, but they cannot be harmonized with a view of the human being as an aggregate of molecules brought together by chance out of the original cosmic soup.

Nor can human rights, which must of necessity be based on the concept of who the human being is, be considered global and universal because of such crass differences about what constitutes the human state. Islamic thinkers must come forward to point out that, yes, there are human values that are global, such as respect for human life or opposition to torture, but other human rights are dependent upon the worldview of various civilizations that together compose humanity. Are the rights of human beings more important than the rights of God? Can we have human rights without human responsibilities? Are political rights superior to economic rights? Do the rights of the individual have priority over those of the community? If human rights  are not to be a form of cultural and political coercion in the name of the love of humanity, the answer of various religions, cultures, and civilizations to such questions must be respected whatever the current strength in this world of these religions or cultures might be. One of the roles of Muslims as members of a major world civilization is to answer such questions in all honesty from the Islamic point of view. It is also to insist upon mutual respect between civilizations and the values they bear instead of accepting one-sided imposition. It is, moreover, to seek actively to cooperate with not only Westerners, but also with members of other cultures and civilizations to point to those values that we do all hold dear and that must be respected by everyone if we are going to live and function as human beings on a globe on which there seems now to be no other choice but to live in mutual respect with compassion and love for others or to perish together.

Not only the Islamic world, not only the West, but the whole world is passing through one of the darkest pages of its history, which no amount of triumphalism and chestbeating can hide. In these dark times Muslims must remain vigilant as never before about all that goes on about them and concerning all those who use the name of Islam for various purposes, including deviant ones. On the basis of the traditional teachings of Islam, some of which have been outlined above, they must be as critical of what goes on among themselves in the form of bigotry and fanaticism as they are

of the shortcomings of modern Western societies, from sexual promiscuity and the breakdown of the family to the desecration and destruction of the natural environment.

Muslims must fulfill their responsibilities before God and His creation as taught in Islam, responsibilities for which they were created as human beings, and on the basis of these responsibilities they must seek to exercise the rights God has given them while also respecting the rights of others.

In a world in which the hierarchies of the states of being are denied, and in the minds of many, human beings are elevated to the level of God, and the “kingdom of man” has come to replace the “Kingdom of God,” it is the duty of Muslims to proclaim the primacy of the Sacred, the absolute necessity of sacred laws as foundations for social morality, the ultimate goal of human life beyond the earthly, the centrality of justice in human society, and the need to seek peace within before searching for outward peace. Muslims must remind themselves again of their responsibilities to God, to human beings, and to the natural world and also of their basic rights, the most important of which is the right to be God’s servant and vicegerent here on earth. They must extend their hand in friendship to followers of other religions as ordered by the Quran and to live and let live with regard to those who have moved away from the world of faith altogether. They must even extend their hand to those Christian and primarily Protestant evangelists who express ignorant, hurtful, and even malicious and egregious views about Islam. Muslims must in this case turn the other cheek and prove in their actions that for them also Christ is sent by God and his words revered.

Men and women in the West who are still devoted to the life of faith should also know that those closest to them in this world are Muslims, if only the veils of mutual misunderstanding and distrust, which have grown so thick of late, were to be rent asunder. Every practicing Muslim, which includes the vast majority of the population of the Islamic world, could not but agree that his or her highest wish is none other than the prayer uttered by Christ, “Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.” No matter what the aberrations that cloud the horizons today, the Islamic tradition remains and must remain witness to God’s Oneness and dedicated to the effort to carry out His Will here on earth.

Only in remaining true to itself, clinging to the “firm cable” mentioned in the Quran and the message it has been destined to bear in this world, will the Islamic community fulfill its duties before God and the rest of humanity and contribute as the “middle people” to the creation of harmony between religions, peoples, and civilizations the world over. Only in turning to the heart of its teachings will Islam be able to bear witness in this age of forgetfulness to the basic truth about the nature of human beings as creatures destined for the spiritual world with the possibility even in this world of “seeing God everywhere,” creatures who are agents of His Will here on earth, bearers of peace, and channels of the waters of compassion that issue from the spring of Life Divine.

EPILOGUE: THE ETHICAL AND SPIRITUAL NATURE OF HUMAN LIFE, EAST AND WEST

The Quran asserts that God is the Lord of both the East and the West and also that the Blessed Olive Tree, which symbolizes the spiritual axis of the world, is of neither the East nor the West. It is more necessary today than at any other time in history to realize the universal nature of the truth, which belongs to both the East and the West and yet is confined to neither. And yet there are those in the West who see Islam as the “totally other” and then vilify and identify it with all that they disdain, while there are also those in the Islamic world who look upon the West as the innate enemy of Islam. Those who realize that God is the Lord of both the East and the West must raise their voices against such ignorant and sometimes malefic attitudes.

There is not, however, a simple symmetry between East and West today. Before modern times the “Abode of Islam” was the only “other” the West knew, and the selfconsciousness of Western civilization during its period of maturation and its crystallization was to a large extent defined by that “other.” For Islam, however, there were several other civilizations, such as those in India and China, with which it had contact and which it saw as the “other.”

This factor itself contributed, through Islam’s image of itself as the central world civilization, to the neglect for several centuries by Muslims of the rise of European power during the Renaissance and the major intellectual and religious transformations that were taking place at that time in the West, including the rise of modern science followed by the new technology.

Some have tried to fault Islamic civilization for not following the same trajectory of development that took place in Europe and have asked, “What went wrong?” in reference to the Islamic world. If we look at world history, however, the question should not be “What went wrong in the Islamic world?” but “What went wrong in Europe?” The very question “What went wrong?” implies a norm or a right against which something is judged to be wrong. Now, the global norm was once traditional civilizations based on religious and spiritual principles and rooted in a theocentric or anthropocosmic worldview, as we see in Japanese, Chinese, Hindu, Islamic, Byzantine, and medieval European civilizations. It was postmedieval Europe that deviated from this norm by substituting an anthropocentric worldview for a theocentric one, making human beings the measure of all things or, to use a religious language, replacing the “Kingdom of God” with the “kingdom of man.” This “freedom” of reason from revelation and intellectual intuition, combined with emphasis upon humanism, rationalism, empiricism, and naturalism, led to many new developments, including a new science based on power rather than wisdom, and made it possible for Europe to expand over the globe and become dominant over other civilizations. It led to the Industrial Revolution, modern technology, and modern medicine. Now, modern medicine has eradicated many diseases but has also caused the population explosion, while modern technology has created many comforts along with the catastrophic destruction of the natural environment.

The death of tens of millions of Europeans in the twentieth century, thanks to modern means of warfare, combined with the loss of the meaning of life, the secularization of the world, the dehumanization of humanity, the breakup of the social fabric, the unprecedented destruction of nature and many other consequences of modern civilization, led a number of leading Western thinkers and poets during the last century to profoundly criticize the course taken by modern Western civilization. If not everyone has read René Guénon’s masterful Crisis of the Modern World, most people in America are familiar with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and some remember Theodor Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends, along with many other works written by European and American authors during the past decades either depicting the spiritually tragic condition of human life in modern society or criticizing the tendencies driving modern Western civilization to its destruction.

Are all these criticisms to be forgotten and modern civilization made the norm that is right and in comparison to which everything else is considered wrong? No thinking person who is aware of what we are doing to our natural environment and what forces are tearing away the fabric of our society and, more important, our souls can claim that the path followed by the West should be the norm by which one should judge other civilizations, Islamic or otherwise. Moreover, if Islamic or Chinese civilizations had followed the same course as the postmedieval West and we had had the Industrial Revolution not only in England, but also in China, India, Persia, Turkey, and Egypt, the environmental impact would have been so great that we might not even be around today to pose the question of what went wrong.

In reality, each civilization, whether in East or West, has decayed and deviated in its own way and must pose the question to itself about what went wrong, rather than exclaiming with hubris and self-righteousness about what went wrong somewhere else because the people in that “somewhere else” have not followed its way of thinking and acting. We must desist from identifying ourselves with pure goodness and the other with pure evil. Even Christ said only God is good in the absolute sense. Each civilization must become ever more aware of its own shortcomings and evil elements as well as its virtues and what is good in it. Muslims must ask themselves what went wrong within their own societies, but the West must also pose the same question about itself. And this task of self-examination is even more urgent for the West, for at this particular juncture of human history it possesses much greater power than other civilizations and has greater global influence.

Moreover, today one can no longer speak strictly of the West and the Islamic world as two civilizations facing each other across a line like two armies ready to do battle in medieval times. In days of old Islam occupied the southern shores of the Mediterranean and the West the northern shores, and later the Ottomans occupied eastern Europe and Western civilization ruled from Vienna west. Today the relation between the Islamic world and the West is more like the yin-yang symbol of the Far East. Let us recall that there is an element of yin in yang and of yang in yin and together they

comprise a circle, which is the symbol of totality. Likewise, there are many Westerners living in the Islamic world along with many Westernized Muslims and there are also sizable Islamic communities in both Europe and America. Whereas the contribution of Westerners in the Islamic world to the West is essentially economic and to some extent political, the contribution of Muslims living in the West to the Islamic world itself is primarily intellectual and only secondarily economic. In fact, at no time in Islamic history have so many influential intellectual leaders of Islam lived outside the “Abode of Islam” in another civilization, which, interestingly enough, provides the favorable climate for free intellectual discourse not found under present-day conditions in many Islamic countries themselves.

The destinies of the West and the Islamic world are intertwined in such a way that one cannot reduce the situation simply to “us” and “them” in total mutual exclusion.

It is in the destiny of not only Islam and the West but all other civilizations to be forced to confront at this particular moment of history the powerful forces of globalization.

If secularism sought earlier to demolish and destroy the older worldviews based on the Sacred, the process of globalization as usually understood seeks in an ever more accelerated manner to articulate a single worldview and “value system.” But this “value system” is what one might call “trans-human,” because it is based on the ephemera of the marketplace and its corporate denizens and not on enduring truths and spiritual values. The political and economic objects of globalization are therefore as inimical to the perennial values of religion as the forces of secularism were in earlier days and still are today. In this unprecedented historical situation, fraught with the greatest danger for the whole spiritual legacy of humanity, it is essential that the particular aspects of each tradition be preserved and sharpened, that the universal aspects be recalled, and that both be used to inform other traditions. It is only on the basis of a positive and mutually enriching dialogue between religious traditions that respects their particularities as well as recognizes the universal truths lying in their heart or center that the answers must be sought for the most acute problems facing humanity today.

In this critical moment of human history both Muslims and Westerners, and in fact all human beings, must seek to live an ethical life based on mutual respect and greater knowledge of each other. Turning more particularly to Islam and the West, it must be emphasized that whether we are Muslims, Jews, Christians, or even secularists, whether we live in the Islamic world or the West, we are in need of meaning in our lives, of ethical norms to guide our actions, of a vision that would allow us to live at peace with each other and with the rest of God’s creation. It is in the achievement of this task that both the formal aspect and the inner message of Islam as well as those of other religions can come to our aid as can nothing else in this world. Of special importance is the inner message, for this message is none other than the universal truth that was placed by God in the hearts of all human beings and that stands at the center of all heavenly revelations.

The heart of Islam is also the Islam of the heart, which is that spiritual virtue, or ihsan, that enables us “to see God everywhere” and to be His “eyes, ears, and hands” in this world. The heart of religion is the religion of the heart, wherein all external forms are transcended, the heart that according to the Prophet is “the Throne of the Infinitely Good and Compassionate.” It is within this religion of the heart that is to be found that eternal wisdom, or sophia, which shines like a jewel at the center of every Divine message.

This wisdom alone can provide for us, in this period of darkness and confusion, the light of harmony based on principial knowledge and the warmth of compassion and love of the other. As the last major historical religion in this cycle of human existence, Islam has been able to preserve to this day, and despite all the external turmoil and even subversion of our times, that message of the eternal sophia in its heart. To understand Islam fully is to understand this universal message from the heart and the manner in which the external elements of the tradition are related to this hidden center.

Muslims themselves must draw ever more from these inner springs of wisdom and all men and women of good will in the West must seek to understand Islam in light of these central truths, which are also to be found in Judaism, Christianity, and other religions. We must all seek to rediscover the heart of religion, which is also the religion of the heart, to drink deeply of the spring of wisdom gushing forth from the heart, to live in peace and harmony on the basis of the universal truths contained in the perennial wisdom shared by all traditions, and to love all of God’s creation as the consequence of being ourselves touched by the love and compassion of the One who resides in our hearts.

Nothing less than the wisdom and love of the religion of the heart can save us in a world torn apart by so much evil and selfishness, a world that has the chimerical dream of living in peace in the forgetfulness of God. The heart of Islam is none other than the witnessing to the oneness of the Divine Reality, the universality of the truth, the necessity of submission to His Will, the fulfilling of human responsibilities, and respect for the rights of all beings. The heart of Islam beckons us to awaken from the dream of forgetfulness, to remember who we are and why we are here, to know and respect the religions of others. It is for Muslims to heed the call from the heart of Islam and live an ethical and spiritual life accordingly, but it is also for those in the West who seek meaning in their lives to turn to their own center and to realize that in coming to know better the heart of Islam they may gain more than greater insight into another religion and civilization; they may gain greater insight into their own heart and soul. The heart of any religion is none other than that single, universal Truth that resides at the heart of all authentic religions and that is itself the foundation of the religion of the heart.

In love no difference there is between monastery and Sufi tavern of ruins, Wheresoever it be, there is the glow of the light of the Beloved’s Face.

Hafiz .

Wa’Llahu a‘lam-And God knows best.