Muslims and the contemporary challenge
The Quran is the basis of all Islamic understanding and the correct understanding of the Qur'an requires education. Photo: ourislamic.webnode
When the Egyptian-born theologian, Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti, died on 18 October 1505 it is said that, "his reputation as a scholar and the aura of godliness which were already his during his lifetime, then reached their zenith; his clothes were bought as if they were relics." Although he lived for only sixty years, a 1983 study credits him with the authorship of 981 works the central message of which was "everything is based on the Qur'an." The Qur'an is Islam and there cannot be a more precise definition of the religion. In the early phase of their history when Muslims adhered to its injunctions, they were able to bring progress and enlightenment to the world. When they deviated from its teachings, the civilization they had built crumbled. Civilizations, as Toynbee said, are born and continue to grow so long as they are able to meet the challenges of their times but they decay when they fail to respond. Muslims were able to contribute to the intellectual ascent of man through the spirit of scientific enquiry but the complacency, which often accompanies success, rendered them incapable of confronting the new realities and all that they had achieved withered. About four hundred and fifty years after Suyuti's death, the nineteenth century reformer, Jalal ad-Din Afghani, wrote, "Every Muslim is sick, and the only remedy is the Qur'an" but to some writers in the West, such as Conor Cruise O'Brien, "the sickness gets worse the more the remedy is taken." This perception has been reinforced after 9/11 and the continuous wave of terrorist violence perpetrated mostly, but not exclusively, by a radicalized minority who profess Islam. As a consequence, the Qur'an's doctrinaire emphasis on non-aggression has been obscured and strengthened the erroneous belief that it encourages violence. For their part, Muslims constantly refer to the hatred of their religion as a recurrent theme of history. They feel that the political and military violence against them did not end with the Crusades or even with the successful completion of the Reconquista in Spain when, on 2 January 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella received the keys of the Alhambra, the Muslim palace in Grenada. On 3 August of that year the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus sailed west as the leader of a small fleet provided by Isabella and reached the Bahamas, which he thought was near China. The voyage symbolized a new phase of European expansionism. In so far as the Islamic world was concerned, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed aggression against and occupation of Muslim territories in the Middle East and North Africa. In 1830 the French colonized Algiers, the British captured Aden in 1839. These colonial powers between them took Tunisia in 1881, Egypt in 1882, the Sudan in 1889 and Libya and Morocco in 1920. They promised independence to these countries but, in effect, divided the region between themselves into spheres of influence and occupation. The end objective of the colonizers was the perpetual subordination of the occupied territories through subtle cultural imperialism long after the latter regained their independence. Through all this and much more the "crusader" attitude towards Islam continued to prevail in the West. On entering Jerusalem in 1917 General Allenby boasted that "the crusades had been completed" and when the French troops reached Damascus their commander went straight to Saladin's tomb in the Great Mosque and declared: "We have returned, Saladin!" From 1945 till the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the US-led West was selective in its approach to the Islamic world. It supported those countries that could promote its Cold War objectives but was, at best, indifferent to those it did not need to defeat communism. The Islamic countries supported by the West during the Cold War era were ruled either by autocratic republican regimes or by absolute monarchies. Despite their horrendous human rights track records, they were considered "moderate" because they were anti-communist. The arms race between the Cold War superpower rivals sapped the Soviet Union of its economic lifeblood and presaged the collapse of communism. The decisive battle of the Cold War was fought and won for the West in Afghanistan by Muslims. They were trained, indoctrinated, armed and given financial assistance with the approval and support of the West and the more affluent "moderate" Islamic countries, notably Saudi Arabia. Thousands of volunteers from Muslim countries and particularly the Arab world were flown to training camps in Pakistan and sent into Afghanistan to fight the Soviet occupation forces. They were acclaimed as the "mujahideen" or holy warriors and were lionised as the heroes of the liberation struggle. The Soviet retreat from Afghanistan and the subsequent collapse of what President Reagan regarded as the "evil empire" dealt an irreversible body-blow to the communist ideal. The triumph, however, was short-lived because of the emergence of a new threat to global peace and security in the form of religion-motivated terrorist violence. The same extremists who had been trained, indoctrinated, financed and equipped by the so-called free world to defeat the Soviet forces in Afghanistan now had a freehand to pursue an agenda of their own. They distorted the tenets of Islam and ironically their primary victims have been Muslims. Muslims, therefore, need to understand the liberal and moderate emphasis of the Qur'an or else this religion, which does not believe in priesthood, will continue to be exploited by those whose agenda is based on violence. But here one encounters a formidable problem because, despite Islam's emphasis on knowledge and learning, the level of literacy and education is alarmingly low in Muslim countries. Even more disconcerting is that little is being done to rectify this problem. The extent of regression is evident from a telling comment in a survey done by the United Nations Development Programme in July 2002: "in the 1,000 years since the Caliph Mamoun…the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in a single year." A recent study shows that 57 Muslim majority countries have an average of ten universities each. This means that there are not even 600 universities catering to 1.5 billion Muslims. In contrast, India has 8,407 universities and the US 5,758. No less appalling is the finding that there are less than 300,000 Muslims who qualify as scientists i.e., 230 scientists per one million Muslims. In comparison the US has 1.1 million scientists (4,099 per million) and Japan 700,000 (5,095 per million). It is revealing that in the past 109 years the world's 1.5 billion Muslims have produced only 9 Nobel laureates while a mere 14 million Jews have produced 167 Nobel Prize winners. The twin plagues of obscurantism and violence in the name of Islam can only be defeated through the Qur'an. Religion is not merely the opiate of the people as the Marxists believed but if wrongly interpreted it is the poison that destroys society. The correct understanding of the Qur'an requires education and this must be the first step in the reformation of Islamic societies. The process is long and there are no quick-fixes. The Sher-e-Bangla, A.K. Fazlul Haq, once described life as "the eternal struggle which man wages on behalf of himself, against himself" and this is precisely the struggle that Muslims need to wage if they are to retrieve even a semblance of the glory that once was theirs.
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