Sorry about the cut and paste!!! But articles in Jang don’t last more than a day. Apparently the site does not archive.
http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/index.html
A personal veiw
The great debate
Inayatullah
Bernard Lewis, for many years a professor of Near East studies at Princeton University, is well known for his analysis of conditions in the Arab and Islamic worlds. His treatise on the Roots of Rage published a few years ago caused quite a stir. He now has come up with a new book titled “What Went Wrong - Western Impact and Eastern Response”. It precisely deals with the Muslim world’s responses to the West and “its long sad decline”, as Paul Kennedy another American scholar puts it in his review of the publication. It is, he makes the telling observation, not just another case of traditional societies having to come to terms with the forces of modernisation. There is a different order of magnitude involved here. A badly damaged religiously driven order is “locked in confrontation with global trends more penetrating and unsettling than could ever have been imagined”. What Went Wrong is about a great cultural and political divide in modern history.
The west for the last 400 years, has been marching ahead in various fields. All these years it underwent great changes sparked by Reformation, Renaissance and industrial revolution. Great strides were made and are still going on in science and technology as well as in the evolution of political institutions and military power. While Europe rose as Kennedy says, the Muslim world “rested on its laurels until it was besieged by western ships, armaments, cheap textiles to all of which it became harder and harder to respond”. We are all familiar with the colonisation of what is now called the Third World and the White Man’s Burden carried for centuries by the European powers. It was the “cultural messages” including democracy which the Muslim states found most difficult to relate to.
Not that Islamic scholars and thinkers over the years failed to recognise the daunting challenges faced by the Muslims and that there were no attempts to review, renew and reform. A number of outstanding intellectuals and activists were seized of the realisation that there was need for a thorough overhauling of the traditional ways of doing things and managing affairs. A great puritan reformer Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahab rose in Arabia in the 18th century. There also were the stirrings of new thinking in Egypt. Jamaluddin Afghani a restless soul marched up and down the Muslim lands and tried to awaken the people to the dangers they faced and how these could be met by uniting and re-evaluating their intellectual and political inheritance.
It was the Turks who facing the western military threat were forced to take to westernisation as a recipe for survival and development. Ataturk, the hero of the day, could drastically change the political order and relegate religion to the sidelines. Iqbal initially lauded Ataturk’s bold moves and especially the ijtihad to replace Khilafat with the Grand National Assembly. The republican form of government, he found consistent with the spirit of Islam. Later, Iqbal reviewed his appreciation of Ataturk’s initiatives and expressed the view that Mustafa Kemal had gone too far. In an Urdu couplet he wistfully observed that the body politic of the Muslim world was yet to find a visionary Islamic leader as Ataturk and Reza Shah Pahlavi had been found wanting.
In the sub-continent three men stand out amongst the Muslims who not only realised the need for change but also suggested how to deal with it and face the new challenges. These were Sir Sayyed, Iqbal and Jinnah. We owe the emergence of Pakistan to their thinking and strivings.
A lot is being said and written these days as to what kind of Pakistan did Iqbal and Jinnah envisage. Intellectuals and columnists are talking about the nature and character of the Islamic state and to Musharraf has been attributed a statement published in the Newsweek that Pakistan has to be a modern democratic and secular state. According to an official clarification, the good General did not utter the word “secular” in his interview. While a speech by Quaid-i-Azam is often cited to establish that he wanted a secular state for Pakistan, there are many articulations of his which are referred to by others to prove that he was in favour of an Islamic state in accordance with the Qur’aan and the Prophet’s Sunnah. A scholar who compiled Quaid’s speeches and statements made between 1911 and 1948 in a letter to an English language daily has quoted chapter and verse to suggest that while Mr Jinnah was against theocracy he favoured an Islamic state in letter and spirit. In an article in the same newspaper a columnist has sought to conclude that even Iqbal wanted a secular dispensation. Friday Times too has been making a significant contribution on the subject. The monthly Herald in its January issue has dealt with the issue by projecting interviews of an Indian Nobel laureate and three Muslim scholars.
It is time the world of Islam and Pakistan in particular, seriously address the overwhelmingly important question as to what kind of Islam do we want or need. It is indeed time for a great debate as short pieces or eloquent articulations based on selected quotations to prove or score a point may only add to confusion which presently prevails on the subject. Perhaps more than the Quaid, it is Iqbal who might provide guidelines for our search for the answers. I may here refer to some of his remarks (from his Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam):
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"The only alternative open to us, then, is to tear off from Islam the hard crust which has immobilised an essentially dynamic outlook on life, and to rediscover the original verities of freedom, equality, and solidarity with a view to rebuild our moral, social, and political ideals out of their original simplicity and universality.
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The question which confronts (the Turks) today, and which is likely to confront other Muslim countries in the near future is whether the Law of Islam is capable of evolution - a question which will require great intellectual effort, and is sure to be answered in the affirmative, provided the world of Islam approaches it in the spirit of Umar - the first critical and independent mind in Islam.
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The Qur’aan considers it necessary to unite religion and state, ethics and politics in a single revelation much in the same way as Plato does in his Republic.
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The teaching of the Qur’aan that life is a process of progressive creation necessitates that each generation, guided but unhampered by the work of its predecessors, should be permitted to solve its own problems.
Let the great debate begin. What for is the Iqbal Academy and institutions like the International Islamic University and the Islamic Research Institute if they remain occupied with the traditional routine and continue to be deficient in coming to grips with the challenges of the times to forge models of political institutions, economic structures and social configurations. The Council of Islamic Ideology too should be recast bringing in men of the calibre of Javid Iqbal, Javed Ahmad Alghamdi and Saroosh Irfani. A considerable time should be set apart, two or three times a week, on one of the TV channels for this purpose to widen the scope of the debate purposed. It is time to wake up, review and renew our commitments to rebuild our political economic and cultural systems and institutions.
The writer is a Lahore-based columnist