ON the occasion of Miladun Nabi recently, the ulema showed their skills of oratory saying that Islam is the solution to all our problems. The rhetoric is repeated year after year.
No one used the auspicious occasion to reflect on why the Muslim world is in turmoil and riddled with serious problems if this is the case. The Muslim world must be able to put its own house in order, and also have a leading global role in solving modern-day problems. The harsh reality is that we use such rhetoric to hide the truth about the Muslim world. It needs not only honest reflection but also calls for a serious rethinking of issues.
We should also know, if we care to face the truth, that what is happening in the Muslim world today is contrary to what the Quran teaches, and we are never tired of talking about those lofty teachings. For example, we say Islam gives equal rights to woman, but in the Muslim world women are most backward and oppressed and facing serious problems. Unfortunately, the whole world has come to think that Islam suppresses women’s rights more than other religions do.
We say that the Quran places a great deal of emphasis on knowledge, and there are innumerable verses, perhaps more than on any other subject, on ilm. But we find the Muslim world swamped with illiteracy. It has never tried to excel in the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge in the modern world. It is a pity that it does not have a single university which can be listed among the top 100 in the world.
It is also unfortunate that it has not produced any Nobel laureate in the natural sciences. Instead of being proud of his achievements, Pakistan was more concerned that Professor Abdus Salam, who worked and did his research in the US and set up an institute in Italy, was an Ahmadi. His proposal to Saudi Arabia to finance his laboratory for research in particle physics was rejected. It was then financed by Unesco.
The Quran lays great emphasis on justice which is one of the names of Allah (Allah is Adil) but we hardly find traces of justice in the Muslim world. In fact, like the five pillars of Islam there are five most fundamental values in the Quran i.e. truth (haq), justice (adl), benevolence (ihsan), compassion (rahmah) and wisdom (hikmah). These all derive from Allah’s own names, and hence these values are most fundamental. We emphasise the five pillars of Islam — and rightly so — but never the five basic Quranic values.
Take a look at the Islamic world and you will find Muslims enthusiastically emphasising and even practis ing the five pillars of Islam but you will hardly find any practising Quranic values. These values are very modern and indeed represent the solution to many of our problems today. But while the Quran greatly emphasises these values, the Muslim world totally neglects them in practice.
If we go beyond the rhetoric and start grappling with reality, the starting point will be to make a serious attempt to establish the causes of our lack of enthusiasm in the Muslim world for Quranic values. We should ask ourselves as to why our great orators outdo one another in emphasising the five pillars but not the five Quranic values. The fact is that in modern times no other system ever emphasised these values so much as the Quran; yet, the whole history of Islam is bereft of these values.
Is it not true that the Muslim ruling classes found these values great obstacles in the way of their interests and saw to it that these values were not emphasised at all? Any serious student of the Quran, reflecting honestly on its teachings, would know that the five pillars of Islam and the five values of the Quran not only complement each other but also that one is incomplete without the other. Yet, we emphasise one without the other.
It will be of great benefit to Muslim masses everywhere if both the pillars and the values are emphasised simultaneously. But we know that the ruling classes exert their influence on the entire political and educational system to smother any attempt to emphasise these values. And without practising these values, the Muslim world can never take the lead in the world. ‘Islam is the solution’ will remain only empty rhetoric, repeated as it may be endlessly.
It is precisely for this reason that along with these pillars and values, the Quran lays so much emphasis on knowledge. It is knowledge which brings awareness, and awareness translates into action. In the Muslim world today, there is neither awareness nor action, and any popular movement is put down by the ruling classes. Does not this state of dismal affairs, then, demand some serious rethinking by Muslim intellectuals? ¦ The writer is an Islamic scholar who heads the Centre for Study of Society & Secularism, Mumbai.
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