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Futurizing Islam
When
people will be connected together
When the female child buried alive will be
questioned for what crime was she killed
When the dissemination of written material
will know no bounds
When the Garden will be brought to near
Shall each soul know what it has put forward
(Al-Qur'an 81:7-14).
While reading these lines of the Qur'an one
comes across a post-modern spatial scenario
and is immediately reminded of the world wide
web. Here, the vision of the Day of Judgment
suddenly gets mixed with a mundane living,
a world where modern life has almost taken
over the traditional space. No wonder, the
Qur'an, as the word of God it is, enables
us to see the past, the present and the future
in one single vision like a sudden glimpse
in a thunderbolt.
The creation of a virtual space away from
the real world is no ordinary wonder. A world
where millions are actively engaged in deliberations
on issues almost anything under the sky, is
a phenomenon rapidly molding even the most
conservatives amongst us. The cyber world
has no official clergy whom one has to look
at for approval nor is it possible here to
subdue an alternative opinion with the barrel
of a gun. In the cyber world there is no capital
city, no focused metropolis, no center and
no periphery. It is a truly post-modern scenario
where the human mind is free to build his/her
own mental picture from the flood of floating
thought fragments. In a world so created ideas
are judged on their own merit without any
weight of the pulpit attached to them. Endowed
with a profound sense of good and evil, here
human mind is equally exposed to Satan and
his adversaries. Amidst a plethora of set
answers of pet questions dug from ancient
books there are also issues inviting us to
think afresh. From superficial propaganda
to serious academic debates, the net world
has created much of a scenario of  a
big bang of ideas.
The stage is set for a free, frank and truly
international debate, for the emergence of
a pure message of God without any local color
or cultural and geographical moorings. Islam,
as it is the message of God to humanity and
Mohammed as he is a Warner to all and a blessing
for the entire world, where then such a universal
message and its prophet can find a better
appreciation than the Cyber world? The traditional
Muslim mind is baffled as the new space has
pushed the old division of the world as Darul
Islam or Darul Kufr into oblivion.
It is not possible any more to live in watertight
compartments. Those fond of looking at the
world through a cultural glass or identify
the message of God with Arab culture may find
uncomfortable with the new, culture-free understanding
of God’s message in the world wide web. Calling
Islam a Middle-Eastern religion is a fashion
on steep decline and so is the traditional
projection of Islam by some of its revered
exponents who fashioned it in Arab cultural
straitjacket.
In some weak moments of Muslim history our
intellectuals and Ulema believed that the
only way to ensure survival of Islam was to
protect the outer manifestations of the traditional
mode of living. Ibne Taimia’s famous treatise
Iqtidha Sirat al-Mutaqeem fi Mukhalefah
Ashab al-Jaheem, a desperate move to arrest
our decline, is perhaps the most telling document
of a misplaced vision. Islam that emerges
from such treatises is all about a sense of
dressing and a penchant for staying away from
the ‘other’. 
This fake and unworthy tradition, a mere asnad
jayyid by Ibne Taimiyah’s own admission,
has been instrumental in shaping the Muslim
mind of the decline period. Identification
of Islam with the Arab culture created serious
doubts about its universal claim and brought
the Islamic dawah to a halt in non-Arabian
regions. So influential was this single treatise
that its echo is found in different places
throughout the ages. In India, Ahmed Sirhindi
and Shah Waliullah considered it an obligation
for the faithful to resist any thing non-Arab
and pride in everything Arab. Unfortunately,
this exclusive Arab color of Islam has come
to be regarded so natural that for most of
us today it is almost impossible to visualize
an authentic Muslim without an Arabian or
Eastern dress. For centuries we are told that
wearing a non-Arabian dress or even getting
to a non-Arabian hair-style can make one’s
faith void. Even learning a foreign language
is not spared. Based on their understanding
of this fabricated tradition, it became completely
Haram to learn Persian language. And
this unlawfulness, by all implications, should
now be extended to English, French, German
and other foreign languages. For it was mistakenly
believed, as Ibne Taimia has it, that Persian
language makes one munafiq. Worse still,
according to this view, if a Muslim gets settled
in a non-Muslim land, on the Day of Judgment
he will have his fate with the Kuffar.
This geographical and cultural projection
of a universal deen not only forced
Muslims to limit themselves within the psychological
boundaries of their own making, it also created
a sense of fear and hatred for the other.
As opposed to the message of the Qur’an calling
for a global society based on tawheed,
the upholders of the neo-tawheed were
claiming that they alone have patented the
worship of one true God. Unmindful of the
far reaching negative implications of this
closed-mind set attitude, the neo-tawhidis
went on preaching: ‘it is commonly held belief
of ahl-sunnah wa al-jama’ah that the
Arab race has an edge over the non-Arabs’.
Besides betraying the essential Islamic teachings,
such highly irresponsible pronouncements paved
the way for an Arab versus non-Arab and East
versus West clash.
In an ever-shrinking world where the believers
have no other option but to ride on the same
globe alongside with the non-believers, the
neo-tawheedi understanding of Islam
is put to scrutiny. Sitting in an Internet
Café in the Arabian city of Qaseem or Riyadh,
the faithful is virtually breathing in the
same world with millions totally stranger
to him. What otherwise might be considered
abhorring, in a private chat room the believer
and the non-believer, the male and the female
get mixed. A dialogue, fraught with all kinds
of danger though, becomes unavoidable.
The neo-Tauheedis alone are not to
be blamed for this closed mind-set. There
are the Indians, the Chinese, the Jews and
the Americans all up to claim a sole right
on the 21st century. For quite
sometime they have been conditioned to think
in purely nationalistic nay, rather jingoistic
terms. For many among them the vital question
is for whom the 21st century? In
a situation where the buzzword is domination
over the ‘other’ it is no surprise if a group
of Muslims too sincerely feels that after
the dismantlement of the ‘evil empire’ the
only hurdle in establishing their hegemony
are the ‘evil Americans’ whose fall they must
engineer. While this attitude otherwise appears
to be a natural corollary of what goes on
in the real world, nonetheless, it belittles
our hope in the future. If religiously inspired
Muslims, who still have some vague sense of
being given the responsibility of leading
history till end time, envision the future
of our globe in terms of domination, where
would one look for a refuge? Islam has come
to liberate people from all kinds of domination
and if Muslims end up in replacing other’s
domination by their own, it will defeat the
very purpose of their existence.
It is high time to visualize a future world
in which no one single group is let free to
dominate the center-stage but all are united
as one single family in worship of one God.
For such a broad, all embracing vision of
Islam to put forward effectively Muslims must
come out of their traditional mind-set. Unless
we realize that we too, like our ancestors,
have been endowed with heads on our shoulders
and that the sole function of our head is
not just to place a cap or a tarbush on it,
we cannot put aside the intellectual garbage
that we have so willingly accumulated in course
of our centuries long intellectual journey.
For a people so fond of using epithets like
‘Islamic Art’, ‘Islamic Philosophy’, ‘Islamic
Architecture’ etc. it would be a great challenge
to concede that we as Ummah Muslimah were
not entrusted to create, what we did, the
grandeur of Abbasid Baghdad, or the splendor
of Moorish Spain. It needs no less than a
paradigm shift to realize that the architectural
wonder of the Taj and other marvels of Mughal
India that sometimes reminds us of our ‘glorious’
past, was in fact a digression from our original
prophetic plan.
The traditional mind that considers ‘Islam
as history’ equally valid as ‘Islam as Revelation’
and insists that the latter must be understood
in conformity with the former, has posed a
great challenge to our return to pure Islam.
It has created serious confusion in young
minds about the nature and function of Islam
itself. For example, in the West, revival
of Arab or eastern culture has acquired religious
sanctity. National liberation struggles in
different parts of the world fought by Muslims
are looked as Jihad activity, a religious
obligation. True, Muslims as a nation are
the worst victims today of the Bush-Blair
tyranny. And it is also true that a nation
being continuously inflicted with fresh wounds
has the right to fight back, to resist the
way it can. But a prophetic vision and concern
for all demands from us that we, as upholders
of the last Revelation, must look beyond mere
self-rescue operations. No doubt, it were
we who were dehumanized in Guantanamo Bay
and Abu Gharib prison and burnt alive in the
streets of Gujarat. It is our blood spilling
on a daily basis in Palestine and other places.
Yet we should not forget in our most nerve
shaking moments that we cannot inflict on
others what they did to us. God forbid! We
cannot indulge in dehumanization of fellow
humans or take innocent lives. And this is
the source of our strength.
In a world where the religious leaders have
long established the norm of looking at each
single issue from a communitarian angle, securing
the interest of their community more than
the truth, calling on Muslim Ulema alone to
look beyond mere Muslim interest will raise
many eyebrows. But if we are sensitive to
the plight of Man and aware of our religious
responsibilities we cannot let each day pass
sitting idly in our fortress of Muslimness
hoping that one day everything will be fine.
Future Islam is a post-modern prophetic voice
though not coming from the mouth of a prophet.
It is a call to give direction to our wayward
globe by rediscovering the pristine purity
of Islam. We understand that that putting
history again on its original prophetic course
is no ordinary venture. We also understand
that there are no set answers to the highly
complex situation that we are in today, nor
we, at futureislam.com, intend to gather various
possible answers, rather we insist on creating
one. We are no prophets nevertheless we carry
on the legacy of Abraham. It is a great challenge.
But who can be better prepared to accept this
challenge than those who uphold the Last Revelation?
Rashid Shaz
New Delhi
September 01, 2004
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