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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