Modernity is celebrated worldwide by the people
of our time, and modern people think of themselves as the best creatures who
have ever lived on the surface of earth and are superior to all those people
who came before them. The consequences of modernity and progress are rarely
considered because of the dominant western discourse, which acts as the
promotor and the prophet of modernity. The notion of modernity has changed
various aspects of our society, culture, traditions, environment, religion,
etc. and these changes are mostly coming as a negative impact on our world and
our way of living. Different religions, a modern category itself, including
Islam have also gone through various changes with the advent of modernity and
are present today in an altered form than how they used to be in the pre-modern
era. The way Islam is perceived today has very little connection with the way
Islam used to be in the Balkans-to-Bengal complex in the pre-modern period. Shahab
Ahmed has given a tremendous alternative discourse to what Islam and being a
Muslim means in today’s world in his book “What is Islam?”, by incorporating
rich literary heritage, Quranic verses, the Hadiths, and academic work of the
leading scholars on Islam who were present in different times and space. In
this paper, I would like to discuss how Muslims living in the modern era have “re-formed”
and “revived” human and historical Islam by limiting their hermeneutical
engagement to dealing with‘Text’ only and giving lesser or no importance to ‘Pre-text’
and ‘Con-text’, prioritizing law and creed over revelation, nationalizing Islam
by using language and geography, having less or no engagement with exploration
as compared to prescription and attempting to simplifying Islam by ignoring the
contradictions in/of Islam.
I have grown up in a Sunni dominated society of
Drosh Chitral, which is considered to be one of the most “Islamic” places of
Pakistan. Being an Ismaili, I could never express my beliefs and I never dared
to perform my Dua in front of others because that would disclose me as being an
Aga Khani. That would be a reason for me to be disgraced and called Kafir and Rafizi.
People, including myself, have tried to keep a distance from Islam because the
modern Muslims have made Islam a very narrow and suffocating category as they
have made Islam as their “identity” by excluding as many people as possible
from the circle of Islam. This shift has come mainly after the encounter of Muslims
of the Balkans-to-Bengal complex with modernity and colonialism. The hermeneutical
engagement with the Pre-Text, Text and Con-Text has been reduced to giving
authority to the Text only. “My point here is that Muslims have, in making of
their modernity, moved decisively away from conceiving of and living normative
Islam as hermeneutical engagement with Pre-text, Text and Con-text of
revelation, and have instead begun conceiving of and living normative Islam
primarily as hermeneutical engagement with Text of revelation” (Ahmed, 2015,
page 515). This omission of the Pre-text from the hermeneutical engagement has
ceased to produce meaning-making from revelation and thus has not really added
anything to the growing Con-text of Islam. The Muslims in the modern era consider
Sharia, as a Text, being equal to truth, while we know that in the pre-modern
times, Sharia was considered a way which with the presence of Pre-text and
Con-text would lead to truth. The Sufis in the pre-modern era did not much
consider Sharia because they had exceeded that layer of truth and were in the
way of truth by personal search. Jalal Uddin Rumi beautifully puts the
hierarchy of Sharia in the Sufi school of thought in Masnavi-yi-Ma’navi
(Doublet of Meaning):
“The Law (Sharia’t) is like
learning the theory of alchemy from a teacher or a book, and the Sufi path is
the transmission of the copper into gold. Those who know alchemy rejoice in
their knowledge of it and those who practice it rejoice in their practice of
it, and those who have experienced the Real-Truth (haqiqah) rejoice in the
Real-Truth saying: We have become gold” (Jalāl, -D.
R., &Whinfield, E. H., 1994). These pre-textual discourses have been
excluded from normative Islam and modern Muslims think of Sufism as something
“mystical” and a practice “other” than Islam. Furthermore, the positioning of
meaning-making from Pre-text to Text has constituted Sufism and philosophy from
being a private-public explorative to a private individual project based on the
discourses of hermeneutical engagement with Text rather than explorative
undertaking to make meaning from Pre-Text. One of the prominent scholars of
Modern times, Allama Muhammad Iqbal, the poet and hero of the east, who claimed
to have revived Islam rejected Sufism because of not serving the purpose,
whatever it means, of Muslims: "Buddhism, Persian Sufism, and
allied forms of ethics will not serve our purpose” (Iqbal, 1917: 250-51). The modern form of Sufism is reduced to a
personal level, and instead of considering it as a part of wider Islamic
experience, it has been marginalized as being impractical and unnecessary.
A
major change came in Islam during the modern times because of diminishing of
the contradictions in Islam and the inability of the modern Muslims to live
with these contradictions and differences as an integral part of Islam. Shahab
Ahmed has tried to highlight some of these contradictions in “What is Islam?”
by putting them in the form of six questions: wine drinking, Sufism,
philosophy, art and painting, Hikmat al ishraq and wahdat al wujud and
poetry. These are some of the well debated topics of the Islamic experience,
but in modern Islam; there is absolutely no space for these contradictions to
be a part of Islam. The very basic pillar of Islam, “kalma”,
is based on a contradiction of “La IllahaIllallah” (There is absolutely
no God, but God), and the pre-modern philosophers like Hafiz, Rumi,
Ibn-e-Tufayl, etc. have lived their lives as a practice of this contradiction.
“Contradictions emerge into view as inherent to and coherent with the
spatiality of Revelation as Pre-Text, Text and Con-Text. This conceptualization
maps onto the human and historical reality of societies of Muslims in that it
enables us to apprehend how Muslims allowed for contrary norms and truth-claims
to be seen and lived with as consonant with Islam: that is, as Islamic” (Ahmed,
2015: 405). The reason it is hard for modern Muslims to think in terms of
contradictions is because the concept of ontology has changed for the moderns.
It is impossible for Muslims today to believe in the un-seen (ghaeb),
because the dominant western discourse has made it very clear that “what you
see is what you get”. The very essence of existence of human beings is a
coherent contradiction because we live and die in every moment simultaneously.However
for modern people; the idea of existence is that everything else exist because
they make them up in their mind. Another important factor which the modern
Muslims have left behind which has caused a lack of understanding of meaningful
ambiguity and engagement with Pre-Text, Text and Con-Text,is their relation to
literary work of poets like Hafiz, Saadi, Jami, Bidil, etc. and their lack of
engagement withthe education system of Balkans-to-Bengal complex which was full
of paradoxes and metaphors. These contradictory literary works are no more a
part of the paideia of the modern societies where Muslims live, whereas they
used to be a huge component of the Con-Text of pre-modern Muslim societies. ShamsurRehmanFaruqihasexplained
well the importance of Metaphor as an achievement of Hindi poets: “The chief
achievement of the Indian Style poets was to treat metaphor as a fact and go on
to create further metaphors from that fact. Each such metaphor in turn became a
fact and was used to create another metaphor” (Faruqi, 1990: 136). One cannot
imagine today to take metaphor as a fact because it is not evident from its
Exteriority (zahir), but the Ghazals have layers of meanings in them because of
these metaphors which are being ignored and are termed as un-Islamic by the
“Mullahs” today. In this way, modern Islamic discourse is missing its
contradictory formation which used to be the hidden core (batin) and it is
known only by its un-complicated parallel identity with a single dimension of
exteriority (zahir). The eradication of meaning making in terms of
contradictions, ambiguities and hermeneutical engagements has thus made Islam
of the modern world a hollow entity as compared to the Islamic experience of
the pre-modern era.
The most important constituent of modernity is the
formation of nation-states, and this form of modernity has re-located Muslims
throughout the world by bringing them under the control of the modern construct
of law. Every state which has Islamic law or does not have Islamic law
acknowledges the fact that Islam is only what Islamic law declares to be right
and this notion has presented the monovalent terms of prescriptive rather than
the explorative approach to Islam. Furthermore, the addition of modern “Islamic
Blasphemy Laws” has further restricted the exploration of Islam and has
narrowed down the hermeneutical engagement of a Muslim to Text or Sharia only. The formation of states cannot be effective
without the utilization of language, geography and ideology to create a
separate identity by making the people of one state “different” from others.
The creation of this vague and unrealistic modern identity has had a great
impact on the representation of Islam in different parts of the world. While
teaching in a primary school, I heard a student saying “Saudi Arabia is very
respectful for all of us because we can find “true Islam” there and they speak
Arabic, the language of Quran”. This form of dominancy and respect based on
geography and language was never present in the Balkan-to-Bengal complex, but
we, moderns, have started bowing down to the state of Saudi Arabia as if the
Arabic speaking people know Islam better than everyone else.
Looking at Islam as
a Semitic religion is also produced by modern western scholars as Tomoko
Masuzava explains in the book “The Invention of World Religion”. He criticizing
Abraham Kuenen and Otto Pfleidere, who are of the view that Islam is an ethnic
religion of the Arabs and is a Semitic race. He further explains the modern
identity of Islam: “The image of Semitic Islam established by the end of the
nineteenth century is now eminently familiar to us, so much so that we can see
largely oblivious to the fact of its establishment, that there was a time when
Islam presented a rather different countenance to the eyes of Europe”
(Masuzawa, 2005: 180). These identities
would have never made sense to the people of pre-modern times, but thanks to
modernity, even Muslims today have adopted such identities. Nations like
Pakistan have been made in the name of “Islam” and have thus nationalized Islam
by making Pakistan a laboratory for Islam. In the short time after the formation
of Pakistan, a former president of Pakistan, Mr. Zia UlHaq, was even successful
in nationalizing God by forbidding saying the wordKhuda, a Persian word
for God, and replacing it by Allah, the Arabic and thus authentic word for God.
The Persian language used to be the richest language in terms of Islamic
literature and academia in the Balkans-to-Bengal complex, but the Persian
poetry of Hafiz, Bidil, Jami, etc. is disappearing from the modern Muslim’s
Con-Text because they are no more part of the Islamic education, except for in
a few places like Iran, Tajikistan and Afghanistan where Persian is taught as a
“national” language. Plurality of languages had widen the Islamic experience of
the pre-modern era, but the dominancy of English and eliminating languages like
Persian as part of the nationalization has ruptured modern Muslims’ connection
with their past and the Con-Text of the pre-modern time.
Lastly, modern Islam has been deeply affected by some of
the dominant hostile parts of Islam like Wahhabism which has totally destroyed
the connection of the Islamic experience with the Pre-Text and Con-Textual
parts of Islam. They have brutally de-structured the holy places of Muslims
like Shrines, Sufi centers, graveyards, etc. in the state of Saudi Arabia by
urbanizing the places for capital production. These modern Muslims have no
value for these places, but in the pre-modern era these holy places were a
metaphor for the truth. The pre-modern notion of Al-majazqantara'l-haqiqa,
"The symbol is the bridge leading towards Reality” holds absolutely no
importance for modern Muslims while reality cannot be reached without a symbol
(Ishara).
In
conclusion, modern Muslims have recalibrated Islam by emphasizing Text as the
only source of hermeneutical engagement and prioritizing it over Pre-Text and
Con-Text, and so ignoring the contradictions in Islam, nationalizing Islam by
making it a Semitic and prescriptive set of laws, and by aborting their
connections with the un-seen (ghaeb), and with signs, with metaphors and
with paradoxes. This does not imply that modern Islam is wrong, but that modern
Muslims have created a different identity for themselves based on these
epistemological and ontological shiftswhich creates a huge gap between Islam
today and how Islam used to be in the pre-modern era.
References
Ahmed, S. (2015). What Is Islam? The
Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton University Press.
Asad, T. (1986). The Idea of Anthropology of
Islam. Washington, DC: Center for Contemporary Arabic Studies, Georgetown
University Press.
Faruqi, S. (2004). A Stranger in the City:
The Poetics of Sabk-e Hindi. Annual of Urdu Studies vol. 19.
Iqbal. (1917)."Islam and
Mysticism," The New Era, Lucknow. pp. 250-51, as cited in
Speeches and Writings, pp. 154-6, p.
154.
Jalāl, -D. R., &Whinfield, E. H.
(1994). Masnaviima'navi: Teachings of Rumi: the spiritual couplets of
MaulańaJalálu-'D-Dín Muhammad I Rúmí. London: Octagon.
Masuzawa,
T. (2005). The invention of world religions, or, How European universalism
was preserved in the language of pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
