The Making of Modern Islam

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.