June 18, 2009
Whither Indian Muslims – Part Two
Section: WRITINGS | 154 reads
The Lesson that Muslims Forgot
In the meantime, the Muslims slowly but surely forgot the lessons of Kitab and Hikmah that Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, taught them. They confused and jumbled up the theory and they diluted and mixed up the practice. And in most cases they were left with only the empty shell of the pure and perfect teachings of Islam, chief among them character (Tazkiyah) and education (Ta’aleem) that he had left them with when he said goodbye to them 1400 ago. In most cases, the meat and substance of those teachings were gone.
As a result, Muslims ended up being among the least educated people of the world. They no longer knew either theory or practice of this world or how to practice Islam in this world. They ended up as a shadow of their past self and as a caricature of most things Muslim and Islamic.
Muslims thus became mostly a people who had neither knowledge nor character. For all practical purposes, they became social, political, cultural and educational zombies.
Muslim debates and discussions became increasingly abstruse and removed from reality. Instead of being practical and pragmatic, they became pointless theological disputations and hairsplitting. And Muslim lives and societies became pale and powerless shadows of their earlier selves, unable to control their own destiny or impact and shape the destiny of the world.
Their time and energies were spent arguing endlessly about what kind of knowledge was Islamic and what kind was not and who were really good Muslims and who were not. Many Muslims became heavily preoccupied with subjects such as ‘Aqeeda. And ‘Amal (read it character in its broadest sense) to many of them became more of the same: more namaz; more roza; and more dhikr.
And of course purer and more ‘Aqeedah.
In the hands of these super-purists, Islamic ‘Aqeedah or core creed that Allah and his Rasul, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, had summed up in no more than seven words – Laa Ilaaha Illaa Allah, Muhammad Rasul Allah – now became the mother of all tomes and treatises, consuming everyone’s time and sucking up all Muslim energy and creativity.
Some of those whom Allah had blessed with wealth and resources thought Islam meant going to Hajj over and over and over again as if Baitullah meant, may God Almighty forgive me for uttering such nonsense, Ma’adallah, that it was the place where God lived.
They forgot that Hajj was a Fareedah – a requirement – only once in their life. Thereafter it was extra stuff that you do when you have nothing more important or urgent to do in your life such as, for example, the following:
Taking the Qur’an to every home and heart that needs it – and which one does not.
Feeding every mouth that was hungry.
Clothing every body that was naked.
Protecting every orphan.
Ensuring honorable remarriage options and opportunities to every widow.
Making sure every child – male as well as female – received the best education possible.
Stopping every oppressor.
Guaranteeing the rights of every oppressed.
Ensuring peace and security to every human being that was fearful.
Protecting every animal from abuse.
Saving every forest from wanton destruction.
Keeping every body of water safe from pollution.
Safeguarding every natural resource from waste or abuse.
Keeping every people and region of the world safe from domination and exploitation by others.
Keeping earth and its environment safe from pollution.
Reshaping a dysfunctional and archaic educational system.
Working to usher in more freedoms to their own people.
Doing something, anything, to relieve the chokehold of feudal structures from the throats of Muslims.
Working to break the stranglehold of usury, interest and Riba on the lives of those around them.
Making arrangements to provide interest-free loans to the people in their communities and neghborhoods – both Muslim and non-Muslim.
Trying to replace the tyrannies in their societies with political structures and institutions that were more open, responsive and accountable to “The People.”
Working tirelessly to replace the various dictatorships in their midst by individuals and power arrangements that were freely elected by a well-informed citizenry.
You can add your own list of priority items here in the light of the Qur’an and Hadith – And Sunnah of Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam.
And common sense, for, a great deal of Islam is common sense.
Supererogatory Refuge of the Pseudo Super-Pious
These are all compulsory things in the sense that they are all required of all Muslims. They are thus moral, social and “religious” obligations. And they are political and survival and success imperatives in any society.
But these pseudo super-pious Muslims in search of a purer ‘Aqeedah and a clearer and more direct shot at Jannat keep boosting up their credentials with multiple extra-Hajj and other supererogatory rituals, while forgetting the obligations they have toward the widows, the hungry, the needy, the poor and the orphans in their midst.
And they forget those groaning under the burden of crushing and impossible debts right before their eyes. They forget that helping people to pay off their legitimate debts is an Islamic obligation.
They ignore the most pressing social and political issues in their societies. They develop myopia about the dictatorial, tyrannical and corrupt governments and power structures that dominate their lands.
They rarely if ever stop to shed a tear or move a muscle about reshaping the shamefully derelict educational systems that prevail among them.
They see Riba- or interest-based economies and dealings engulf them from every side and do little to change that state of affairs. They see the poor and the hungry and the sick claw at their clothes constantly and brush them aside and keep on walking.
In a place like India they see a curse like Dowry dominate Muslim social life and blight the marriages of young Muslim maids and the lives of their hapless parents, and they pretend as if they were not even aware of it.
They see near-total illiteracy define the culture of places like Afghanistan, and they do not shed a tear. Nor do they lift a finger to change that situation. In places like Pakistan they see and live in the middle of a gaping social, educational and cultural black hole where a dynamic, most up-to-date and creative educational system should have been, and it does not bother them.
They see oppressive feudal social and agrarian structures dominate places like Pakistan, reducing hundreds of millions of Muslim men, women and children to generational serfdom and slavery in modern age and sowing the seeds of corruption everywhere, and they do not say or do anything about it.
They see Muslim resources plundered and squandered by Muslim rulers and their non-Muslim cronies, masters and mentors and they pretend it was not happening. They seem to hold the view that it was not their business.
Their oil – Muslim oil – ran and powered the world and acted as the life-blood of modern civilization for decades. Yet that oil sold for $2 a barrel for the longest time. The money from that oil was used to support a life of personal, moral and social decadence on the widest scale by those in power in their societies.
And to service and sustain the faltering economies of the lands and societies that controlled and protected them.
That money was used to turn their lands into slave-holding pens and concentration-style labor camps of the like the world had never seen in centuries using mostly cheap labor from impoverished Muslim lands, while “expatriates” with second- and third-rate qualifications and dubious pasts and questionable motives and intentions lived like lords and princes in their midst as supervisors, guests and visitors.
They see Muslim land after Muslim land lapse in the grips of the worst political and socio-cultural tyranny and dictatorship in centuries and they do not even complain or protest about it. Not even in private. Not even, it would appear, to their God. They simply go about their lives as if it was all business as usual.
To many of these super-Muslims it was all about so-called ‘Aqeedah and ‘Amal and it had nothing to do with common sense or reality or rationality or everyday practicality, things that constitute the very essence of Islam in the Qur’an and in the life of the most blessed Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam.
These pseudo super-pious are thus quite comfortable, in fact quite smug, in their imagined supererogatory refuge. They seek refuge in what they consider to be the “religion” of Islam from the very Deen of Islam that Allah sent into this world to help human beings run and manage the affairs of this world in the best possible manner.
Go West, My Dear Muslim!
This is how mostly many of the Muslims were. And continue to be. They cloaked themselves in garbs of pseudo super-piety and turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the hard and pressing demands of reality that were clamoring around them everywhere.
And then the winds shifted.
And, all of a sudden, and out of nowhere as they say, Allah opened up the West for them. And Muslims made a beeline for Europe and America. Of those who went westward, the poor and less-educated ones among them who found their way into Europe tried to hold on to their old mix of whatever little Islam they knew and all the cultural accretions they had collected over decades and centuries.
The more educated and better-off ones went to America. There they saw a land of plenty and freedom. And many of them simply ran amuck. Now all of a sudden, many of them became what some people in India would call chhoon-choon ka murabbah, neither fully “Old Country” nor fully “American,” but a strange mix of both.
Those who muscled their way to positions of leadership among them became a law unto themselves. It was a case of the Wild Islamic West. Some of them even worked hard to build Islam from scratch, and did a pretty good job with it in many ways – at least in the initial stages.
But they had a fatal flaw.
Their focus was not really America – and the West in general – but “Back Home,” whatever that meant and wherever it was. Thus, the Egyptians among them lived in America but worked to “establish” Islam in Egypt, while those from Pakistan had the same orientation with regard to Pakistan.
The others did the same with their face pointing toward the “Qiblah” of their own respective “motherlands,” even though in Islam land is not your mother, no matter how much you may love it. So, pretty much it was all about me and my native land – Pakistan, Egypt and all else. As for America – and the West in general – it was a case of May-the-Devil-Take-the-Hindmost, or of an Islamic version thereof, whatever it may be.
These folks – many of them highly educated and sophisticated individuals and many of them nice, wonderful, good and extremely talented people – forgot that the nature of this Deen was peripatetism: a restless moving about from place to place. Call it Hijrat if you will.
Hijrat Defines the Soul of This Deen
Hijrat – migration – always defined the soul of this Deen from the time of Noah and Abraham to the time of Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam.
Nooh, Alaihissalaam, was shipped off in an ark to go and found an Islamic colony and civilization in a new and more receptive place. Ibrahim, Alaihisalaam, was made to march back and forth the few miles – or was it a bit more than that, maybe a few thousand – that separated the land of Sham – Syria and Palestine – from the land of Hijaz – Arabia – as if he was taking a stroll down the street.
Musa, Alaihissalaam, was made to wander the four corners of the desert from Egypt to Palestine for years and years before he and his people were allowed to enter the Al-Ardal Muqaddasah on which their name was already written.
And the glorious Deen of Islam under the pristine, culminating and final leadership of Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, did not take root in its “birthplace” or “native” soil of Makkah but in the “foreign” land of Madinah where it was transplanted in its late adolescence. Muslims, under the leadership of Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, left Makkah and never looked back.
The name of the game in the Deen of Islam whether during the times of Nooh, Ibrahim or Musa, Alaihisalaam, or during the time of Sayyidina Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, is Hijrat, which means immigration. All right, call it emigration, with an “e” if you want to make bones about it.
But most certainly “flight” it was not, as the colonialist translators make it out to be.
He became invisible to his would-be assassins as he walked right past them. If he wanted to, he could have made them disappear instead, don’t you think? So, he was not “fleeing,” as your pseudo history books told you, he was walking out in full majesty and glory, right before their eyes. Except that their eyes had been rendered blind so they would not seem him go by.
Musa, Alaihissalam, was not “fleeing” from the forces of Pharaoh. He was laying a trap for them which neither he nor Pharaoh saw and which he himself did not realize. It was part of a meticulous plan to lure Pharaoh to his final reckoning.
What is the matter with you people? Can’t you see? Or think? Islam is for thinking people you know. Can’t you see that seas don’t part for those “fleeing” in panic and fear from their enemies?
Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, was not “fleeing” from the would-be assassins that surrounded his house in Makkah with naked swords. Those who “flee” in fear and confusion, do not pause to pick up a fistful of dust from under their feet and throw it toward the ring of the killer contingent in front of them making it temporarily blind and thus completely neutralizing it.
Hills, caves and rocks do not greet “fleeing” people and offer them their hospitality. Sand dunes do not swallow up the legs of enemy horses when they get too close. Barren goats do not fill their vessels with fresh milk.
What world do we live in, people?
This was no mad dash to escape the enemy. This was no “flight.” This was a most majestic and glorious Hijrat to save the world, including those and the children of those who had turned up to kill him. Migration; immigration; emigration; whatever you prefer. I am not unaware of the distinctions in meaning and connotations, it is just that at this time and in this context they do not really seem to matter.
Here they all mean one simple thing: what was taking place was a carefully and minutely choreographed transplanting of the sapling of Islam in our age and time – starting in the middle of the 7th Century – from its place of birth in Makkah to its new home in Madinah, where it will grow to its fullest height and might, and from where it will cast its shadow of universal love and mercy, justice and equality, freedom and liberty, all around the world – for all people of the world.
That is what was happening.
And that is the nature of this Deen then and now and forever. It is called Hijarat. It is free from a worldly type of Shirk of divided loyalties. It is total focus on the new place and people of adoption. It is complete integration into the local scene and culture, except where they are in direct and fundamental conflict with the core teachings of the Deen itself.
Hijrat is thus inclusive and integrative. It is forward looking and not backward looking. Most of all, Hijrat has its roots in the most basic principle of human equality regardless of race, religion or gender. It is an engine for human liberation and uplift everywhere. It is not a tool for the conquest, domination and exploitation of the weaker sections of humanity anywhere.
Next Article: Whither Indian Muslims – Third and Last Part
Previous Article: Whither Indian Muslims – Part One
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