Eyes wide shut in the Islamic world
by Tarek Fatah, Globe and Mail, Toronto
THE CRISIS IN ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION by Ali A. Allawi. Yale University Press, 320 pages, $33.50
LOST IN THE SACRED: Why the Muslim World Stood Still by Dan Diner. Princeton University press, 214 pages, $35.95
The Muslim world seems to be caught up in a crisis that shows no end in sight. If there is a single image that reflects this ongoing catastrophe, it is captured in the haunting eyes of a dying Neda Soltani, the 24-year-old woman shot dead on the streets of Tehran.
Since Bernard Lewis’s tome What Went Wrong, much has been written on this subject. Now, two books shed new light on the fall and decline of Muslim civilization. Both authors, Ali Allawi, an Iraqi politician-academic who teaches in the U.S., and Dan Diner, a Jewish professor of modern history in Germany, not only study the decline, but also look into the reasons why attempts to resuscitate the Ummah have failed.
Until the 15th century, bloodshed and oppression were not an exclusive domain of the Muslim world. The rest of humanity, from India to China, from Africa to Europe, lived through similar travails. However, after the Reformation, Renaissance and Enlightenment, Europe slowly started on the long road to democracy, freedom, liberty and secularism, with religion and race separated from state and politics, at least in spirit if not in practice.
However, in the Muslim world, time seems to have stood still for the past five centuries. The once glorious civilizations that flourished in Baghdad, Cordoba and Delhi now seem to me mere myths that sustain the ossified existence of a billion people, trapped in the past and seemingly unable to break loose from chains of conformity intertwined with superstition and a contempt for joy itself.
Diner’s Lost in the Sacred relies on the findings of the 2002 United Nations Arab Human Development Report (ADHR) that painted a very bleak picture of the Arab world. The fact that Arab sociologists, political scientists and scholars compiled the report gave it tremendous credibility. However, in Diner’s words, “the ADHR holds a mirror up to the Arab world. The image it shows is not appealing, and stomaching it is no easy task.” No wonder the document barely made waves in the Arab world, with one Canadian Arab professor suggesting the report was racist.
Diner compares ADHR with another document from the 19th century, a diary by an Egyptian scholar that did make waves and for a time gave hope that the Muslim world might finally open its arms and eyes to the revolution of ideas and innovations taking hold in Europe.
This was the diary compiled by an imam of Al-Azhar University, Rifaah al-Tantawi (1801-1873), who acted as a spiritual adviser to a group of Egyptian scholars studying in Paris. The scholars had been sent to Paris by the Egyptian pasha Mehmed Ali to study the modernization sweeping Europe.
El-Tantawi’s diary, asking for change in the ossified Muslim world, was printed by the Egyptian government and made compulsory reading for all civil servants.
Diner points out that both the 19th-century diary and the 21st-century ADHR report asked for massive change in the way the Muslim world, specially Arab society, conducts itself. The difference between then and now is that, while the 19th-century documents was widely distributed by the government and read by scholars and politicians in earnest as a recognition that something was rotten in the kingdom of Islam, its 21st-century counterpart was ridiculed as irrelevant by the Islamists and dictators of the Arab world.
Diner suggests that “two postures informing such discourse are at loggerheads. One claims that the lamentable state of the region is a result of the religion and the culture of Islam impeding modernity. The other blames Western domination – if it admits that there is a crisis at all.”
Lost in the Sacred offers a very refreshing perspective into the thinking of the Arab world as compared to the Muslim world. Diner notices a major flaw committed by the Arab intelligentsia in ignoring the non-Arab Islamic world. While the Arab world laments its lost power and leadership, which ended in the 13th century, and compares that period with it current pathetic condition, it acts “as if the many intervening centuries never existed,” he says.
He goes on to say that Arab scholars who wrote the scathing ADHR report ignored “the circumstances of the early decline of the Arab-Muslim realm, not to mention the rise of the subsequent, and no less Muslim, high culture of the Ottomans, which led to a major unleashing of power and cultural attainment in the Middle East and beyond …ignoring the civilizing achievements of the Ottomans’ four centuries of control of the Arab heartlands of Islam, culminates in the perception of Muslim rule as a form of foreign rule.”
Lost in the Sacred traces backwardness in the Muslim world to the resistance put forward by Islamic clergy to the printing press and how a gap of 200 years has led the Islamic lands to fall so far behind that the present rise of political Islam only ensures that free thinking and the rebellion against clerical authority that marked European awakening, can barely make inroads in the Arab world.
Diner contrasts Turkey with the Arab world and suggests that Turkey’s shedding of a theocratic caliphate and embracing of secularism may offer some reason for its lead over the oil-rich Arab world. In fact, he suggests that the blessing of oil is a curse. Where Arab countries fell down in failing to have a healthy proportion of their wealth coming from other sectors of the economy, “above all through labour.”
Diner’s short book dwells with a host of issues: comparing the Arab-Israel wars to the India-Pakistan conflicts; the impact of the fall of the Berlin Wall; the mother of all taboos – the separation of church and state, comparing Islam and Christianity. But, above all, this book is invaluable for anyone willing to go beyond the political rhetoric and understand the multiple factors that brought on the ossification of Arab society and, to a lesser degree, the Islamic world. This includes a unique perspective on the role played by the Arabic language itself in arresting development.
Compared with Diner’s analysis, Ali Allawi’s The Crisis of Islamic Civilization makes no bones about where the fault lies: squarely at the feet of colonialism and what he feels is the absence of spirituality among Muslims.
An Iraqi Shia exile based in Britain, and one who supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Allawi takes a broad swipe at secularism and suggests that the Islamic world lost out in the race with the West because it strayed from its own heritage and the sharia law that he feels triggered the golden age of Islam.
Like Diner, Allawi makes the mistake of suggesting that the crisis inside Islam is no more than 200 years old: “In one form or another, this crisis has been going on for well over two hundred years. It still has not worked itself out.”
The fact is, the crisis inside Islamdom goes back to the night the Prophet Mohammed died and his vision of the equality of all human beings was buried with him, triggering a level of instability that has not given Muslims a sense of commonality and community since Islam’s birth.
While Diner talks about “two postures” being at loggerheads inside the Muslim world, Allawi talks of “the two worlds of Islam … the outer world of political and social action and the inner world of spiritual and moral realization … entirely at odds with each other.” He refers to the first as “societies and nations,” while the second is “the self and the individual.”
Allawi concludes that the future of the Muslim world is grim unless it completely rejects the notion of separation between religion and state, eschews secularism and musters “the inner resources of their faith to fashion a civilizing outer presence.” It’s a clear call to finding the future in the past.
He yearns for the caliphate, but does not tell the reader that the concept of a single caliphate in Islam is a myth, not reality. He fails to recognize the almost non-stop wars of accession, power and domination over other Muslims that has been the hallmark of all Islamic societies since the seventh century.
Thus, the reader is left unaware that, just years after the death of Mohammed, the caliphate had split into two, with bloody civil wars taking place between the Prophet’s closest companions. At the height of Islamic civilization, in the 10th century, the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad was at war with the Fatimid caliph of Cairo, who was at war with the Umayyad caliph in Spain. Not to mention the fact that the Indian subcontinent never came under any caliph, while the largest Muslim society on earth, Indonesia, never hosted a caliph.
In the last paragraph of the book, Allawi outlines his manifesto for the future of Islam. He says that if Islam is just “another player in the market place for ideas and religions,” there will be no rebirth of an Islamic civilization. In fact, he predicts that unless Muslims buy into the Islamist doctrine of their religion being a complete way of life, “the much heralded Islamic ‘awakening’ of recent times will not be a prelude to the rebirth of an Islamic civilization; it will be another episode in its decline.”
Dan Diner and Ali Allawi offer opposing solutions to the Muslim malaise, but both are guilty of conflating Arab with Muslim. Thus both view Islam and Muslims from the Arab perspective. They do occasionally venture into non-Arab Islamdom – 80 per cent of the Muslim world – but in the end both are Arab-centric. Both books treat a Muslim from Bangladesh or Darfur as the periphery and the Arab at the centre of Islam.
As recent events in Iran demonstrate, the much-awaited renaissance or reformation of Islam is likely to come from the non-Arab world, in societies such as Pakistan, Turkey or Indonesia. I would argue the revolution for change in Islam has already begun. Unfortunately, Diner and Allawi are looking for it in the wrong place.
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Tarek Fatah is the founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, an organization advocating a separation between religion and state. He is author of Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, short-listed for the 2009 Donner Prize.