16 August 2012
The Islamiqueness Of Today's Muslims (2)
By Abdulwarees Solanke
Since this is the season of Ramadan, the season of
reform and reflection for the Muslim Ummah, when all
mature, healthy muslims are expected to engage in the
rite of fasting, one of the five pillars of Islam,
permit my indulgence in raising critical questions on
how the Muslims world have fared in the in the recent
past, coinciding with the rise of colonization and how
their history has shaped events in the world. This is
because this is the era of serious contacts and
confrontation between the Orient and the Occident,
between the East and the West. It is the era of the
clash of the western Civilization and the Islamic
Civilization.
In most development literatures from the West, the
Islamic World in the past era was painted as crude and
barbaric, unstructured and uncultured. But in the
perception of the Muslims, the West, which was just
undergoing the industrial revolution then , was a
world that has abandoned guidance and lapsed into the
modern jahiliyyah, ignorance. While the west was
basking in the euphoria of its so called renaissance,
the age of learning, the Muslim East was luxuriating
in its own enlightenment (I call this Islamiqueness).
But what the Muslim East did not take into account was
that at the height of their own enlightenement, they
could becomes victims of plenty as they also begun to
slip into some slumber when their world reached
Utopia. I think this is arrogance on their part, and
stupidity too, to forget where they came from,
jahiliyyah, to favour from above. The Muslim world
then had attained what is being championed as
globalization today, in the Ottoman Empire or the
Caliphate that they established was more of a world
government where the order of the Sultan in
Constantinople could take effect in Cairo.
At the height of their power which had reached the
heart of Europe (Andalusia, Spain was actually an
Islamic centre of learning with the most advance
architecture), they became a threat to the West. But
they had also, in some lascivious indulgences, began
to show some cracks in the beautiful edifice
constructed with the instrumentality of the Islamic
order. As moral deterioration set in for the Ummah,
their spiritual might waned and their strength of
unity balked. It took the Western political, military
and diplomatic strategists the simple tactics of
playing brother against brother, divide and rule for
the imperial West to smash the caliphate and split the
ummah into pieces. At the end of the first world war,
the empire of islam had collapsed. That is why the
decision on the future of many Muslim lands were taken
at the Berlin Conference or through the Balfour
Declaration. The Berlin Conference was where the
colonial powers decided on how to share territories of
Africa and Asia predominantly muslim. The Balfour
declaration set the tone of future crisis of the
middle east over the state of palestine.
These insights are necessary for us to appreciate why
it is in the Muslim lands that most of the colonial
wars over territories were fought. They will also let
us appreciate why the most problematic region now is
the Muslim and Arab-dominated Maghreb and the
Islamically influenced countries of South and south
East Asia, from Algeria to the Philippines. They will
also let us appreciate why the policy of may European
nations is to curtail the influence of islam in their
socio-cultural milieu.
But at the height of muslim power and domination of
the World, there was pursuit of beneficial knowledge
and application of virtuous science, even if not as
advanced as what it is today. It brought out the
Islamiqueness of Muslims as cultured, not the
barbarians the western scholars made the world to
believe. Trade and Commerce flourished in the golden
era of Islamic orient, but not in what will compromise
the sanity of man. Unfortunately, it is the
Islamiqueness of that time that the so called
modernists first assaulted as backwardness and
unnecessary attachment to tradition. In the following
analysis, I will highlight some of the basic values of
Islam that confirm the Islamiqueness of the early
muslims and their immediate successors with a view to
identifying why today's muslims are falling short of
their leadership expectations.
The first principle of Islamiqueness on which the
early Muslim generation constructed their lives is
iiman, that is belief or faith in Allah and the
prophethood of Prophet Muhammad. The corollary to
adherence to this first pillar of Islam is the
acceptance of all the contents of faith: all the
prophets, the angels, the revealed books,
predestination and life after death/last day. The
extent to which they held these articles of faith also
defined the strength with which they upheld the other
four pillars of the Islamic faith i.e. the prescribed
daily prayers, as-salaat, the purifying payment of
zakaat or charity, the obligation of fasting in
Ramadan and the concern to perform the hajj, or the
pilgrimage to the house of Allah, in Makkah.
To be continued
AbdulWarees Solanke, Head, Voice of Nigeria
Training Centre (Transmitting Station, ikorodu),
Lagos, studied Mass Communication at the University of
Lagos and Public Policy at the Universiti Brunei
Darusslam and writes
viakorewarith@yahoo.com ,
korewarith@voiceofnigeria.org
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EsinIslam.Com
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