A 21st century munajat - Adnan Morshed

OCTOBER 17, 2012

O dear Allah, thank you for listening to me, you are the most merciful. Please, Allah, give Muslims strength to love you instead of fearing you. Please give them courage to follow your path not because of the rewards of heaven, but because you are the most loving creator and because piety should be understood as part of an enlightened existence based on tolerance, social justice, and individual responsibility. Actions driven by fear and the greed of heavenly rewards can’t be authentic devotion.

O Allah, there is something strange going on with the ways some of your followers are interpreting your words these days. You have created the human species differently from other species for a reason. Unlike animals, fish, insects and other organisms, humans can think beyond mere food-gathering and survival, and analyze complex ideas. O Allah, in the mysterious space between your words and the human head you put the human ability to interpret your words in many different ways.

So, Allah, how, then, the Islamic faith seems to be hijacked by the mindlessly literal and sternwahabi-style adherents, who are often inflexible, inadaptable, angry, intolerant, uneducated, and illogical? It is very confusing, Allah! Is it because the educated, liberal Muslims sat on the sideline helplessly and watched their faith being stripped of all possibilities of intellectual inquiry? Or, are they too lazy to speak out? Why were they largely quiet when hooligans and thugs killed a friendly ambassador in Libya and destroyed the age-old Buddhist temples in Chittagong in the name of Islam? Where is the Muslim uprising when the Talibans singled out the 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai from a school bus in Swat Valley in Pakistan and shot her in the head execution style because she dared to speak up for female education?                          

 Allah, isn’t the fundamental insight that humans are capable of “processing” knowledge one of the reasons why during the heyday of Islamic “golden age” Islamic scholars thrived on learning? O Allah, how did Islamic intellectuals make classical Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Persian, Sanskrit, and Chinese knowledge available not only to the Arabic-speaking world across the Islamic empire, but also to medieval Europe? The once-upon-a-time Islamic learning excellence seems too good to be true against the current context of violence-prone Islamic societies!

O Allah, Muslims were receptive to useful influences back then. When in the mid-8th century the Chinese paper-making technology arrived on the eastern frontier of the empire, books proliferated and libraries became central to the Islamic pursuit of knowledge. But, Allah, it must have been something more that accounted for Islam’s promotion of scientific learning. It must have been the primacy of a fundamental belief that faith and intellectual inquiry are not at loggerheads!

Allah, please bestow on your followers the insight that time changes, societies take new shapes, especially because of the advent of newer technologies. Such changes call for appropriate adjustments in the way people live their religious lives.

So, Allah, when Sam Bassiel, aka Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, posted his insulting film clip on YouTube, why did some angry Muslims not even think for a second that technology had democratized the world with easy access to information? Anybody anywhere could now post anything anytime on Facebook, YouTube, and other internet platforms, and reach billions of people in seconds. Allah, what’s the point of equating Nakoula’s individual pathology with an alleged Western imperial conspiracy to denigrate Islam?

O Allah, why don’t modern Islamic intellectuals show the path to be a non-violent and cerebral Muslim in the 21st century? Or, could they at least write a rational account as to why Nakoula’s vitriolic story can’t be justified as free speech, even in a Western sense? Allah, the all-seeing, you have shown us that there were precedents for Muslims to counter adversaries with reason and logic.

O Allah, I could think of one simple example. Even as late as 1655, the Ottoman geographer Katib Celebi wrote a book entitled Guide for the Perplexed on the History of the Greeks and the Romans and the Christians. Celebi’s stated reason for writing this book was to better inform Muslims about the ways the Western civilization had developed so rapidly since the late medieval period. From his perspective, Muslims must be better equipped to handle their own affairs in relation to the Christian world.

 Allah, another example is the little-known 14th-century manuscript on astronomy written by a timekeeper of the central Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, a pious man by the name of ibn al-Shatir. Some 20th century scholars argued that al-Shatir’s work had been so important that it might have even informed the Copernican Revolution. This revolution was about the displacement of the Earth from the centre of the universe, one of the foundational theories of the European Renaissance and subsequent scientific developments.

However, this example seems to debunk the linear history that Renaissance Europe was able to rediscover the Greco-Roman knowledge because medieval Islamic scholars saved the ancient texts by translating them into Arabic. But, as many now agree, Islamic intellectuals were hardly mere go-betweens. Al-Shatir, for instance, endeavoured in his manuscript to rectify the mathematical problems in the work of the Greek Astronomer Ptolemy in the second century A.D.

O Allah, where are the modern Celebis and al-Shatirs? Where is the contemporary ibn Khaldun? Why doesn’t Islam today present somebody of the stature of Averroes and Avicenna? Where are the new al-Kindis and al-Farabis? Sure, there are some modern Islamic scholars around the world today. But why is it that they are hardly the leaders of the faith? Why do they hide in academia or in timidity and let angry mullahs call all the shots? However, this longing for modern Islamic intellectuals should not be equated with a false desire for an Islamic revival. Modern Islamic intellectuals should advance the good cause of all humanity, rather than that of one faith or one people or one region. Allah, isn’t this how Islam could transcend its self-defeating, ultra-orthodox boundaries?

Allah, how long will Muslims hide behind the clichéd argument that it’s all about the logical politics of retribution? The non-believers insult Islam as part of a vast conspiracy, so it’s okay to attack them, kill them, and silence them. When will Muslims understand the essential fallacy of this moribund argument?

Allah, many Muslims today dismiss Samuel Huntington’s thesis of the “clash of civilization” by arguing that there is no single Islamic entity that is readily available for political theorization and that his arbitrary taxonomy simplifies the internal dynamics of the so-called “civilizations.” But the same argumentative Muslims can hardly explain why a sleazy film like Innocence of Muslims could provoke widespread violence across four continents — Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia! Allah, why this perverse unity? Does it not seem to reinforce, alas, Huntington’s flawed thesis? Don’t Muslims become the perpetrators of their own victimization?

O Allah, please provide Muslims with the strength to coexist peacefully with other faiths and live on this Earth with a shared sense of the common good. Once in a while, there would be a newInnocence of Muslims or an insulting post on Facebook. But, Allah, please teach Muslims how to be thick-skinned and how to ignore. Most of all, Allah, teach them how to reconcile with social changes that result from new and newer technologies.

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Adnan Morshed teaches at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.