| Building A Strong Muslim Ummah---Speech given by Shah Abdul Hannan in Sheffield(edited version)in 1998 Building A Strong Muslim Ummah Shah Abdul Hannan Former Secretary, Govt. of Bangladesh [This talk was delivered by Shah Abdul Hannan, a former Secretary in the Ministry of Finance in Bangladesh. The title of the talk was “Building A Strong Muslim Ummah,” which was delivered on Tuesday, the 22nd September, 1998 at the Sheffield Islamic Centre in front of the local Sheffield community and International students.] My topic today is “Building A Strong Muslim Ummah.” First, I will bring a few things to the attention of the Muslim community in the UK in general and the community in Sheffield in particular on the basis of what I have learnt from my friends, brothers, and sisters. I think the Muslim community in the various areas in the United Kingdom should focus on building a very strong community. First, the Muslim community should be built not on the basis of ethnicity, but on the basis of Islamic identity. There could be ethnic enclaves that would work in close connection with their countries of origin, and this is okay. However, additionally, an Islamic organization should exist in every part of the UK, such as “Sheffield Islamic Organization” or “Sheffield Islamic Community,” and this should hold true not only for Sheffield, but for all other regions in the UK as well. If this is not possible, then at least, a federation of existing Muslim organizations should be formed, centered solely on the Islamic cause. This federation would pursue the general, social, economic, political, and particularly the ideological objective of Islam. One means of doing this could be to spread an authentic knowledge of Islam based on the Qur’an, the Sunnah or Hadith, and writings of the prominent Islamic scholars of the past and the present, including commentaries on the Qur’an and Hadith or Sunnah. Those who do not read sufficiently may not be able to derive the best possible guidance from the Qur’an in a comprehensive manner; having access to authentic writings of the key scholars of Islam would greatly benefit such people. Finally, I would suggest to the UK Muslim community what I suggested during my visit to the United States in connection with state business. I advised that Muslims in America should build more Islamic Schools. Muslims in the United States have launched about 400 high schools where they are teaching, first of all, the normative curricula of that country plus Arabic plus Islamic studies, and wherever possible, they are trying to impart education in a gender segregated environment. Wherever possible, they are urging both boys and girls to observe Islamic norms of dress and decorum. From an Islamic perspective, I believe that the survival and progress of the Muslim community here in the UK depends on your building schools along these lines. I firmly believe that the future of Muslim communities in Europe, Canada, the United States, and Australia depends, first, on the ability of these groups to build strong communities on the basis of Islam and, second, on the establishment of schools. From preliminary observations, let me now shift to the core of my talk. I submit that the state of the Muslim Ummah is not very healthy. I will not go into great detail since I am certain you are quite well aware of these matters. Let me still say that there is a profound ideological ignorance within the Muslim community about Islam. There is considerable bid’a (innovation unacceptable in Shariah) in the Muslim community, innovations that are not acceptable and have been judged to be innovations (in the technical term of Fiqh). There is also much shirk in the Muslim world today. I can not say how things stand exactly in the UK. Materially speaking, there is much illiteracy, much poverty and backwardness in most Muslim societies. Our economy is in bad shape by and large. Our defense is very weak. What can we do to build a strong Ummah given our dismal material and ideological condition today? Clearly, the need to build our education, economy, and defense cannot be overemphasized. We must attend to these arenas first and then to the ideological sphere. As you all know, education in the majority of Muslim societies today is not fulfilling the requirements of Islamic education. In my case, for instance, I can state confidently that between my school days and postgraduation from Dhaka University, Bangladesh, I was taught a negligible number of Qur’anic verses. I was not taught the life of the Prophet (sm), who is the key role model for us. A key objective of Muslims today should be to ultimately build a strong Islamic education system in each independent Muslim country. This may take time but we must strive to establish an education system which will meet both our material needs and our ideological need to live as good human beings and as strong Muslims. The education system in most countries today is not patterned along these lines. As long as the education system does not fulfil these basic needs, our duty is to study Islam thoroughly in private. I will not talk about the issue of building the economy today. Obviously, much needs to be done in this regard as well. Let me only indicate that all Muslim governments, all Muslim politicians, and all Muslim intellectuals must work together to enhance the economic condition of the Muslim world. I will return to this issue later. We must build our defense also. If we consider the last ayats of Suratul Imran we find that find Allah has commanded us to guard our borders and to keep horses ready. In other words, Islam demands that Muslims be constantly prepared to defend their borders, and to defend them well. The idea of de-nuclearisation is a very good and humane one, but only when it is applied to all countries, not only the Muslims or only those opposed to certain spheres of hegemony. Likewise, disarmament should be for all countries and groups. It is not just to pressure some to disarm themselves while others retain arms. The material aspect of building the Ummah is not the focus of my talk today. My key concern is the fact that the Ummah is under serious attack today. As you know, major scholars today are predicting a clash of civilizations. A major American Jewish scholar, Sameul Huntington, has written about a civilizational conflict, suggesting that Islam poses the next threat to the Western civilisation. We do not accept that Western civilisation is the last word; I will come back to this. Not only Huntington, Fukuyama in his book _The end of history_ states that history has reached its final stage. He proposes that secular democracy and capitalism constitute the final historical achievement of the human race and that nothing superior would emerge. This is the end of history. We, however, cannot accept this ethnocentric claim that secularism is the destiny of human civlilzation. The greatest problem of human civilisation is that human beings have departed from the guidance of Allah (SWT). I suggest this is the reason behind the profound immoralities we see in the world today. Most conflicts today are grounded in national interests, in the projects of some nations to wield hegemony over other nations. I agree that some conflicts are grounded in religion but these fewer conflicts can be contained if we make a concerted effort towards that end. We cannot forsake morality and surrender to immorality in the name of secularism or the forgetting of the guidance of Allah (SWT). Indeed, as I just stated, much of contemporary evil is rooted in our divergence from the guidance of Allah (SWT). I will revisit this issue in the course of my lecture. The Challenge of the West The challenge of the West to the Muslim Ummah is political, cultural, and economic, but mostly and fundamentally, intellectual. The nature of the Western political challenge to the Ummah is self evident today and does not require elaboration. What does the West want? The West wants Muslim countries to obey the dictates of the West. It is not acceptable to us. When a Muslim country was about to conduct an experiment by blasting a bomb, it got a phone call from the head of the most powerful state in the world today ordering the Muslim country not to go through with the explosion. There is unbound interference in the affairs of the Muslim states today. The West wants Muslim countries to follow Western dictates but we know that Western states only issue dictates in keeping with their own national interests, often to the detriment of the national interests of Muslims. Certainly, Muslims should pay heed to just concerns articulated by others, but the politically motivated clarion calls of the West are not acceptable. The West wants us to surrender to their culture, but what can Western culture really offer to the world today? It is a culture largely oriented around an obsession with and exploitation of the human body, particularly the female body. Western television, films, songs, literature, and art today reflect an unhealthy preoccupation with bodily desires, sexual matters, and violence. Children in Western schools are shooting each other in imitation of the violence they are exposed to through television and films. Western societies are awash with problems of alcoholism, drug abuse, obesity, eating disorders, emotional illnesses, sexually transmitted diseases, and sexual abuse. Many young women in the West today suffer from eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. Anorexics starve themselves to death while bulimics force themselves to vomit after having eaten in order to lose weight or remain thin so that they may look good and desirable in snug fitted clothing; Western clothing for women have steadily shrunken over time and are increasingly designed to reveal a woman’s bodily curves. Western women and even men are increasingly opting for cosmetic surgery to improve their bodily appearances and to feel good about themselves. Western culture is addicted to beauty and youth today, both of which are transient and do not endure for long, and yet the self-esteem of a Western individual is increasingly tied to both. Western children grow up in this environment, embodying these cultural sensibilities and desires thereby reproducing the cycle of unhappiness, longing, low self-esteem, and preoccupation with external appearance and sexual desirability. Such is the “way of life” the West is imprisoned in today and wants us to adopt. The Western family continues to collapse. Soaring divorce rates mean a growing number of children in the West today are from broken homes and suffer from a wide array of emotional and social problems. An increasing number of children are brought up by single parents and are likely to suffer abuse and neglect since it is very difficult for a single person to bring up a child on her/his own. A child is meant to have the attention of both its father and mother. In addition to the children, another group that is particularly victimized by the materialist and capitalist West today is the elderly. Since children grow up neglected by their parents and they grow up in a materialist culture with an exclusive focus on the material and bodily needs of young individuals, these children tend to neglect their parents in their old age and many elderly individuals are left to spend their last days within the impersonal and uncaring confines of nursing homes. Even those children who are not from broken homes usually enjoy the caring of the mother alone since the father is too busy pursuing his work and career all day long. The West is destroying the institution of marriage and of the family, institutions which ensure that human couples support each other emotionally and physically within a well defined system of mutual rights and obligations and that human beings are raised in a loving environment under the nurturing guidance of a mother and father. In response to these social developments and to the sense of meaninglessness, emptiness, and despair these phenomena engender, extreme right-wing Christian movements and various so called “new age” movements are on the rise in the West today. The West is now trying to export its chaotic, fragmenting, and inhumane, postmodern social traditions to Muslim societies. As for the economic goal of the West, it is primarily economic imperialism. Western countries wants Muslim countries to be second graders, 3rd graders, and 4th graders. They ultimately want us to be their markets. Their institutions are all geared to furthering the interests of the major Western powers. I know this very well, for I have dealt with these financial institutions closely. They serve mostly the purposes of the West and not the purpose of humanity as a whole. In the end, however, the basic challenge the West poses to the Muslim Ummah today is intellectual. The West is telling us that the idea of an Islamic state is neither beneficial nor feasible. They suggest that Islam is not compatible with human rights and women’s rights. I must say with great sorrow that the actions of some Muslims and indigenous cultural practices in some Muslim countries do indeed violate human and women’s rights. But one must not confuse the actions of some Muslims or indigenous traditions not rooted in Islam with the tenets of Islam or with Islamic practices. Regrettably, every tradition or activity or policy in such a Muslim society or Muslim majority country is not rooted in Islam or even in harmony with Islam; various practices in these societies and cultures date back from pre-Islamic times. It is owing to the tolerant nature of Islam that Islam has not tried to forcibly uproot indigenous cultural traditions as long as these do not clash with basic Islamic principles directly. However, the time has come for Muslims to take a firmer stance against local cultural traditions that oppose the Islamic spirit of human and women’s rights. Thus, for instance, the practice of dowry among South Asian Muslim communities and the practice of female genital mutilation among North African Muslim communities must be dealt with sternly. Those Muslims who do not abide by Islamic injunctions in connection with human and women’s rights are not only committing grave injustices to their own souls and to their victims but they are tarnishing the image of Islam and Muslims as a whole in the world today, thereby facilitating the goals of our adversaries. Coming to the issues of human rights and women rights, I would explain that these are very much integral to Islam. I will quote three basic documents in support of Islamic notions of human rights and women rights. The constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran was drafted by the Ulama. The constitution of the Islamic republic of Pakistan is also accepted by the Ulama even though it was not drafted by them. I offer these two documents in combination with the writings of contemporary Islamic thinkers as evidence for the case in point. I could not possibly name all these Islamic scholars and thinkers, but among these individuals are the likes of Muhammad Asad, Abul ala Maududi, Hasan Turabi and others. I would say that these documents, which are drafted by the Ulama or accepted by the Ulama, indicate clearly that Islam affirms and upholds basic human rights. The Islamic constitution of Pakistan has a chapter devoted exclusively to the issue of Fundamental Rights. As a university teacher of comparative political thought, I ask my students to go through various national constitutions notably the Iranian constitution, the Pakistan constitution, the Bangladesh constitution, and the American constitution. I explain to them the differences between western democratic models and Islamic democratic models. A perusal of works by political scientists, major Alims, and major Islamic politicians and scholars and the two other basic documents, which are either drafted by the Ulama or accepted by the Ulama, clearly indicates that Human rights are respected and women rights are guaranteed in Islam. So, we should not listen to random voices at the expense of losing the consensus that scholars and students of Islam have attained following centuries of discussions and reflections. Another document worth mentioning here is the OIC declaration of Human Rights, which was approved by the OIC Fiqh Academy. Let us now consider the causes of Muslim decline. As you all know, we have been at the forefront of the expansion of knowledge. It is the Muslims who have been the principal actors in the field of knowledge from the 7th through the 10th centuries. In the course of the 11th, 12th, 13th century, Muslims abandoned the pursuit of knowledge. Why and how did this come about? While an exploration of this area is beyond the scope of this discussion, let me just say that Muslims simply neglected knowledge and one of the reasons for this was a growing emphasis on Taqlid or a blind following of tradition. Muslims began to follow the thoughts and recommendations of older scholars and neglected the cultivation of Ijtihad. As a small example of the degree to which Muslims began to cling to Taqlid blindly, let me mention the Fiqh book called Fatwah-e-Alamgiri, which was prepared by 300 Alims at the time of the Mughal Emperor, Aurangjeb in India. The book discusses innumerable issues and you will be surprised to learn that not a single issue was buttressed by reference to a single verse of the Qur’an or by a single Hadith but by references to some old books such as Tatarkhania or Shami or Bharurraik or Muhit. I personally was shocked and extremely dismayed upon going through the vlumes of Fatwah-e-Alamgiri. It is this degree of taqlid that has been responsible for Muslim decline over the ages. In such a situation, how do we meet the challenges of the West on various fronts-- political, cultural, economic and intellectual? As I have said earlier, we have to build our economies and education but above all we must face the intellectual challenge of the West. We have to explain the reasons behind specific Islamic injunctions. Just as Ilmul Kalam was once developed to explain the roots of our faith and our Akaid (beliefs), similarly, we must put together new subjects and new responses to the intellectual challenge posed by the West today. I think the most important thing is to build up individuals. If we want to construct a strong Islamic Ummah, we must construct Islam-oriented individuals and produce a large number of scholars in every major field. I say this since in the end, it is individuals who run political, social, educational, and economic systems. How do we go about this serious business of training individuals? I suggest that in addition to the cultivation of Iman, Akhlaq (character), and obligatory Islamic practices, individuals must dedicate themselves to the sole task of study. Thus my prescription for creating the conditions for the building of a strong Muslim Ummah is that Muslim individuals must read, read, and read more. Nobody can be an Islamic scholar without having read 1000 Islamic books in addition to another 500/600 books of general interest. A first class Islamic worker cannot be prepared unless he has studied 200 Islamic books in addition to another 200-300-400-500 books on general matters. I declare that the building up of the Ummah ultimately would depend on the one hand on building a strong economy, a strong defence, good education, good infrastructure and so on. On the other hand, in order to meet the challenge of the West fruitfully, we must construct new individuals equipped with certain kinds of knowledge and vast amounts of it, because, ultimately, it is individuals who administer states and societies. Now, what should we read? I think we should read as many Tafsirs of the Quran as possible, as many commentaries of the Hadith as possible, and we should be well versed in Usul al Fiqh. Those who are not familiar with Usul al Fiqh, do not understand how to classify Hadith. They do not know how to infer and derive laws from the Quran and Sunnah. They would not have heard of Ibartunnas, Isaratunnas, Dalatunnas, and Iktedaannas. These are the methods of derivation of the rules from the Qur_an and Sunnah. A firm foundation in Usul al Fiqh is needed for anybody who wants to be a scholar of Islam and fight for Islam and work for Islam seriously. If you want to be a general worker of Islam, this is not especially difficult, but if you want to be serious worker, I can recommend a book to all of you in this regard. It is Dr. Hashim Kamali’s Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence, published by Islamic Texts Society, Cambridge. This book is based on all the major works in Arabic by the Ulama of Usul. I will make a few more points. One is, apart from studies, we must make a concerted effort to adopt the prophetic character. People say it is not possible to follow the Prophet fully. I do not agree. If it were not possible for an ordinary human being to follow the Prophet (sm), then Allah would not have said that the life of the Prophet is a model for us or the Prophet (sm) would not have said that his conduct is a Sunnah for all of us and that he is a guidance for all of us, the embodiment of the Quran itself. I personally believe that it is imperative that a Muslim strives to emulate the Prophet (sm). We should behave with our wives as the Prophet (sm) behaved with Ayesha (ra). It is possible to behave with our assistants/associates as Prophet (sm) behaved with Zaid (ra). I additionally submit that if we want to reconstruct a strong Ummah, we must not neglect our women. They are as able to strive for Islam as a man and they are as essential to the renewal of Islam as are men. Is say this on the basis of an ayat in the Qur_an, which was revealed in the 9th of Hijra in the last part of the Prophet’s career, says so. It is in Surattut Tawba. The Ayat is like this _Wa al muminuna ( Quran:9:71). This indicates that a man and a woman are friend to each other, protector to each other, helper to each other. What do they do? The duties common to a mumin man and woman are to enjoin good and forbid evil, establish Salah, establish Zakat, and follow Allah and His Prophet. This ayat clearly declares that the potentials of Muslim men and women are alike. We must not forget that the souls of Muslim men and women are the same in every way. While the physiological structure of a man is somewhat different from that of a woman and while there are a few differences between the key responsibilities assigned to each, they are the same on the most fundamental level, that of the soul or the spirit, which inhabits, infuses, and enlivens the body. Allah (SWT) has not said anywhere that the soul of a man is different from that of a woman. In other words, a man and a woman are essentially the same creature. Second, despite certain physical differences, Allah says, the physiology of both men and women are really most excellent. Allah says in the Quran in Suratu Tiin, _Lakad Khalanal Insana ..., that is, men women have the most excellent structure. No majaji (allegorical) interpretation is possible here. Finally we belong to the same family, the family of Adam and Hawa as has been stated in Suratun Nisa. As Muslims, we must therefore give Muslim women the opportunity to realize their potential to the fullest. In conclusion, let me simply reiterate that we face major challenges in the fields of politics, economy, culture, and mostly in the intellectual field. We must prepare and train individuals who in turn will revitalize Muslim societies, build Muslim nations, schools, universities, disciplines, and Muslim economies. Thank you so much for having me here and for bearing with me. Assalamau ‘alaikum | |