A teacher or a Trojan horse?

Tuesday June 29, 2010
A teacher or a Trojan horse?
IKIM VIEWS
By Md ASHAM AHMAD
Fellow, Centre for Syariah Law and Political Science

Many Muslim thinkers and leaders today, being educated in the West and severed from their religious intellectual tradition, do subscribe to the idea that all religions are the same, subject to development and changes.
EVERY way of life is based on a certain way of looking at life. The way one looks at life is one’s philosophy, and since there are many ways of looking at life, there are many philosophies.
So, what is called “western” philosophy is the western way of looking at life and why should a Muslim follow it when Islam has its own philosophy? In the first place why should he listen to the West? Western ideas are not necessarily correct, the best, or relevant to everybody.
What a rational person would do to an idea is to subject it to rigorous examination and criticism. Take for example the western notion of freedom and human rights. A proper thinker would want to know the reason why western people think the way they do about those issues. Philosophy is human reaction to the problems of life; it cannot be separated from history.
Western idea of freedom has to do with their experience with Christianity. Taking a cue from the history of Europe, a western thinker would not hesitate to conclude that neither freedom nor civil society is conceivable as long as there is religion. Experience tells him that individual freedom can only be guaranteed when the role of religion is curbed to the effect that it does not interfere in social and political life the way it used to be in the Middle Age.
Some writers even believe that human condition is more tolerable under the pagan religion while the scriptural, doctrinal and universal religion may only cause disaster to human society.
Such an attitude towards religion is peculiarly western and is relevant as far as the history of the western people is concerned. According to Will Durant, all notable western historians like Gibbon, Renan, Ferrero and E.L. White blame Christianity for the downfall of the Roman Empire.
The Renaissance saw a widening gap between the medieval structure of thought (based upon the doctrines of Christian theology) and a growing yearning for a free inquiry into the areas of humanity and nature, using methods and assumptions not directly derived from religion.
Humanism, which is so characteristic of the Renaissance and modern philosophy is in essence secular and signifies ultimately the independence of man from religion and his freedom on earth outside the laws and dictates of God and revelation. From humanism comes individualism which teaches that individual right is supreme, above the rights of God, even of society to a certain extent.
Modernity demands that Chris¬tianity be secularised – something which was very much feared of and consistently opposed by the early Christians. Religious belief can no longer be the basis of morality because it is antithetical to the spirit of enlightenment. They now believe that religion was only useful when human culture was still in the early stage of development because at that stage, they were not yet capable of building an exclusively rational moral system.
Is it possible to build a moral philosophy based purely on reason? Marx argues that religion is an obstacle to human freedom and to full moral responsibility. Freud believes that morality based on belief in the afterlife is impermanent because that belief will soon disappear with the advancement of reason. He also believes that religion, which among others, forgives sins is a catalyst to immorality.
The western people believe that their culture and civilisation is the most developed and refined, and they want others to think that their cultures and civilisations will also undergo the same historical development. Many Muslim thinkers and leaders today, being educated in the western way of thinking and at the same time severed from their religious intellectual tradition, do think like that. Out of sheer ignorance they subscribe to the idea that all religions are the same, subject to development and changes.
Professor Ali Mazrui, an ardent believer in historical relativism, thinks that Islam, like all other religions, also undergoes development and changes. Mazrui thinks that doctrinally Islam is a synthesis of three religions – Judaism, Christianity and the message of Muhammad. He holds that Islam as a civilisation began with a religious synthesis, and just as Islam had been receptive to Judaism and Christianity in the sphere of religious doctrine, so did it demonstrate receptivity to ancient Greece in the secular field.
To him Prophet Muhammad is just another prophet and he is equal to all other prophets.
The reason why Islam recognises so many prophets (nabiyyun) and so many messengers or apostles (rusul), according to Mazrui, is because Allah reveals himself in “instalments” across time and across space. To him Prophet Muhammad was the last messenger (rasul) only in the form of a human being, whereas time is “a continuing cosmic rasul”. So history, to him, is a continuing revelation of God, and expanding science a “non-carnate messenger of God”.
If God reveals Himself incrementally, and if history is a continuing revelation of God, he argues, should we not re-examine the message of Muhammad in the light of new instalments of divine revelation?
By new instalments of divine revelation, Mazrui means new findings in science, and based on that we should be able to reinterpret not only Qur’anic verses about astronomy, but also Islamic verses about what he calls “ancient punishments” (hudud). He argues that the expansion of human knowledge is not only about the stars, it is also about human beings themselves and their behaviour. Hence, he concludes that if we now know more about the causes of crime, we also know more about the limits of culpability and guilt.
If God has been teaching human beings in instalments about crime and punishment, and if there were no police, prisons, forensic science, or knowledge about DNA 14 centuries ago, the type of punishments needed had to be truly severe enough to be a deterrent. Hence the hudud. Since then, however, God has taught us more about crime, its causes, the methods of its investigation, the limits of guilt, and the much wider range of possible punishments. Therefore, he strongly believes that Muslims will be less and less convinced that the amputation of the hand is a suitable punishment for a thief under any circumstances.
He then directs his attack on the companions of the Prophet, whom he believes have been “idealised too much by the Muslims”. To him this is a grave error because the companions were not themselves prophets, and most of them were not even saints. They are simply ordinary human beings and the usual mixture of vices and virtues. Citing the assassination of Islam’s first four Caliphs and the civil war that broke out within little more than a decade after the Prophet’s death, Mazrui concludes that the behaviour of the companions “was often neither liberal nor moderate”.
Next comes his attack on the scholars of Islam (ulama’), which is directed at their “fallibility”. If the Prophet’s disciples could be fallible, he argues, so could the founders of the Schools of Law (madhahib). Not only that, he also points at the fact that for 14 centuries the Qur’an and the tradition of the Prophet have been interpreted almost exclusively by men, which makes Islamic Jurisprudence “male-centric”, making it guilty of subjectivism.
We have merely outlined here the gists of Mazrui’s thoughts about the religion of Islam, the Prophet, his companions, and the scholars. We shall describe his thoughts as plain ignorance disguised as scholarship. To accept them simply means to reject Islam and Islamic scholarship as a whole.
What Mazrui seeks to achieve is creating doubt about the truth, authenticity and finality of Islam, about the hierarchy of valid authority in the interpretation of Islam and its sources culminating in the authority of the Prophet, and reducing all to historical relativism and subjective interpretation.
For those who know and understand, and are not easily impressed with whatever that comes from the west or that is sanctioned by western institutions, Mazrui should be seen as a Trojan horse, not a teacher.