Tragedy of the Muslim mind

By Dr Muzaffar Iqbal

The public space in the Muslim world is dominated by those who have received education of a kind that has no rooting in the intellectual tradition of Islam. This is true, by and large, of the entire traditional lands of Islam. As a result of this education, most Muslims are uprooted from that enchanting intellectual realm which once used to produced men and women of the highest calibre. These giants of yesteryears are now foreign names to their modern-day heirs; no one knows what they wrote, how they integrated their faith with everything they did, and how they perceived the world from the prism of Divinely revealed religion which guided all aspects of their being.This severance is most visible in lands where the impact of colonisation has been the strongest: Pakistan, Egypt, the Central Asian republics, the Muslim lands of the Far East. But even in the relatively insulated exceptions (Iran and Turkey being the most obvious examples), modern education has done exactly what it is meant to do: create a bifurcation of the mind. Thus, this world and the next world become two separate entities in the Muslim mind. This division of the mind, which is, in fact, merely a consequence and not the cause, manifests itself at various levels of existence--from daily interactions with other human beings to financial transactions, and from beliefs and ideas to attitudes and outward appearances.This division has produced strange phenomena: apparently pious, observant believers are known to indulge in all kinds of fraudulent activities; even the religious leadership, whether political or social or both, is often corrupt to the core when it comes to matters which are deemed to be of this world. Thus divided against itself, the Muslim mind is now a living tragedy. A very large majority of educated Muslims live in an intellectual wasteland of confusion and anarchy. There is hardly any internal clarity on most basic aspects of life.The most fundamental cause of this tragedy is the alienation of the mental world from the Islamic tradition at various levels: from spiritual to intellectual, and from emotional to experiential. Even those who have some facility with the two primary sources of Islam--the Qur'an and the Sunnah--are not exempted from this internal division, although there are exceptions in this regard. This alienation, and the consequent internal split, has come into existence through a historical process that pushed into the background a living tradition of production and dissemination of knowledge. This tradition started to falter sometime in the sixteen century and by the time of European Scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, there were obvious signs of its disappearance. But this is in retrospect. A sort of false pride and arrogance continued to dominate the Muslim intellectual landscape well into the late eighteenth century when it finally woke up with the rude clamping of European military might at its door steps. The rest, as they say, is history.The tragedy that unfolded in the Muslim world during its colonization has no precedent in their history. The entire system of life and living, a centuries-old methodological way of existence, was wiped out by the colonizers. Institutions and rituals, rites of passage and cultural and social norms were destroyed; even the integral link with the language of the Qur'an was severed. As a result of a systematic and well-executed social engineering, the entire Muslim world was reduced to a level of subsistence dominated by a deep-seated inferiority complex.As a result, the educated classes now grow up with a living tragedy: these men and women know and firmly believe that Islam is the true religion, based on the two veritable sources, which remain uncorrupted, but their personal choice of being a Muslim remain tragically thinly grounded in any intellectual realm. What they know in the deepest recesses of their being, and what they believe from the core of their hearts, has no counterpart in the intellectual realm. Thus, their ideas and ideals, their thoughts and actions, their emotional attachments and their behaviour often remain firmly entrenched in the secular contemporary modernity, which is a complete anti-thesis of what Islam is all about.This tragedy is being lived everyday by millions of Muslims all over the world. It has created a hunger for Islam's intellectual tradition, which is based on the two primary sources. But most educated Muslim are not able to drink from this fountain because they simply do not know how to read Ibn Kathir or Hamid al-Ghazali, or Ibn Qayyam al-Jawzi, even if they have a translated text in their hands. The training they receive at educational institutions does not equip them with intellectual tools to read these texts and benefit from insights of these keen minds.What they have, as a result, is a mental confusion of the highest order. The remedy to this tragic state of existence is, of course, a thorough grounding in Islam's formidable intellectual tradition, but this cannot happen until and unless one unlearns what one has learned through one's education and experience, and this requires a courage very few find in themselves. Thus the tragedy continues to unfold in so many realms of the personal and collective lives of Muslims on a daily basis, all over the world.