ISLAM

Islam: a bridge-builder

Graham E Fuller

What if Islam had never existed? To some, it’s a comforting thought: No clash of civilizations, no holy wars, no terrorists. Would Christianity have taken over the world? Would the Middle East be a peaceful beacon of democracy? Would 9/11 have happened? In fact, remove Islam from the path of history, and the world ends up exactly where it is today.

Imagine, if you will, a world without Islam-admittedly an almost inconceivable state of affairs given its charged centrality in our daily news headlines. Islam seems to lie behind a broad range of international disorders: suicide attacks, car bombings, military occupations, resistance struggles, riots, fatwas, jihads, guerrilla warfare, threatening videos, and 9/11 itself.

Why are these things taking place? “Islam” seems to offer an instant and uncomplicated analytical touchstone, enabling us to make sense of today’s convulsive world. Indeed, for some neoconservatives, “Islamofascism” is now our sworn foe in a looming “World War III.”

But indulge me for a moment. What if there were no such thing as Islam? What if there had never been a Prophet Mohammed, no saga of the spread of Islam across vast parts of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa?

True sources

Given our intense current focus on terrorism, war, and rampant anti-Americanism-some of the most emotional international issues of the day-it’s vital to understand the true sources of these crises. Is Islam, in fact, the source of the problem, or does it tend to lie with other less obvious and deeper factors? For the sake of argument, in an act of historical imagination, picture a Middle East in which Islam had never appeared.

Would we then be spared many of the current challenges before us? Would the Middle East be more peaceful? How different might the character of East-West relations be? Without Islam, surely the international order would present a very different picture than it does today. Or would it?

If not Islam, then what?

From the earliest days of a broader Middle East, Islam has seemingly shaped the cultural norms and even political preferences of its followers. How can we then separate Islam from the Middle East? As it turns out, it’s not so hard to imagine.

Let’s start with ethnicity. Without Islam, the face of the region still remains complex and conflicted. The dominant ethnic groups of the Middle East-Arabs, Persians, Turks, Kurds, Jews, even Berbers and Pashtuns-would still dominate politics.

Powerful forces

Take the Persians. Long before Islam, successive great Persian empires pushed to the doors of Athens and were the perpetual rivals of whoever inhabited Anatolia. Contesting Semitic peoples, too, fought the Persians across the Fertile Crescent and into Iraq.

And then there are the powerful forces of diverse Arab tribes and traders expanding and migrating into other Semitic areas of the Middle East before Islam. Mongols would still have overrun and destroyed the civilizations of Central Asia and much of the Middle East in the 13th century.

Turks still would have conquered Anatolia, the Balkans up to Vienna, and most of the Middle East. These struggles-over power, territory, influence, and trade-existed long before Islam arrived.

Still, it’s too arbitrary to exclude religion entirely from the equation. If, in fact, Islam had never emerged, most of the Middle East would have remained predominantly Christian, in its various sects, just as it had been at the dawn of Islam. Apart from some Zoroastrians and small numbers of Jews, no other major religions were present.

And so it’s unlikely that Christian inhabitants of the Middle East would have welcomed the stream of European fleets and their merchants backed by Western guns. Imperialism would have prospered in the region’s complex ethnic mosaic-the raw materials for the old game of divide and rule.

And Europeans still would have installed the same pliable local rulers to accommodate their needs.

The Middle-East

Move the clock forward to the age of oil in the Middle East. Would Middle Eastern states, even if Christian, have welcomed the establishment of European protectorates over their region? Hardly.

The West still would have built and controlled the same choke points, such as the Suez Canal. It wasn’t Islam that made Middle Eastern states powerfully resist the colonial project, with its drastic redrawing of borders in accordance with European geopolitical preferences. Nor would Middle Eastern Christians have welcomed imperial Western oil companies, backed by their European viceregents, diplomats, intelligence agents, and armies, any more than Muslims did. Look at the long history of Latin American reactions to American domination of their oil, economics, and politics.

The Middle East would have been equally keen to create nationalist anticolonial movements to wrest control over their own soil, markets, sovereignty, and destiny from foreign grips-just like anticolonial struggles in Hindu India, Confucian China, Buddhist Vietnam, and a Christian and animist Africa.

And surely the French would have just as readily expanded into a Christian Algeria to seize its rich farmlands and establish a colony. The Italians, too, never let Ethiopia’s Christianity stop them from turning that country into a harshly administered colony. In short, there is no reason to believe that a Middle Eastern reaction to the European colonial ordeal would have differed significantly from the way it actually reacted under Islam.

There is Palestine. Examples of anti-Semitism were firmly rooted in Western lands and culture. Jews would therefore have still sought a homeland outside Europe; the Zionist movement would still have emerged and sought a base in Palestine. And the new Jewish State would still have dislodged the same 750,000 Arab natives of Palestine from their lands even if they had been Christian-and indeed some of them were. Would not these Arab Palestinians have fought to protect or regain their land?

The Israeli-Palestinian problem remains at heart a national, ethnic, and territorial conflict, only recently bolstered by religious slogans. And let’s not forget that Arab Christians played a major role in the early emergence of the whole Arab nationalist movement in the Middle East; indeed, the ideological founder of the first pan-Arab Ba’th party, Michel Aflaq, was a Sorbonne-educated Syrian Christian.

Today, the US occupation of Iraq would be no more welcome to Iraqis if they were Christians. The United States did not overthrow Saddam Hussein, an intensely nationalist and secular leader, because he was a Muslim. Other Arab peoples would still have supported the Iraqi Arabs in their trauma of occupation.

Nowhere do people welcome foreign occupation and the killing of their citizens at the hands of foreign troops. Indeed, groups threatened by such outside forces invariably cast about for appropriate ideologies to justify and glorify their resistance struggle. Religion is one such ideology.

It is, of course, absurd to argue that the existence of Islam has had no independent impact on the Middle East or East-West relations. Islam has been a unifying force of a high order across a wide region.

As a global universal faith, it has created a broad civilization that shares many common principles of philosophy, the arts, and society; a vision of the moral life; a sense of justice, jurisprudence, and good governance-all in a deeply rooted high culture.

As a cultural and moral force, Islam has helped bridge ethnic differences among diverse Muslim peoples, encouraging them to feel part of a broader Muslim civilizational project. That alone furnishes it with great weight. Islam affected political geography as well: If there had been no Islam, the Muslim countries of South Asia and Southeast Asia today-particularly Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia-would be rooted instead in the Hindu world.

More of the same

The question remains, if Islam didn’t exist, would the world be more peaceful? In the face of these tensions between East and West, Islam unquestionably adds yet one more emotive element, one more layer of complications to finding solutions. Islam is not the cause of such problems. It may seem sophisticated to seek out passages in the Koran that seem to explain “why they hate us.” But that blindly misses the nature of the phenomenon. How comfortable to identify Islam as the source of “the problem”; it’s certainly much easier than exploring the impact of the massive global footprint of the world’s sole superpower.

Nationalism

A world without Islam would still see most of the enduring bloody rivalries whose wars and tribulations dominate the geopolitical landscape. If it were not religion, all of these groups would have found some other banner under which to express nationalism and a quest for independence. Sure, history would not have followed the exact same path as it has. But, at rock bottom, conflict between East and West remains all about the grand historical and geopolitical issues of human history: ethnicity, nationalism, ambition, greed, resources, local leaders, turf, financial gain, power, interventions, and hatred of outsiders, invaders, and imperialists. Faced with timeless issues like these, how could the power of religion not be invoked?

Remember too, that virtually everyone of the principle horrors of the 20th century came almost exclusively from strictly secular regimes: Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo, Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin and Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. It was Europeans who visited their “world wars” twice upon the rest of the world-two devastating global conflicts with no remote parallels in Islamic history.

Islam provides women honour, self-respect

In the midst of the darkness that engulfed the world, the divine revelation echoed in the wide desert of Arabia in the 7th Century with a fresh, noble, and universal message to humanity, described below.

According to the Holy Qur’an, men and women have the same human spiritual nature: “O mankind! Be dutiful to your Lord, Who created you from a single person (Adam) and from him (Adam) He created his wife [Hawwa (Eve)], and from them both He created many men and women...” (Qur’an 4:1, see also 7:189, 42:11, 16:72, 32:9, and 15:29)

* God has invested both genders with inherent dignity and has made men and women, collectively the vicegerents of God on earth (see the Qur’an 17:70 and 2:30).

* The Qur’an does not blame woman for the “fall of man,” nor does it view pregnancy and childbirth as punishments for “eating from the forbidden tree.” On the contrary, the Qur’an depicts Adam and Eve as equally responsible for their sin in the Garden, never singling out Eve for blame. Both repented, and both were forgiven (see the Qur’an 2:36-37 and 7:19-27). In fact, in one verse (Qur’an 20:121) Adam specifically was blamed. The Qur’an also esteems pregnancy and childbirth as sufficient reasons for the love and respect due to mothers from their children (Qur’an 31:14 and 46:15).

* Men and women have the same religious and moral duties and responsibilities. Each human being shall face the consequences of his or her deeds: “So their Lord accepted of them (their supplication and answered them), `Never will I allow to be lost the work of any of you, be he male or female. You are (members) one of another...” (Qur’an 3:195, see also 74:38, 16:97, 4:124, 33:35, and 57:12)

* The Qur’an is quite clear about the issue of the claimed superiority or inferiority of any human, male or female. The sole basis for superiority of any person over another is piety and righteousness, not gender, colour, or nationality (see the Qur’an 49:13).

Economic status

* The right to possess personal property: Islam decreed a right of which woman was deprived both before Islam and after it (even as late as this century), the right of independent ownership. The Islamic Law recognizes the full property rights of women before and after marriage. They may buy, sell, or lease any or all of their properties at will.For this reason, Muslim women may keep (and in fact they have traditionally kept) their maiden names after marriage, an indication of their independent property rights as legal entities.

* Financial security and inheritance laws: Financial security is assured for women. They are entitled to receive marital gifts without limit and to keep present and future properties and income for their own security, even after marriage.

No married woman is required to spend any amount at all from her property and income on the household.

The woman is entitled also to full financial support during marriage and during the “waiting period” (iddah) in case of divorce or widowhood. Some jurists require, in addition, one year’s support in the advent of divorce and widowhood (or until they remarry, if remarriage takes place before the year is over).

A woman who bears a child in marriage is entitled to child support from the child’s father. Generally, a Muslim woman is guaranteed support in all stages of her life, as a daughter, wife, mother, or sister.

The financial advantages accorded to women and not to men in marriage and in family have a social counterpart in the provisions that the Qur’an lays down in the laws of inheritance, which afford the male, in most cases, twice the inheritance of a female. Males do not always inherit more; at times a woman inherits more than a man.

In instances where the men inherit more, they ultimately are financially responsible for their female relatives: their wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters. Females inherit less but retain their share for investment and financial security, without any legal obligation to spend any part of it, even for their own sustenance (food, clothing, housing, medication, etc).

It should be noted that before Islam women themselves were sometimes objects of inheritance (see the Qur’an 4:19). In some Western countries, even after the advent of Islam, the whole estate of the deceased was given to his/her eldest son. The Qur’an, however, made it clear that both men and women are entitled to a specified share of the estate of their deceased parents or close relatives. Allah has said: “There is a share for men and a share for women from what is left by parents and those nearest related, whether the property be small or large - a legal share.” (Qur’an 4:7)

Employment

With regard to the woman’s right to seek employment, it should be stated first that Islam regards her role in society as a mother and a wife as her most sacred and essential one. Neither maids nor baby-sitters can possibly take the mother’s place as the educator of an upright, complex-free, and carefully-reared child. Such a noble and vital role, which largely shapes the future of nations, cannot be regarded as idleness. However, there is no decree in Islam that forbids women from seeking employment whenever there is a necessity for it, especially in positions which fit her nature best and in which society needs her most. Examples of these professions are nursing, teaching (especially children), medicine, and social and charitable work.

Compiled by Latheef Farook [email protected]

Muslim heritage throughout the world

An exhibition called “1001 Inventions: Muslim Heritage in Our World,” which opened in December 2010 in New York Hall of Science, focuses on the reality - the period when Muslims’ sphere of influence stretched from China to Spain for hundreds of centuries.

Highlighting what organizers say is a forgotten period of history, “1001 Inventions” is a global educational initiative that promotes awareness of a thousand years of scientific and cultural achievements from Muslim civilization from the 7th century onwards, and shows how those contributions helped build the foundations of our modern world.

Originally launched in the United Kingdom in March 2006, 1001 Inventions was created by the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation, FSTC, a British based non-profit, non-religious and academic organization.

Its focus is to connect with the viewing public through educational media and interactive global exhibitions, and to focus on the shared cultural and technological inheritance of humanity between the West and the Muslim world, said Peter Fell, Senior Advisor to the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilization.

The exhibition also focused on heroic individuals of the past. They are role models and have made major contributions, but now, sadly, are often forgotten. We wanted to use them to help the children identify with Muslim history,” said Fell. The exhibition in New York in April 2011, will travel in May to the Los Angeles Science Centre, and will end in Washington DC at the National Geographic in the second half of 2012.

“The exhibition reveals the forgotten history of men and women from a variety of faiths and backgrounds whose contributions to the advancement of scholarship and technology during the Middle Ages helped pave the way for the European Renaissance,” said Fell. “This period of history from the 7th through 17th centuries is commonly-though, often erroneously - referred to as the ‘Dark Ages.’” Visitors learn when scientists first discovered how we see what we now see; how ancient approaches to health influence modern medicine; why East and West share so much architectural heritage; and the origins of everyday items like coffee, toothbrushes, soap and much more.

The exhibition’s main international sponsor is the Jameel Foundation, part of the Saudi-based Abdul Latif Jameel Community Initiatives. ALJCI is the Corporate Social Responsibility arm of the ALJ Group. The organizers of the 1001 Inventions exhibition in New York have focused on getting young people to attend the exhibition. Schools, said Fell, are bringing children by the bus loads. “What has been rewarding to the organizers, he said, was the discovery that many of those children who came with their school would then return with their parents.

“But we’re also very keen on sharing the information with educators and the teachers, and libraries and the museum world. We’re trying to reveal this hidden part of history, and want to help people understand it,” said Fell.

“What’s really interesting is that the exhibition has the ability to attract people who normally don’t go to an exhibition, said Fell. “Over 30 percent of those who attend this exhibition have never been to a museum before.” “It was built for the new generation, and was designed to use the latest technology available.

The exhibition is filled with computer games, touch screens, a movie and even a mini-planetarium where you can move the stars with your hands. You also can move the different constellations around and see where they fit, and learn the Arabic names of the constellations and the roots of Arabic astronomy.”

“The project is designed to stimulate students’ understanding of science and technology and to provide positive Muslim role models for evolving Muslim identities, especially in the West,” said Fell002E