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Washington Post, December
30, 2001; Page B4
If the world is to be spared what future
historians may call the "century of terror," we will have to
chart a perilous course between the Scylla of American imperial arrogance
and the Charybdis of Islamic religious fanaticism. Through these waters,
we must steer by a distant star toward a careful, reasoned, democratic,
humanistic and secular future. Otherwise, shipwreck is certain.
For nearly four months now, leaders of the Muslim community in the United
States, and even President Bush, have routinely asserted that Islam is a
religion of peace that was hijacked by fanatics on Sept. 11.
These two assertions are simply untrue.
First, Islam -- like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism or any other religion
-- is not about peace. Nor is it about war. Every religion is about
absolute belief in its own superiority and the divine right to impose its
version of truth upon others. In medieval times, both the Crusades and the
Jihads were soaked in blood. Today, there are Christian fundamentalists
who attack abortion clinics in the United States and kill doctors; Muslim
fundamentalists who wage their sectarian wars against each other; Jewish
settlers who, holding the Old Testament in one hand and Uzis in the other,
burn olive orchards and drive Palestinians off their ancestral land; and
Hindus in India who demolish ancient mosques and burn down churches.
The second assertion is even further off the mark. Even if Islam had, in
some metaphorical sense, been hijacked, that event did not occur three
months ago. It was well over seven centuries ago that Islam suffered a
serious trauma, the effects of which refuse to go away.
Where do Muslims stand today? Note that I do not ask about Islam; Islam is
an abstraction. Maulana Abdus Sattar Edhi, Pakistan's preeminent social
worker, and the Taliban's Mohammad Omar are both followers of Islam, but
the former is overdue for a Nobel Peace Prize while the latter is an
ignorant, psychotic fiend. Palestinian writer Edward Said, among others,
has insistently pointed out that Islam holds very different meaning for
different people. Within my own family, hugely different kinds of Islam
are practiced. The religion is as heterogeneous as those who believe and
follow it. There is no "true Islam."
Today, Muslims number 1 billion. Of the 48 countries with a full or near
Muslim majority, none has yet evolved a stable democratic political
system. In fact, all Muslim countries are dominated by self-serving
corrupt elites who cynically advance their personal interests and steal
resources from their people. None of these countries has a viable
educational system or a university of international stature.
Reason, too, has been waylaid.
You will seldom see a Muslim name as you flip through scientific journals,
and if you do, the chances are that this person lives in the West. There
are a few exceptions: Pakistani Abdus Salam, together with Americans
Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in
1979. I got to know Salam reasonably well; we even wrote a book preface
together. He was a remarkable man, terribly in love with his country and
his religion. And yet he died deeply unhappy, scorned by Pakistan,
declared a non-Muslim by an act of the Pakistani parliament in 1974. Today
the Ahmadi sect, to which Salam belonged, is considered heretical and
harshly persecuted. (My next-door neighbor, an Ahmadi physicist, was shot
in the neck and heart and died in my car as I drove him to the hospital
seven years ago. His only fault was to have been born into the wrong
sect.)
Though genuine scientific achievement is rare in the contemporary Muslim
world, pseudo-science is in generous supply. A former chairman of my
department has calculated the speed of heaven: He maintains it is receding
from Earth at one centimeter per second less than the speed of light. His
ingenious method relies upon a verse in the Islamic holy book, which says
that worship on the night on which the book was revealed is worth a
thousand nights of ordinary worship. He states that this amounts to a time
dilation factor of 1,000, which he puts into a formula of Einstein's
theory of special relativity.
A more public example: One of two Pakistani nuclear engineers recently
arrested on suspicion of passing nuclear secrets to the Taliban had
earlier proposed to solve Pakistan's energy problems by harnessing the
power of genies. He relied on the Islamic belief that God created man from
clay, and angels and genies from fire; so this highly placed engineer
proposed to capture the genies and extract their energy.
Today's sorry situation contrasts starkly with the Islam of yesterday.
Between the 9th and 13th centuries -- the Golden Age of Islam --the only
people doing decent work in science, philosophy or medicine were Muslims.
Muslims not only preserved ancient learning, they also made substantial
innovations. The loss of this tradition has proven tragic for Muslim
peoples.
Science flourished in the Golden Age of Islam because of a strong
rationalist and liberal tradition, carried on by a group of Muslim
thinkers known as the Mutazilites.
But in the 12th century, Muslim orthodoxy reawakened, spearheaded by the
Arab cleric Imam Al-Ghazali. Al-Ghazali championed revelation over reason,
predestination over free will. He damned mathematics as being against
Islam, an intoxicant of the mind that weakened faith.
Caught in the viselike grip of orthodoxy, Islam choked. No longer would
Muslim, Christian and Jewish scholars gather and work together in the
royal courts. It was the end of tolerance, intellect and science in the
Muslim world. The last great Muslim thinker, Abd-al Rahman Ibn Khaldun,
belonged to the 14th century.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world moved on. The Renaissance brought an
explosion of scientific inquiry in the West. This owed much to
translations of Greek works carried out by Arabs and other Muslim
contributions, but they were to matter little. Mercantile capitalism and
technological progress drove Western countries -- in ways that were often
brutal and at times genocidal -- to rapidly colonize the Muslim world from
Indonesia to Morocco. It soon became clear, at least to some of the Muslim
elites, that they were paying a heavy price for not possessing the
analytical tools of modern science and the social and political values of
modern culture -- the real source of power of their colonizers.
Despite widespread resistance from the orthodox, the logic of modernity
found 19th-century Muslim adherents. Some seized on the modern idea of the
nation-state. It is crucial to note that not a single Muslim nationalist
leader of the 20th century was a fundamentalist.
However, Muslim and Arab nationalism, part of a larger anti-colonial
nationalist current across the Third World, included the desire to control
and use national resources for domestic benefit. The conflict with Western
greed was inevitable. The imperial interests of Britain, and later the
United States, feared independent nationalism. Anyone willing to
collaborate was preferred, even the ultraconservative Islamic regime of
Saudi Arabia. In 1953, Mohammed Mosaddeq of Iran was overthrown in a CIA
coup, replaced by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Britain targeted Egypt's
Gamal Abdel Nasser. Indonesia's Sukarno was replaced by Suharto after a
bloody coup that left hundreds of thousands dead.
Pressed from outside, corrupt and incompetent from within, secular Muslim
governments proved unable to defend national interests or deliver social
justice. They began to frustrate democracy to preserve their positions of
power and privilege. These failures left a vacuum that Islamic religious
movements grew to fill -- in Iran, Pakistan and Sudan, to name a few.
The lack of scruple and the pursuit of power by the United States combined
fatally with this tide in the Muslim world in 1979, when the Soviet Union
invaded Afghanistan. With Pakistan's Mohammed Zia ul-Haq as America's
foremost ally, the CIA openly recruited Islamic holy warriors from Egypt,
Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Algeria. Radical Islam went into overdrive as its
superpower ally and mentor funneled support to the mujaheddin; Ronald
Reagan feted them on the White House lawn.
The rest is by now familiar: After the Soviet Union collapsed, the United
States walked away from an Afghanistan in shambles. The Taliban emerged;
Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda made Afghanistan their base.
What should thoughtful people infer from this whole narrative?
For Muslims, it is time to stop wallowing in self-pity: Muslims are not
helpless victims of conspiracies hatched by an all-powerful, malicious
West. The fact is that the decline of Islamic greatness took place long
before the age of mercantile imperialism. The causes were essentially
internal. Therefore Muslims must be introspective and ask what went wrong.
Muslims must recognize that their societies are far larger, more diverse
and complex than the small homogeneous tribal society in Arabia 1,400
years ago. It is therefore time to renounce the idea that Islam can
survive and prosper only in an Islamic state run according to sharia, or
Islamic law. Muslims need a secular and democratic state that respects
religious freedom and human dignity and is founded on the principle that
power belongs to the people. This means confronting and rejecting the
claim by orthodox Islamic scholars that, in an Islamic state, sovereignty
belongs to the vice-regents of Allah, or Islamic jurists, not to the
people.
Muslims must not look to the likes of bin Laden; such people have no real
answer and can offer no real positive alternative. To glorify their
terrorism is a hideous mistake: The unremitting slaughter of Shiites,
Christians and Ahmadis in their places of worship in Pakistan, and of
other minorities in other Muslim countries, is proof that all terrorism is
not about the revolt of the dispossessed.
The United States, too, must confront bitter truths. The messages of
George W. Bush and Tony Blair fall flat while those of bin Laden, whether
he lives or dies, resonate strongly across the Muslim world. Bin Laden's
religious extremism turns off many Muslims, but they find his political
message easy to relate to: The United States must stop helping Israel in
dispossessing the Palestinians, stop propping up corrupt and despotic
regimes across the world just because they serve U.S. interests.
Americans will also have to accept that their triumphalism and disdain for
international law are creating enemies everywhere, not just among Muslims.
Therefore they must become less arrogant and more like other peoples of
this world.
Our collective survival lies in recognizing that religion is not the
solution; neither is nationalism. We have but one choice: the path of
secular humanism, based upon the principles of logic and reason. This
alone offers the hope of providing everybody on this globe with the right
to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Pervez Hoodbhoy is a professor of
nuclear and high-energy physics at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.
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