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PAS : KE ARAH PEMERINTAHAN ISLAM YANG ADIL
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Transcript of interview of Abdal Hakim Murad, by Dr Enes Karic,
Minister of Education, Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Published in Ljliljan, a Bosnian-language newspaper.
EK: Can I start by asking about your belief that Imam al-Ghazali's
books must play a central role in the current campaign to revivify
Islam?
AHM: Imam al-Ghazali's significance is manifold. He not only
understood philosophy, but he showed the dangerously speculative
nature of its basic premises in a way which anticipates much modern
positivism. This awareness led him to develop a Muslim epistemology
rooted in 'tasting' (dhawq), i.e. the illuminative fruits of
systematic and divinely-assisted introspection, as the only sure path
to knowledge. This makes him a figure of profound and immediate
relevance to Westerners of my generation who often feel that
post-modernism and the notion of the 'equality of all discourse' have
thrown humanity into what is in effect, despite all the information
cascading from the universities and science laboratories, a state of
ideologically rigorous ignorance. We are now grasping what Ghazali
and his school were explaining nine hundred years ago: no universal
statements about the world or the human condition can be reached by
purely ratiocinative or inductive methods, because these cannot
transcend the material context of the world in which they are framed.
Ghazali, in short, through his manifesto the Ihya, offers the only
intellectually rigorous escape from the trap of postmodernity.
EK: Could you say a little about the West's relationship with
Ghazali?
AHM: In the medieval period Ghazali was known in Europe as 'Algazel',
through Latin translations by Guindisalvi and others of a few of his
books, particularly his 'Intentions of the Philosophers' and his
'Incoherence of the Philosophers' in which he famously demolishes
Arab Aristotelianism. Scholastic thinkers such as Aquinas, Robert
Grosseteste and Hugo of St Victor were materially influenced by these
books. Medieval Jews such as Maimonides, his commentator Moses of
Narbonne, and particularly the pietist writer Bahya ben Paquda, were
also profoundly indebted to his ideas on epistemology and logic.
His Ihya however appears to have been unknown. In the present century
about twenty of the forty volumes have been translated into various
European languages, mainly French and German, but also Italian, Dutch
and Russian. It is a curious fact that although he is recognised as
the most influential Muslim thinker of all time, there are very few
serious studies of his thought in the West, with the exception of
Richard Frank's recent Al-Ghazali and the Asharite School, which is
of limited compass.
EK: What about Ghazali's academic influence in the East today?
AHM: Ghazali's Ihya continues to be reprinted constantly in many
countries. It is particularly popular in Turkey, and is also known in
Iran in the Shiite version of Muhsin Fayz Kashani. In Malaysia he has
a particular influence because he followed the Shafi'i rite in law,
which is practiced by almost all Malaysians. Of course, his
intellectual approach has provoked the anger of some literalists at
the Saudi universities, where any systematic theology is regarded as
blasphemous. Saudi Arabia, unfortunately, is a country where most
people until recently lived in extremely simple conditions, and have
not recognised the need to speak to the modern world in a
sophisticated idiom. Literalism and anti-intellectualism may appeal
to desert people, but will not survive long in the global academic
and intellectual arena. Similarly, Ghazali's interest in Sufi
mysticism is regarded with suspicion by members of the Wahhabi sect,
which has its headquarters in Saudi Arabia, because it interferes
with their vision of Islam as a purely legalistic, superficial
religion with no possibilities of nuanced spiritual or literary
discourse. Nonetheless, even in Saudi Arabia, many more educated and
sensitive people now seem to be rejecting the Wahhabi sect and are
turning to Ghazali for a more thoughtful and advanced understanding
of their religion.
EK: Can we turn now to the wider issue of the mutual incomprehension
of the Islamic and Western worlds?
AHM: The West sees itself as a fundamentally Christian civilisation,
despite many years of creeping but in many ways superficial
secularisation. In 1993, Jacques Delors, President of the European
Commission, announced that 'Membership of the European Community is
conditional on the possession of a shared Christian heritage' - a
remark which was not well received in Turkey, for instance, but
reflects a general assumption in Europe. And Christianity is
historically a religion which, thanks to its idea of the unique
salvific status of Christ, has often found it difficult to tolerate
large non-Christian minorities. In the middle ages, you could be a
Christian in Cairo, but you could not be a Muslim in London.
Christians and Jews lived under Muslim rule in Spain for eight
hundred years; but when Granada fell in 1492, the Inquisition soon
demolished the mosques, and burned and exiled the Muslim and Jewish
population. Since the Enlightenment, which was in fact the considered
though usually discreet rejection of Christianity by many educated
people, this situation has been changed, but even the present century
has seen 'civilised Europe' supervise the massacre of six million
Jews, something which never happened in the Muslim world.
What is ironic is that this traditional contest - between the
exclusivist Christian world and the multi-ethnic world of Islam - has
been strangely inverted, so that the usual international discourse
today presents the Christian West as pluralist and the Islamic East
as totalitarian. This is largely untrue - for instance, there are
many Christian members of the Egyptian and Iranian parliaments, but
no Muslim members of the British, French, German or Italian
parliaments. Many Muslim countries support the schools of their
Christian minorities, whereas the Muslim schools in Britain are
consistently denied state funding, which is freely given to Christian
and Jewish schools. So while the media headlines may suggest that the
Christian West is somehow more tolerant and provides more equality of
opportunity for its minorities, the reality, both in the past and the
present, is quite otherwise. Of course, there are conspicuous
exceptions: one thinks of the poor minority rights situation in some
Muslim countries, for instance. But the fact is that an Eastern
Christian can become Secretary-General of the United Nations, a
position to which no Western Muslim could realistically aspire, given
the discreet but heavy cultural preferences which exists in our
societies.
EK: What about the much-touted growth of a contemporary dialogue of
civilisations, an 'East-West encounter'?
AHM: I do not believe that there is an East-West encounter. There are
in fact two contests presently taking shape in the modern world.
Firstly, there is the competition for resources between the
industrialised North and the poor South. Despite all the rhetoric of
'aid', the reality is that the net transfer of capital from the South
to the North now exceeds seven billion dollars every month. Secondly,
there is a contest between traditional religion and materialism. I
believe that in our time the major religions should postpone debates
on their doctrinal differences and recognise that they all face the
same enemy: the spirit of negation and greed which is the driving
force of modernity. The cooperation between the Muslims and the
Vatican delegation to the UN Population Conference in Cairo in 1994,
which resulted in the modification of many anti-religious and
anti-family provisions, proves that such a cooperation can be of
mutual benefit. We all have our backs against the same wall, and I
constantly urge Muslims to develop links with serious believers in
the earlier revelations to see how we can unite against the
destructive individualism of the modern world, which is increasingly
the polemical and activist agenda of the UN and similar world
agencies.
EK: We hear much about Western converts to Islam. How powerful is the
movement in reality?
AHM: A few years ago I helped a couple of French journalists who were
writing a book on the phenomenon of conversion, and was interested to
learn from them that most conversions in Western Europe today are to
Islam, with Buddhism as a close second. They calculate that around
100,000 French people have joined Islam, with the number increasing
substantially if we include those who convert for purposes of
marrying a Muslim woman. In Britain, partly because of the English
sense of reticence, many educated converts do not make their
conversion known, even to close members of their families, and it is
hence not possible to speculate about numbers. I myself know, for
instance, a professor at my university who with his wife has
practised Islam for thirty years totally unknown to his colleagues at
work. Some prominent British cultural figures, such as Lord
Northbourne, were only known as converts after their death. In France
the situation is rather different: you have philosophers such as
Roger Garaudy, and cultural leaders such as the painter Alijs Mojon,
or the Sorbonne professor of Arabic Vincent Monteil, who are very
public about their faith, and defend Islam controversially in a
public arena increasingly noted for right-wing xenophobia and
mounting support for neo-fascist parties.
EK: You have spent much time in Western universities. Do you think
that academic attitudes to Muslims are changing?
AHM: Islamic Studies departments in the West are an anachronism,
inasmuch as Jewish Studies are almost always taught by Jews,
Christian studies by Christians, feminist studies by feminists, and
so on; while Islamic studies are almost invariably taught by people
indifferent to the religion, and in some cases actively hostile. I
have encountered several cases of Muslim scholars excluded from jobs
for which they are well-qualified simply because appointments
committees believe that Muslims cannot be 'objective' when teaching
Islam. Using that logic, one would have to prevent Christians from
teaching Christianity, and feminists from teaching feminism, and so
on! The only way around this really is for British Muslims whose
Islam is not conspicuous or even known to enter university life.
Oddly, there seems to be less prejudice against converts than against
native Muslims, perhaps because converts understand how to be
inconspicuous when the interests of Islam require this. Most Muslim
teachers of Islam in British universities now are in fact from the
convert community. They face an interesting task, since Islamic
studies, which was until recently a minor academic ghetto, has taken
on immediate and heavy political and cultural significance in the
past two decades. It is on the basis of the advice and literary
output of academics that politicians often take their decisions in
parts of the world about which they know little. Hence it is of vital
importance for Muslims to rectify the current asymmetry in
universities and play a central role.
EK: What is your experience of Bosnia?
AHM: I first visited Bosnia before going to university - I was one of
those long-haired teenagers with back-packs who wander around Europe
for no apparent reason. I remember how impressed I was at the age of
18, having spent a day in Belgrade, a city which I found to be of
ntolerable greyness and ugly heaviness, waking up on a train near
Zavidovici, and being startled by the verdant green of the hills, the
yellow mounds of hay on the slopes, and the white minarets in the
villages. It was like seeing a beautiful woman for the first time
after leaving prison!
I visited Bosnia several times thereafter - I was in Sarajevo during
the trial of Alija Izetbegovic and the others, and was able to bring
some information to Amnesty International as a result. I spent time
at the offices of Preporod and at the Gazi Husrev-begova Biblioteka.
I was impressed by the conviviality of the three religious
communities, which I took to be proof of the fact that religious
toleration in its truest and most durable sense has only ever been
able to flourish in the Muslim parts of Europe. And in 1992, the
500th anniversary of the fall of Granada to the forces of the
Reconquista, the war launched by the Serbian nationalists seemed to
prove that my theory remained valid even at the end of the twentieth
century.
I visited Bosnia several times after the war began, and found myself
horrified by the violence of the Serbs, and also the Croats of the
HVO. Even if you are not a Christian, it is unpleasant to see
swastikas being sold side by side with images of the Blessed Virgin
at Medjugorje, and to see Ante Pavelic's portrait hanging in police
stations in 'Herzeg-Bosna'.
I also noted with alarm the presence and influence of some of our
brothers from the Arab world, who try to bring to Bosnia a rigorist
and exclusivist understanding of Islam which is alien to Balkan
Islam, and can have no true future in today's pluralistic and
sophisticated world. One of Islam's sources of strength is its
cultural diversity: Malaysians have their own style of Islam, so do
Turks, Nigerians, Uzbeks, and so on. The Arab aid workers should not
imagine that the Bosnian Muslims can become Arab Muslims. Their
cultural context is quite different. And there is a danger, I feel,
that the intensity and narrow-mindedness of some Middle Eastern aid
workers will in fact frighten young Bosnians away from Islam, rather
than bring them back to it. The Bosniaks have their own very fine
style of being Muslim, as expounded by men such as Mustafa Ceric and
Ismet Spahic, and have a right to be proud of their identity.
The future of Bosnia, as an island of Muslim toleration in a bigoted
corner of Europe, will depend on many things. But most importantly,
it will depend on the continued state of readiness of the Bosnian
Army. If the Jews had had an army in 1939, and had been fighting for
their lives, the Holocaust might never have happened. If the Chechens
had been better armed in 1994, they might now have won their
independence. The sad lesson is that non-Christian minorities in
Europe, given the absence of a medieval tradition of tolerance, must
be constantly on their guard. In 1992, the Bosniaks were caught by
surprise, having believed the silly rhetoric of the EU and the UN
about the inalienable rights of small peoples. They are wiser now;
and in a stronger position. I have every confidence that they will
weather the storms which still await them, and become a model of
Muslim decency, hospitality and tolerance.
--------------------------------------------------------------
sallam.
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