Muslim Faith and Values

A Guide for Christians

Robert A. Hunt

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781532663123
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religiöse Ökumene & Interreligiösität

"Christians are called to love Muslims in all their little particularities." This was the advice Duncan Black MacDonald, famous scholar of Islam and teacher of missionaries to Muslim lands, gave to his students. His words from a hundred years ago remain true today. This book invites the reader to explore Islam as a human religion, a religion embodied in what Muslims believe and value. Learning about Islam through the beliefs and values that Muslims hold, the reader will be prepared to engage in fruitful conversation with Muslim neighbors, and better understand their struggles and aspirations. Along the way the reader will learn about Muhammad and the Qur'an, discover the rich history of Islamic civilizations, and learn the ways contemporary Muslims confront the challenges of the modern world. The reader will meet poets, mystics, theologians, and everyday people living out their response to God's call to Islam, to submission and peace, and will compare Muslim beliefs to Christian beliefs, learning how they coincide and differ. By the end the reader will have a richer understanding of Muslims and the religion of Islam, and will have explored the most fruitful ways to relate to the Muslim neighbors they are obliged to love.

Chapter 1: Religion and Faith

On a warm humid afternoon in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, I sat at a table with a dozen students from the University of Malaya. We were talking about Islam, and particularly how Muslims understood Christians, and Christians understood Muslims. As we spoke, different facets of the faith of these students emerged. The name of a professor came up, and someone remarked that, “He is Muslim, but not practicing.” A woman quickly replied, “Islam is a belief and a practice. If he does not does not practice what Muslims practice, then he is not a Muslim.”

Her ideas about Islamic belief and practice were clearly defined in terms of the five pillars of Islam and the commonly accepted Islamic creed. The other students did not contradict her, but many wanted to add to what she said.

One young man was anxious to stress that the central tenant of Islam was the oneness of God, and for him personally Islam was a path of unity with God. Another woman reminded me that Islam was dīn, a way of life that encompassed not only the five pillars, but also all economic, political, family, and personal relationships. For her this was the glory of Islam, and the reason she had become a Muslim although she was born into a Buddhist family.

Another student added that Muhammad and the early leaders of Islam were an inspiration to him. He believed that only by imitating their charisma and moral leadership could modern Muslims shake off the last vestiges of colonialism. Quoting the ideas of several modern Muslim writers, another young woman stressed that Islam was a methodology for solving problems and organizing human life, not just a fixed set of rules. Finally one young man put forward that the key to Islam was the Quran. He used the prefix “hafiz” with his name, to indicate that he could chant the entire Quran from memory. For him the Quran was a miracle whose power had transformed ignorant and warlike tribes into a great civilization.

The ideas expressed by these students can be found over and again in the modern Islamic literature that most of them are reading. All of them would, at least in public, assent to the importance of the five pillars of Islam and basic Muslim beliefs. Yet it wasn’t these basic beliefs and practices that most excited them most about their own faith. They were animated by a set of ideals that inspire them both to share their faith, and to work actively through various student groups to make it the dominant force in shaping their society and nation. Understanding these ideals is the key to understanding the motive power of Islam in the modern world, and why Islam has such an attraction not only for young people raised in Muslim families, but a growing number of converts as well. To introduce some of these ideals we’ll look at a few of the most popular Muslim writers of this century; the ones whose books can be purchased in almost any Muslim bookstore, and which are available in scores of languages.

1. Mawlana Sayyid Mawdudi

Mawlana Sayyid Mawdudi was one of the founders of the influential Jama’at-I Islami, a Pakistan-based movement for the reform and renewal of Islam. Mawdudi’s scholarship, and his commitment to making Islam the driving force behind Pakistani government, law, and society, made him a figure much admired by Muslim youth. His most popular and widely read work, Toward Understanding Islam, is both a primer in basic Islamic beliefs and an apologetic for the need, in the twentieth century, for a reexamination of the foundations upon which society is built.

Mawdudi articulates powerfully a central idea, and ideal, of Islam: that God’s progressive and universal revelation reached its final and perfect form in Islam, and that Islam is thus the world’s only truly “progressive” religion. He presents a vision of Islam as rational, forthright, and humane. It is the religion that restores God and God’s law to the central place in human affairs, and thus restores both just social relations and a proper human attitude toward creation.

The focus of Mawdudi’s writing is always on the principles that underlie both law and belief, and the ways in which these promote human ethics and scientific advancement. His apologetic work is frequently quoted as Muslims seek to affirm that their religion yields to no ideology in the advancement of peace, security, and human dignity. It is also controversial in asserting Islamic principles of human relationships in preference to universal understandings of human rights. But Muslims and non-Muslims are uncomfortable with his concept of a an Islamic state run on theocratic principles.

Most Muslims live in countries that are materially poor, yet have a social memory of being part of one of the world’s greatest civilizations. Their powerlessness and poverty are strongly at odds with the sense of individual self-worth, responsibility, and dignity instilled by their religion. At the same time the apparent decadence, violence, and vice of the Western civilization (which Muslims see on television and read in about in their newspapers) is wedded to overwhelming power and wealth. One common explanation for this situation, adequately borne out by historical fact, is that the Muslims are victims of Western colonialism and imperialism. But why? Why should the followers of God’s perfect religion be so degraded?

The answer presented by Mawdudi in his book Come, Let Us Be Muslims, and by many other Muslim leaders, is that Muslims have not perfectly realized their religion. Thus the solution to the Muslim problem is that they return to the roots of the religion, and rebuild on those sure foundations. They must more perfectly implement the great and complex system of Islam found at the height of classical Islamic civilization. Then despite their present condition, it will be Muslims alone who are destined both to shape the future of civilization and enjoy the pleasures of heaven.

One could argue that Mawdudi’s vision of Islam leaves out many of the internal conflicts that so divide the Islamic world, as well as the many ways in which Muslim law and belief seem outdated and superstitious. For example, he does not talk of the problem of the Shī‛ite Muslims, their persecution by the Sunni majority in Pakistan and elsewhere, or how Shī‛ite beliefs fit into his model of Islam. Nor does he answer women’s rights advocates apart from asserting that Islam insures a woman’s “honor.” But it should be remembered that Mawdudi was a reformer, not merely a defender, of the classical Islamic tradition. The inspiration he has given to generations of young Muslims came by asserting to them and for them that their tradition and their faith could build on the science and technology of twentieth-century society, while overcoming its brutality and inequality.

2. Sayyid Qutb

Sayyid Qutb’s book Milestones was written while he was imprisoned in Egypt in 1965. It was widely banned, and widely read, in the Muslim world. Its popularity was fanned by Qutb’s death by hanging in 1966. It was Qutb’s role in the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, his fierce opposition to the government, and his powerful call for the renewal of the Muslim community that led to his death at the hand of Egypt’s government.

His call for renewal was based on an appeal to what he calls “The Quranic Generation,” or the generation of leaders who knew the Quran and Muhammad from the beginning of the Islamic movement. These leaders knew firsthand the profound contrast between Islam as knowledge of God and the jahilia or spiritual and material ignorance that preceded it. Qutb believed that later generations, and particularly the current generation of political leaders, had compromised and blended the Islamic with the non-Islamic. He maintained that the twentieth-century world, including the Muslim world, was in a state of ignorance equal to that of the pre-Islamic Arabic tribes. The only solution was a radically new leadership for the Muslim community: a leadership that, like the Quranic generation, would renounce everything and start fresh with the Quran and the Prophet in rebuilding a proper Islamic society.

Qutb’s appeal was revolutionary, and many credit him with having given the ideological basis for radical Islamic movements such as Hamas and Al Qaeda, as well as having provided a justification for terrorism. Yet it must be remembered that his message gained emotional strength and credibility from the fact that Muslims had for centuries idealized first four “rightly guided caliphs.” All Muslim children know their heroic deeds and great works by heart. Other reformers had sought in that golden age the principles for rebuilding Islamic law and belief. Qutb focused instead on the personal transformation and commitment of those who build their entire life and life work on God’s revelation to Muhammad. For Qutb’s followers the golden age was neither an object of scholarly study nor a source of nostalgic comfort in the face of present-day humiliation. It was a living possibility for those who chose to dedicate themselves to the cause of Islam against a world (Muslim and non-Muslim) sunk in ignorance and degradation. Radical as he was, his radicalism was rooted in the idealism of almost every Muslim who had marveled at the victories of Muhammad and his first followers.

3. Ayatollah Khomeini

The image of Ayatollah Khomeini, which was burned into the consciousness of Americans and Europeans during the Iranian revolution of 1977, is almost impossible to reconcile with his popularity and influence among Muslim youth of that and later generations. In part this is because reporting on Khomeini in the West tended to focus on his anti-American and anti-Western polemics, and of course the enormous political and economic losses caused by the overthrow of the Shah of Iran...