Islam in the Modern World

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780062020123
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia islamica

The foremost U.S. authority on Islam and, Seyyed Hossein Nasr discusses today's hot button issues—including holy wars, women's rights, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and the future of Moslems in the Middle East—in this groundbreaking discussion of the fastest-growing religion in the world. One of the great scholars in the modern Islamic intellectual tradition, and the acclaimed author of books such as The Garden of Truth and The Heart of Islam, Nasr brings incomparable insight to this exploration of Muslim issues and realities, delivering a landmark publication promoting cross-cultural awareness and world peace.

Part I

Contentious Issues Debated in Islamic Circles Today

Chapter One

Islam in the Present-Day Islamic World

An Overview

Numerous factors, including the revival of Islam within the Islamic world, attempts to reassert the Islamic identity of Muslims, reactions to the political and cultural domination of the Islamic world by the West that take the form of political and even violent challenges to the geopolitical interests of Western powers in Islamic countries, and the spread of Islam in the West itself have all contributed to a greater interest on the part of many people in Europe and America in the Islamic world and the role of Islam in that world.

To discuss Islam in the present-day Islamic world, however, means that a distinction has already been made between Islam as a religious and spiritual reality and the manifestation of this reality in a particular social order or historic context. Such a distinction, although not accepted by all modern interpreters and students of religion, lies at the heart of the traditional perspective, which always distinguishes between levels of reality and between the archetype in relation to its spatio-temporal manifestations. From this point of view, it is therefore not only possible to make such a distinction, but even necessary to do so in order to avoid confusing everything that is called Islamic today by this or that group with the Islamic norm as it has manifested itself over the centuries in accordance with the essential reality of Islam, a norm that has also displayed various modes of development, but always within the possibilities inherent in that reality and according to its principles. It is especially imperative to speak of both Islam as traditionally understood and the present-day Islamic world, precisely because of the bewildering confusion that reigns in this domain, combined with intense interest in the subject in the Western world as a result of factors to which reference has already been made.¹

As far as Islam is concerned, its meaning is clear from the traditional point of view. Islam is a divinely revealed religion whose roots are contained in the Noble Quran and the traditions of the Blessed Prophet—both written and oral—and whose branches represent fourteen hundred years of a sacred religious history that, in its orthodoxy, has embraced both Sunnism and Shī‘ism as well as the esoteric dimension of the tradition, contained mostly in Sufism. It has produced not only the schools of law (Shari‘ah), but also theology, philosophy, a whole array of arts and sciences, and a distinct educational system, not to speak of political, economic, social, and family structures and the ethical and moral norms to which those structures are related.

This tree, which has its roots in revelation, has also produced a sacred traditional art, both auditory and visual, ranging from the various methods of chanting the Noble Quran to calligraphy, architecture, and various forms of Islamic literature. Although Islam remains in its essence a transhistorical reality, it has also had this long period of historical development, which links every generation of Muslims through time to the Origin. This direct access to the spiritual world, where the transhistorical reality of Islam is to be found, is made possible by the rites and the barakah issuing from the Quranic revelation, which links each Muslim to the Source through a hierarchic “space” that is present and accessible here and now. Islam is at once that inexhaustible transhistorical reality and the whole of the Islamic tradition as reflected in Islamic history. As already mentioned, this is the “tree of Islam,” whose roots are sunk in the ground of divine revelation and whose trunk, branches, and fruits symbolize the manifestations of the Islamic reality in various climes and historical epochs.

As for the Islamic world, that term needs some elucidation. In traditional Islamic language the Islamic world is divided into three abodes: dār al-islām, the “Abode of Islam,” where Islam rules as a majority religion, that is, where the Islamic Divine Law, or Shari‘ah, governs human life; dār al-sulh, the “Abode of Peace,” where Muslims live as the minority, but are at peace and can practice their religion freely; and finally dār al-harb, the “Abode of Conflict or War,” where Muslims are a minority, but are in conflict with and struggle against the external social and political environment in order to be able to practice their religion.

Had secularism not intruded into the Islamic world beginning in the nineteenth century, one could have simply defined the “Islamic world” as dār al-islām. But today the situation is complicated by the fact that, in many parts of dār al-islām itself, non-Islamic forces have gained a footing, sometimes under the name of a foreign ideology or a Western form of nationalism and sometimes even under the name of Islam itself, which, as already noted, has during the last few decades been done more and more in a cunning and sometimes insidious fashion to hide the real nature of some of the forces at work. Moreover, Muslims in both dār al-sulh (such as India and parts of Africa, where they are in fact not always able to live in peace) and what used to be known as dār al-harb (such as North America and most of Europe in earlier periods of history, but where they now live for the most part in peace) have now come to play an important role in dār al-islām itself, and modern means of communication have linked Muslims in the three “worlds” in a new fashion. It is, therefore, not so easy to define exactly what is meant by the Islamic world on the basis of earlier definitions. For the sake of this discussion, however, let us define it as that part of the world in which there is either an Islamic majority or a substantial Muslim population free to live Islamically, even if the degree of people’s attachment to Islam in all these regions is not exactly the same.

This question of the degree and mode of attachment of Muslims to Islam is itself a crucial question in the discussion of the role of Islam in the Islamic world today. Before modern times, the degree of penetration of Islam within a particular region or ethnic group depended mostly on how long the process of Islamization had been going on. For example, in parts of Indonesia or Black Africa, where Islam had penetrated for only a century or two, the process of Islamization had not been as complete as in other areas where this process had commenced, let us say, four centuries earlier, not to speak of a millennium earlier. In parts of the Islamic world where Islam had had time to sink its roots and establish its institutions, the attachment of Muslims to Islamic practices was of such intensity that one could not easily say whether, for example, the Egyptians, Syrians, Persians, or Punjabis were more strongly attached to Islam, although some communities accentuated the formal, legal aspects and others inner attachment and faith, according to the emphasis of the different schools of law and theology that they followed. Wherever orthodox schools of Islam, whether Sunni or Shī‘ite, were firmly rooted, the complete practice of Islamic precepts and attachment to the teachings of Islam were taken for granted. Differences existed only in such questions as pietistic attitudes, emphasis upon secondary forms of worship (such as pilgrimage to local shrines or certain supererogatory prayers), theological speculations, expressions of sacred art, and so on, which often demonstrated local variation as a result of differences of language, ethnicity, or culture between various Islamic collectivities. At the same time such differences reflected the positive elements of the ethnic genius of the various groups, elements that Islam did not destroy, but allowed to flower within the matrix of the Islamic universe.

In modern times, however, forces such as Western-style nationalism, revival of tribalism and linguistic affinities, and the different ways in which various parts of the Islamic world have experienced the modern world, encountering such forces as colonialism, secular nationalism, racism, and Western secular humanism, have caused a significant variation in the manner and degree of attachment of many Muslims to Islam. A majority of Muslims never miss their daily prayers and live as much as they can by the Shari‘ah, some of whom moreover consider their manner of following Islam to be the only manner. But in contrast to the days of old, there are also others who do not follow all the injunctions of the Shari‘ah or even pray regularly, yet also definitely consider themselves Muslims. And there are even others who do not do anything specifically Islamic except follow a vaguely Islamic kind of “humanistic” ethics, yet call themselves Muslims and would protest if called anything else. And again there is another group who perform the Islamic rites meticulously and yet break many of the moral injunctions of the Shari‘ah (including, for example, honesty in business), while claiming to be devout. Moreover, another, even more vocal minority has now adopted the most violent forms of modern ideology, which it seeks to present to the world as authentic Islam.

From another point of view, there is the majority for whom Islam is essentially an all-embracing ethical and social code, a way of life embodied in the Shari‘ah and, for those who wish to follow the spiritual life, in the Tariqah. And there are those for whom Islam is felt more as a culture and now, as a result of Western influence and reactions against it, as an ideology and political force with which to combat other ideologies. There are now in the Islamic world authentic as well as antitraditional and modernistic interpretations along with countertraditional ones, which are not only against tradition but seek to create a counterfeit to replace tradition. There are, as a result, many degrees and modes of attachment to Islam, especially in those parts of that world that have been long exposed to various types of modernistic influences. Those who speak of a “monolithic” Islam or a uniform wave of “fundamentalism” sweeping over the Islamic world, those who try to scare the West by depicting Islam as a violent enemy unified to oppose the rest of the world are all too unaware of the differences and nuances that exist in the perception of Islam and attachment to it by contemporary Muslims. If Islamic history has taught us anything in this domain, it is that, even in traditional times, no part of dār al-islām could speak for the whole of it and that the reaction of the whole of the Islamic world to such major events and forces as the introduction of Greco-Hellenistic learning, the Crusades, or the Mongol invasion was never uniform. How much more is this true today when the degree of exposure of a college student in any cosmopolitan center of the Middle East to non-Islamic elements is totally different from the exposure of a villager in the same country to these elements, not to speak of radical differences in the degree and manner of modernization and secularization in, let us say, Senegal and Turkey.

Another point of central importance in the study of Islam in the Islamic world today is the all-embracing nature of Islam itself. This still holds ...