Islam & Modernity

THE   STATESMAN  , NEW DELHI
DECEMBER  06 , 2001

ISLAM & MODERNITY-I         The Contradictions Of Holy Wars

BY    SWAMI  AGNIVESH  and   VALSON  THAMPU
(authors'  introduction is  at the end)

General Pervez Musharraf is carving out for himself a place in the sun. Future historians of Islam could profile him as a gambler in Islam’s transition from a negative to a positive engagement with the challenge of modernity. The truth about the suffering of Muslims around the world is that they hurt themselves by beating back the waves of reform that leaders like the Shah of Iran and Nasser of Egypt tried to usher in. The fact that bigots like Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran and Mulla Omar in Afghanistan prevailed over their progressive rivals is a commentary on the mindset shaped over decades.

Shutting one’s mind on the currents of the times is no proof of intellectual or spiritual vitality. Rather, the contrary. The religious elite in every religion and age has enjoyed the exclusive right to define and direct the religiosity of their people. As is to be expected, this is done necessarily with a view to reinforcing their own class interests. It is an irresistible temptation for the power-wielders of the world to turn their supporters into unthinking and ardent devotees, the substance of whose devotion can be directed at will.

Intruders
Seen from this perspective, the spread of rationality, free thinking, and intellectual objectivity are unwelcome intruders. The manipulators of all religious communities have abhorred the spread of light in various ways. They have had enviable success in persuading their followers into believing that this light is nothing but a deceptive form of darkness. It is this that delays the engagement between Islam and the rational forces of modernity to a greater extent than has been the case with most other religions.

This is not to argue that everything about modernity is rational or desirable. Modernity itself was turned into a religion of sorts: the religion of the materialistic world, with all the aberrations that necessarily go with it. It is an interplay of light and darkness, making it easy for those who wish to demonise it by focusing only on its hedonistic and narcissistic faces. This enabled the likes of Khomeni and Mullah Omar to evoke an atavistic fear of modernity in their followers.

The interesting thing, though, is that the engagement between Islam and modernity is under way already. The material tools and weapons of Islamic fundamentalism are borrowed entirely from technology, which is the faceless god of modernity. The terrorists flying commercial aircraft into the trade towers in New York bristles with this symbolic irony.

Hypocrisy
Only the proverbial fundamentalist hypocrisy can live at peace with the glaring self-contradiction of fighting holy wars using the weapons developed by the infidels, the spread of whose demonic culture is assumed to spell doom to one’s God and religion. The irony is this: it is perfectly legitimate for Islam, in its fundamentalist caricature, to welcome the means and tools of violence afforded by modernity, whereas it is sinful to accept what is positive in it. The self-appointed, bigoted leaders are allergic to modernity’s insistence on human rights and dignity, free thinking and free movements, progress, equality and human welfare. They are quite comfortable, though, in putting up with mounting human suffering, poverty, violation of human rights, illiteracy, injustice and backwardness. It is time that this hypocrisy is seen for what it is. Look at the oil-rich sheikdoms in the Middle East who compete among themselves in displaying their zeal for Islam. The Sheik of Abu Dhabi in UAE, for example, began to build a mosque recently that would have surpassed its rival in Mecca. This was opposed by his Saudi counterpart, whose will has prevailed in the matter, causing enormous confusion and loss of money. For all the religious fervour, what one sees in the Middle Eastern cities is not Islamic austerity but western consumerism at its zenith. But for the innumerable mosques that dot these cityscapes, everything about them is awash with the culture of the infidels.

Watershed
Afghanistan could prove a watershed in the historical evolution of Islam by compelling a re-examination of the strategy, so far, of unthinking negativity to whatever is modern. Events since 11 September has exposed the deep fissures on the façade of Pan-Islamic solidarity upon which Osama bin Laden, like Saddam a decade ago, staked his life. The fast-developing scenario in Afghanistan proves that the challenge of modernity cannot be met with a medievalist mindset, even if you have the destructive weapons of modernity. The standoff in Afghanistan is not between Christianity and Islam, but between the progressive and the regressive mindsets. It is irreligious to lend the legitimacy of religion to a retrograde project that drags the people back to medievalism. The religious task is not to put the clock back. It is, instead, to engage every society and every age from a pro-active outlook so as to infuse it with the values that are necessary to safeguard its health and to maximise the welfare of its people. A religion that seeks to anchor a people in the past and cripple their capacity to live effectively in the present condemns itself to irrelevance.

Assumptions
One of the perennial traits of the religious outlook, when it is uninformed by spirituality, is the lack of objectivity. The custodians of religion tend to take everyone else on their own terms. The Sangh Parivar’s arbitrary assumptions about Ayodhya are a case in point. So also, Musharraf’s insistence that there should be no bombing in Afghanistan during the holy month of Ramzan. Does he want the bombing to stop because, war being unholy, it is unwelcome in the holy month? If war is unholy, how can any war be holy for those who are outside of one’s own religious fold? If some wars can be holy, and every group has the right to decide arbitrarily what is holy and what is not, what is there to prevent the Americans from claiming that they too are waging a holy war: the war of “enduring justice” diplomatically re-christened “war on terrorism”?

In this globalising world no group can continue to impose its own exclusive norms and priorities on others. The call to call off bombing in the holy month is not made any more credible by shooting Christian worshippers on Sunday, their holy day. Apparently, those who burst into the church on that fateful Sunday morning and massacred the innocents there were also pious Muslims: pious at least according to the bin Laden version of Islam. The incapacity for objectivity evident in this case is also reflected in the bloody rhetoric in Palestine that sets the right of the Palestinians to exist as a separate and viable state in opposition to that of the Jews.
(To be concluded)

THE  STATESMAN , NEW DELHI
DECEMBER 07 ,  2001

ISLAM & MODERNITY-II

By Swami Agnivesh and Valson Thampu

To engage modernity is not to compromise with it or to succumb to it. As a matter of fact, to remain willfully disengaged from it is to aggravate the danger of being penetrated by it and to capitulate to it eventually. This is true about whatever we dodge or disengage from, as is evident from the history of our country as well. Contrary to the universal Vedic vision, Brahminical Hinduism evolved a territorial and insular religious outlook that remained negative to the forces beyond our borders. Everything beyond our boundaries was a source of pollution, of which the taboo in crossing the seas is a familiar example. It is inevitable that we fail to develop the skills and means necessary to cope with what we choose to exclude or overlook.

The emergence of the global order redefines distances and boundaries between communities and nations in a shrinking global village. It adds unprecedented urgency to the need for multi-religious and multi-cultural inter-faces. Mercifully, there have been signs in recent times of the stirrings of sporadic awareness in the Islamic world of the need to engage the forces of modernity.

Institute
One of the present authors, on a recent visit to the Institute of Ecumenics in Dublin, Ireland, came across two Muslim students from Egypt sent there by their organisations to learn Christian theology. In the course of the conversation with them it came to light that their placement at the Dublin Institute signals a new keenness in certain quarters in the Islamic world to evolve the theological and cultural tools to negotiate modernity, a need that the Islamic world had neglected for long. Readers would remember the founding of an Islamic research centre in Paris a few years ago to evolve the dynamics for meeting the challenges of modernity from an Islamic perspective. While these new stirrings are there, they remain few and far-between. An earnest engagement between Islam and modernity, on the scale appropriate to the realities of today, is still to begin.

Among the factors that obstruct this long overdue process are the predominance of the oil-rich sheikdoms in the Islamic world on the one hand, and of the tradition-bound clergy, keen more to retain their control over the faithful than to equip them to live amidst the challenges of our times. By nature and culture, Muslim rulers are allergic to the ideals of liberal democracy, with its insistence on freedom of thought and expression. It is not an accident that the recent meeting of the WTO took place in Doha, Qatar: a choice dictated clearly by the need to protect the WTO deliberations from the groundswell of popular resentment all over the world.

Irony
Only the sheikdoms of the Middle East can assure the WTO of total insulation from the anger of the people against the insidious anti-people and anti-poor agenda of globalisation. This, too, is part of the irony of our times that the economic juggernaut devised by the keepers of democracy needs to be showcased in the sterile serenity of an un-democratic theology. Be that as it may, what concerns us here is the fact that the petro-rich Sheiks, who virtually dictate Islamic culture and religiosity today, have a vested interest in keeping the rational ferment of modernity at bay, even as they go after consumerist pleasures.

Press freedom
The freedom of the hypermarket is welcome, but a free press is a danger to be kept at bay at all costs. As long as this situation remains unchallenged, the engagement between Islam and modernity is unlikely to begin in right earnest or make any real headway.

But history is moving fast in a different direction. The sun is setting on the assured inviolability of nation states. Nations and cultures are being coerced into taking stands. President Bush’s matter-of-fact assertion, “Those who are not with us, are against us” is a pointer in this direction. It is remarkable how the Arab and Muslim nations have been keen to avoid even suggestions of any anti-American posturings, and how quickly many of them boarded the US bandwagon. Cultures and religions are today in a state of unprecedented proximity. They jostle each other for space and advantage. General Musharraf, for example, outpaced Vajpayee in joining the US-led anti-terrorism enterprise. This leaves us with only the option to engage. Especially so, since 11 September.

Attempts have been made to cast this historical reality in the specious mould of a civilisational conflict between Islam and Christianity. The truth that emerges from the upheavals in Afghanistan has a different flavour though. The total rout of the Taliban under the dual pressures of American bombing and the push of the Northern Alliance constitutes a unique geo-political scenario with cascading historical overtones. It betokens the vulnerability of the assumptions on which the Islamic psyche has been conditioned for much of the modern age.

In a sense this has been in the offing for some time now. It was not religious verses but American weapons that the Taliban used in fighting the erstwhile Soviet Union. The Taliban had little difficulty in harmonising the moral high ground of their fundamentalist project, including their ruthless zeal for “suppressing vices and promoting virtues’’ with the allurement of drug-traffic and abetting acts of inter-national terrorism, including the hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight.

Infidels
The collapse of the Taliban must bring the curtain down on the crudity of a so-called religious outlook that adopts what is evil and destructive in the infidels and demonises what is good and positive in them. Islam needs to emerge from the noose of negativity that today chokes its scope for spiritual effervescence and begin to play its rightful role in shaping a just and egalitarian world order.

This process needs to begin in the sphere of education. There is an urgent need to reform the madrassas and promote liberal and rational education in the Muslim community all over the world, especially in India. Until the ordinary Muslim is handed over the tools of objective thinking, analysis and decision-making, the present archaic and lamentable situation is unlikely to change for the better. And if it does not, Afghanistan could repeat itself.

(Concluded)

AUTHORS' PROFILE

His Holiness Shri Swami Agnivesh

7, Jantar Mantar Road, New Delhi - 110001
Phone- 011-3366765/7943
Fax - 011-3368355
E-mail : agnivesh@vsnl.com

Swami Agnivesh is well known for his work in various fields of social work. He has held several important positions such as Chairperson of the United Nations Trust Fund on Contemporary Forms of Slavery, Chairperson of Bandhua Mukti Morcha (Bonded Labour Liberation Front) and General Secretary of Bhartiya Arya Pratinidhi Sabha. He was a former Member of the Haryana Legislative Assembly (1977-1982) and Minister of Education of Haryana in 1979. His present mission involves networking with various religious leaders of all major faiths, Women's organizations and social-political activists in their effort to carry out anti-liquor movements throughout India, strengthening the Arya Samaj movement to fight against various forms of casteism, communalism, religious obscurantism and other social evils. He has been actively involved in assisting women's movement with a view to ensuring their equal participation in all walks of life.

He is committed to continue to fight against bonded labour, child labour, child prostitution by making Right to Minimum Wage & Right to Education, Fundamental Rights. He has been trying to get the religious debate into the mass media such as Radio and T.V.

Swami Agnivesh has to his credit various published books like Vedic Socialism, Religion, Revolution and Marxism and has published various articles on national, social and political issues in leading newspapers and magazines. He was the Chief Editor of 'Rajdharma' a fortnightly magazine 'Kranti Dharma' a monthly magazine. He has been awarded the Anti-Slavery International Award, London, 1990 and Freedom and Human Rights Award, Bern, Switzerland, 1994. He has been striving for establishing a liberal, egalitarian society based on tolerance and mutual accommodation and  co-ordinating efforts under the banner of 'Religions for Social Justice'. 

FR.   VALSON THAMPU   IS   MEMBER MINORITIES COMMISION  AND SOCIAL  ACTIVIST