A Night Out + My Thoughts on 'Da'wah'

Dr Abdullah Periyardhasan struts his stuff

The other day I had the opportunity to attend a talk by Dr Periyadhasan, these days also better known as Dr. Abdullah, well-known Indian psychologist, politician, former film star and visiting professor at the University of California - oh yes, and celebrity Muslim convert. The talk, themed "Atheism to Islam", outlined his journey from Hinduism to atheism to flirtations with Buddhism and Christianity, and finally to the deen of Muhammad s.a.w. (btw, I wonder what the reaction would have been if this was an atheist event titled "Islam to Atheism"?)

After accidently walking into the sister's section, I was directed to the bloke's entrance where I perused the tables the hosting organization had loaded with various books - the usual stuff on how to achieve domestic harmony, treatises on the afterlife, "comparative religion" etc. as well as the obligatory material from petrodollar-rich Saudi publishing houses. After a little squiz, we were ushered into the lecture room where I observed that the vast majority of the audience were very obviously Muslim. After a brother recited an extract from Surah an-Nisa, the talk began in earnest.

Speaking in accented but articulate English, Dr. Abdullah proceeded to tell us of his spiritual journey. From his disillusionment with the expense and cruelty of Hindu rituals, then atheist anthropocentricism, Buddhist hedonism and hypocrisy before his final satisfaction in Islam, he (perhaps needless to say) had the audience largely on his side, even cracking a few well-received jokes now and then. I got the impression that he was basically a pretty good bloke.

After a break (and a $2 slice of pizza in my case), we reconvened in the theatre where a dude showed us a trailer of his organization's new historical presentation - "Crusades II - Mongol Scourge" complete with sinister music and a burning pile of decapitated heads (in the trailer, not real life!), after which a bunch of cute little poppets came up to sing "The Heart of a Muslim"  by Zain Bhikha. Unfortunately, I couldn't stay for the scheduled Q&A session with Dr. Abdullah.

When he was finishing his talk, Dr. Abdullah stated that he wasn't interested in converting non-Muslims. However, the whole experience got me thinking about the current status of da'wah in this society of ours.

Islam doesn't nearly have much of a proselytizing tradition as western Christianity, although it does see activities of outreach and invitation, which can be directed at both existing Muslims (e.g to strengthen their knowledge and faith) and non-Muslims.

I've noticed several patterns in contemporary da'wah practices. The first is the "comparative" approach. This involves pointing out (real or perceived) fallacies and weaknesses in other beliefs, and setting them up against a superior equivalent of your own belief system. "Oh lol, Hindus worship cows! Weez has a real God!" "Them atheists got no morality!" etc etc. etc. (without meaning to state that Dr. Abdullah actually said any of this)  However, this has very real disadvantages. At best, such an approach, when self-directed, only contributes to the development of pride in one's heart and at worst, contributes to parochialism and fanaticism. When directed at others, it simply serves to offend and further distance them from the da'i (performer of dawah).
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Then there is the "apologetic" approach. This employs the use of rational arguments to defend one's religion, and to demonstrate that it is not irrational, or contradicts current trends, or science or human nature. For example, we can argue how Islam does not contradict 'democracy' or women's rights', or how the Quran mentions scientific facts. In my opinion, regardless of the validity of the arguments, this approach is merely passive and anaemic. It just serves to implicitly affirm the superiority of the dominant paradigm and its centrality in determining norms. Islam only becomes as valuable as its success in being an appendage to current fashions, rather than as a viable alternative in its own right. Thus we have things like "Islamic Feminism", "Islamic Socialism" and so on. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence will fail to be persuaded by such a presentation. If I'm an atheist, why don't I ignore "Islamic Feminism" and go with plain old "Feminism" instead?

And then we have the "Fire and Brimstone" approach. When I was university, during one "O-Week" our Islamic Society set up a stall which included such delightful material as some brochures expounding all the terrible punishments in hell dealers in interest money wll face......says it all, really.

Dr Abdullah's presentation itself was good insofar as it was an account of his own experiences in life. However, much of the packaging of the event only served to further perpetuate such counterproductive da'wah. Elements which could have been beneficial to Muslims too often just felt like exercises in self-congratulation, and elements which could have benefited non-Muslims felt rather more like plain-old turn-offs.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Islam is a treasure chest of gems - we should just show these gems! What's the point of having leaflets on the comparative merits of Islam and Christianity, or hackneyed brochures on how Islam does not condone terrorism when we have things like Rumi's Masnavi and Farid ud-Din Attar's Conference of the Birds, or the works of Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Al-Ghazali? Why pontificate on how Islam promotes respect of people when we could simply make a habit of smiling at the bus driver, or try out at a soup kitchen? Certainly more effective at giving a good impression than threats of damnation!

We have such a rich tradition, a living tradition and we should plumb it. For a people who value their own religion so much, it is ironic that we so often look to the likes of Evangelical Christianity to inspire our activities.

Wa Allahu a'lam

Pew Research Center: Religious Knowledge in the US

Assalamu aleikum/G'day/Gutentag/Konnichiwa/你好,

Not to long ago the Pew Research Center conducted a survey in which 3,412 Americans were asked to answer 32 questions on religion. The survey found that:

" On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education."

Predictably, the blogosphere was soon filled with significant amounts of self-congratulatory chatter. For instance, in response to an entry on the Guardian website about this topic (which contained a link to a 15-question sample survey), reader comments such as the following could be found:

"well of course the atheists know their stuff - we're the ones who have actually applied some thought and enquiry to the concept!"

 and

"Atheists do better in this quiz because we are better educated and better informed. We are interested in other people's points of view and take the trouble to learn about them before making decisions. As an atheist, I got 14\15."

Now, one of the fundamental concepts in academia is the acknowledgement of the difference between the hard data itself, and the interpretation of the data. It is very natural to infer from the results of the survey that the survey itself is a manifestation of a truth that atheists and agnostics benefit from inherent superiority in the field of intellect. However, such a conclusion fails to take into account the fact that the basic finding of this 32-question survey of 3,412 Americans was exactly that - that of a group of 3,412 Americans asked 32 questions, atheists and agnostics on average got the most number of questions right out of the 32 questions asked.

It is worth asking ourselves:

1. What exactly was the nature of these questions? Is this significant?
2. Of what significance is the number of questions asked?
3. Of what significance is the sample size?
4. How was it that the atheists/agnostics got the most questions right on average? What is the meaning of such a result?
5. It is stated that "Data from the survey indicate that educational attainment – how much schooling an individual has completed – is the single best predictor of religious knowledge." So, what is the relationship between lack of religion and educational attainment? Is there a relationship? And what kind of relationship is it anyway?
6. What reflection is such a high score of an individual's intelligence and wisdom?

So, do people like the writers of the above two comments have it in the bag? Or are they merely victims of the likes of confirmation bias and illusory correlation? After all, can't one also suggest that the study only goes to show the atheistic tendency for gathering of superficial trivia at the expense of any real sort of understanding?

Blind men, here is your elephant!

An Interview with Seyyed Hossein Nasr - Today's Zaman

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

‘So-called Islamic universities following Western tradition’

 Renowned Iranian thinker and academic Seyyed Hossein Nasr told Sunday’s Zaman that most of the so-called Islamic universities in the Muslim world are not Islamic in the sense that they operate within the framework of a Western worldview.

“Their successes are successes of Western science,” Nasr said. According to Nasr, as long as Muslim educational institutions continue to copy Western science without engaging in any endeavor to internalize it, the Muslim tradition will continue to be destroyed. Professor Nasr is not altogether pessimistic, though. He observes that a new generation of Muslim intellectuals and scientists is being produced in certain Muslim countries. “Even when they write about Derrida, Heidegger, modern astrophysics or something like that, they try to speak from a perspective of a Muslim tradition,” he said.

Professor Nasr is particularly fond of the intellectual productivity he has witnessed in Turkey and Iran, whereas Western philosophy seems to be stuck at a dead end.

Nasr was in İstanbul to speak at a conference held as part of the UN-backed Alliance of Civilizations initiative, Sunday’s Zaman interviewed Nasr, who is regarded as a prime traditionalist, about the Muslim tradition, intellectual productivity in the East and the West and about the relationship between knowledge and the socio-cultural milieu it is produced in.

In the preface to “The Heart of Islam,” you say you wrote all your works to preserve tradition. What does tradition mean to you and why is its preservation so important?

The English word tradition is used in different ways, including customs, habits and historical transmission, but for me tradition means a reality of sacred origin which is given to humanity through revelation. Through preservation and application of that teaching, of that sacred instruction, our civilization was created. The same is true for the Western civilization. The Christian civilization was created by the coming of Christ. That is the beginning of the Christian tradition, and then it created the Western civilization with many forms of sacred Christian architecture, theology, ethics and forms of social structure. In Islam we have the Quranic revelation. That’s the beginning of the Islamic tradition and then the whole civilization is created with its art, with its social structure, with its laws and so forth. It is important to preserve this tradition because we believe that it comes from God, that it is reality.

So you don’t support the historicist claims about contextuality of revealed sacred texts?

We reject that completely. God always speaks in the language of the people to whom He addresses His message, but the sociological understanding of revelation is rejected by us. That is itself a completely anti-traditional idea. All Muslims for 1,400 years believed that the Quran comes from God, that it is not a product of pre-Islamic Arabian society or Mecca.

Do you make a distinction between the revelation of the Quran by God into the heart and mind of the Prophet and its understanding by the Prophet as a historical thing?

No, the Prophet was chosen by God and was protected from making errors. He was also protected by the Archangel. The Prophet’s understanding of the Quran is a guarantee for our correct understanding of the Quran.

There is a dependence on Western literature in the Muslim world by means of educational material. How will we preserve tradition if even on the most basic of issues we are dependant on a foreign tradition?

We will not be able to do so if we continue like this. Everything we do is copying from another civilization. Obviously it is going to end up by destroying our own civilization, and much of it has already been destroyed in the last 200 years. Education is a very, very key issue. When the West first began to colonize the Islamic world, they began with military forces, naval forces in the Mediterranean Sea and then land forces in North Africa. They soon followed by trying to dominate over the Islamic world by means of education, and since they had more knowledge of the natural world, natural sciences, many Muslims accepted this, and gradually the Western educational system spread throughout the Islamic world. I believe that what we have to do is to teach Western sciences, but not from the Western perspective. We have to recreate our own educational system. Even theology is being dominated now in certain places by just copying in a very weak way. I say “in a very weak way” because Western theology is not strong enough to persist.

How universal is the university? Can we speak of an Islamic university?

There is always a relationship between every form of knowledge and a worldview within which that knowledge is accepted as knowledge. There is no doubt about that. The worldview in all civilizations before modern times came from religion. This is true for every civilization. Hindu universities, Chinese universities, Islamic universities -- but as Western influence spreads all over the world, we will begin to emulate Western forms of knowledge, which claim to now be independent of religion. But it was not independent of the Christian worldview. The secularist paradigm which was created in the 17th century is itself a pseudo-religion in that it is a view of the nature of reality. There is no abstract knowledge; knowledge is always within the framework of a worldview, of a way of looking at the nature of reality.

Are there any Islamic universities in the world?

Since the first World Muslim Congress was held in the 1970s in Mecca, they decided to create Islamic universities throughout the Islamic world, and several have been created in Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan and elsewhere. They are called Islamic universities, but they are not really Islamic universities because they teach the Shariah, Arabic and Islamic history, but the other subjects are not integrated. In other places, they tried to take the old madrasa and modernize it, like al-Azhar University. The university itself is an Islamic university, but not the medical school. The medical school does not teach Islamic medicine. The school of architecture doesn’t produce Muslim architects. They copy Western architecture with a Muslim name. The name is Ahmet instead of John. But it is possible to have an Islamic university.

How will the Islamic philosophical worldview be revived?

I believe that all important intellectual transformations begin with a few, not with the many. When the modern scientific worldview came about, at the beginning, at the time of Galileo, there weren’t more than 20 people in Europe who understood and accepted what they were saying. The transformation always comes with the few.

Do you see new intellectual minds emerging in the Muslim world?

Definitely! Fifty years ago there were only two types of intellectuals in the Islamic world. One were those traditional ulama -- great scholars of Arabic, theology and Islamic law -- and the other type of intellectuals were totally Westernized intellectuals, but God does not figure in Western scientific thought. But 50 years later, now, we have a number of younger intellectuals in Turkey itself, in Malaysia, in Indonesia, in Iran, in Pakistan -- mostly in these five countries. Even when they write about Derrida and Heidegger, they try to speak from the perspective of a Muslim tradition. This is a very, very good sign. We didn’t have that 50 years ago. I have a lot of hopes for the future, and I spent all my life trying to create that. InshaAllah [God-willing] something will come out of it.

But is there still an intellectual infertility in the Muslim world?

I don’t usually see that in the same way. In Iran we have leading and incredible scientists doing all kinds of things in physics and in nuclear science. The fact that Islam has not made such a big contribution to Western science is a cultural problem. It is not a scientific problem. We lost our self-confidence, we lost the confidence in ourselves, we just try to copy the West. There are excellent Turkish heart surgeons or Arab heart surgeons in the US. But to make it a civilization of your own is something else. That was not done very much because of a lack of self-confidence.

What about the West? At least speaking about philosophy, it seems the West is passing through a kind of paralysis also.

The West is now undergoing a very, very severe intellectual crisis. The reason why people are not aware of it is because of the power of technology and the military might of the West. It is like the end of the Roman Empire. As long as the Roman legends were leading in Libya, nobody thought that something was wrong. It is a very similar situation. Western philosophy is now at a dead end. Even Heidegger said, Western philosophy ends with me. There is a philosophical crisis and a religious crisis as a result of that. After that comes the environmental crisis, which is not solved unless the West changes completely the way it lives, its worldview, and they don’t want to do it. So they use cosmetics all the time. Look at the Gulf of Mexico now. It is a great tragedy of human history. Nobody wants to talk about it. So the West is also experiencing a very, very large crisis, and I’d say it is suicide for us to try to blindly copy the West at this stage.

How did the West come to this point?

In a sense, if we speak in Islamic terms, the leaders of the society in the West decided to sacrifice the akhira to the dunya completely [Nasr is referring to Quran 2:86, which reads: “These are the people who buy the life of this world (ad-dunya) at the price of the Hereafter (al-akhira).”] The great German poet Goethe in “Faust” speaks about this. Faust sells his soul to the devil in order to get power and technology. So everything is sacrificed for material ends and earthly human welfare. But we also have spiritual needs.

Can we update Western democracy into a new system where our spiritual needs are also provided for?

First of all, democracy is a method; it is not a value system. It is a method of government, and it is a question of having more people participate. Look at the Ottoman world -- very powerful sultans sat here in İstanbul, and people claim that there was no democracy in the Ottoman state. But who elected all the village elders who ran all of Anatolia? It wasn’t the sultans sitting in Topkapı Palace. It was the local people. There was a lot of internal democracy within the Islamic world even at that time. Now it is possible to develop an Islamic model of democracy on a more macro level without sacrificing the spiritual values. But it is something that Muslims have to work on, and we are in a terrible situation when it comes to the field of politics.

During the last 200 years, the power of governance in the Islamic world has increased, not decreased. It increased step-by-step. As a result, all our institutions have been destroyed. We are now looking for models based on Western civilization, and they don’t always work because those institutions grew out of a particular civilization. What it needs is creativity and adaptation. Democracy is also not ideal in the West. Money is much more powerful than the individual. We see this in the US. You cannot even participate in a nomination for a party unless you’re a millionaire to begin with.

Please comment on the idea that original and innovative ideas need freedom to blossom. Looking from this perspective, how do you evaluate the atmosphere of freedom and democracy in Turkey?

First of all, let me talk about “new ideas needing freedom in order to blossom.” What happened to the word “truth”? Where is truth in this matter? Every new idea is not a good idea. Politically, we don’t believe that Karl Marx’s ideas, which were very new, were very good also. They killed tens of thousands of people during the next 100 years after his death. Truth is the criteria. And in every society, there must be this ambiance in which ideas are tested and only true ideas survive. Islamic civilization in its golden age created this ambiance. Otherwise it would not have produced such great philosophers. People debated each other and opposed each other, but they did not oppose the oneness of God. That was like a sky over everything. But within that, there was freedom of discussion. We already lost that. That has become more and more restrictive in the last century with the rise of modernism, which in the name of freedom destroyed the whole atmosphere of the Islamic ambiance. So you were free only if you expressed Western ideas; otherwise, you would be put in prison.

Now the atmosphere in Turkey is fairly good. I am not saying ideal, but the two countries which have the greatest field of intellectuals are in Turkey and Iran. Pure philosophy, which is the heart of all scientific development, is produced more in Iran and Turkey than in the rest of the Islamic countries. I think Turkey and Iran have the largest number of books coming out which seriously deal with these intellectual matters.



23 May 2010, Sunday


KERİM BALCI / ŞEYMA AKKOYUNLU İSTANBUL

Source: www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/news-210911-so-called-islamic-universities-following-western-tradition.html

The Reactive Nature of Muslim Thought

*This is an edited version of a previous essay of mine*

The topic of Islam (or indeed, any religion in general) and its relationship with science and other intellectual disciplines is obviously a touchy issue. Two stereotypes tend to dominate in the present psyche – regressive primitives, and modern reformists. The later is often praised, but more often than not this is undeserved. The religion today suffers not only from the sicknesses of the old, but those of the new – not many people appreciate the dangers of modernist thought in the sciences and humanities to the intellectual state of humanity at large. In today’s increasingly globalised world, it is essential that Muslims and other followers of genuine religions understand themselves in regards to this issue.

In Islam, there are essentially two main classes of people concerned with religious, intellectual and philosophical questions: the ulema and other authorities, and the religious modernists. Respectively these groups often occupy these general attitudes towards science as well as other things ‘Western’. The first is a trend that has become unfortunately very prevalent amongst the puritanical movement; that is, the rejection of science and ‘Western things’ altogether. The second, preserve of the modernists, is an obsession with Western science, and the belief that the West is strong because of science.

That is, that one can espouse the merits of Western science whilst performing one’s religious obligations, and everything will be hunky-dory. That the problems of Western science are not due to intellectual clashes, but ones of ethical application in that Western science is safe and sound if you just apply Islamic ethics. This viewpoint fails to recognize that science is not an objective entity in itself, but value-determined and based upon the imposition of culturally-specific categories and assumptions on nature – if one civilization is to make use of the science of another, it must adapt it to its own framework.

The values and assumptions that drive contemporary Western science have gained man prodigious knowledge in certain areas but is ultimately narrow and unconcerned with the deeper aspects of reality. The ultimate goal of Islamic science is integrative; promoting the contemplation of the universe, and using the insight gained from such contemplation to improve the self and remould it to become more in accordance with the divine decree, and thus also improve the surrounding world. Modern science in contrast is characterized by the dispersive externalization of action and the violent tearing apart of man and nature.

Likewise, in regards to philosophy, modernized Muslims and Easterners in general constantly compare this Eastern philosopher to that Western philosopher, in an effort to give respectability to the former. This fails to acknowledge the fact that contemporary Western philosophy is essentially different to that of the East. The majority Occidental trend is to place emphasis on and conflate philosophy with reason, with its concern with analysis and sense data, at the expense of a wholistic approach which treats reason as but one faculty amongst others. Eastern philosophy traditionally operates only as an aspect of a larger path. The anti-metaphysical character of modern Western philosophy means that if we do not consider this distinction, then all efforts at comparison will fail as we reduce all content to the lowest common denominator.

Such attempts at synthesis are the wolf in sheep’s clothing. The modernists, with their particular educational background, have a fetish for all things western and a sense of inferiority related to all things Islamic, mistaking their own disequilibrium for that of the religion itself. This is the greatest problem of the Muslim world and most deeply afflicts those who would be most expected to face the challenges of the west and modernity. I do not criticize the West, I do not criticize Western culture per se, but I do criticize the problems that have developed in the West.

What is lacking in the Muslim world today is a thorough examination and careful criticism of all that is happening in the modern world. The conflation of Western science with Islamic science has produced many Muslim scientists, but very few Islamic scientists. Unless one applies an Islamic world view, attempts to harmonize Islam and modern western phenomena are doomed because the appropriate evaluative criteria are bypassed. Islam is seen as a partial entity to be complemented by some modern ideology rather than as a complete system and world view in itself. The rapidly changing whims of the day are itself proof of the fallacy of such an approach, and ideologically-charged movements in general which universalize the contextually specific.

We live in a time where paradoxically, as people in the West become more aware of the peaking and gradual deterioration of their civilizational paradigm, modernized Muslims have begun to be a force to be reckoned with. Even with the weakening of confidence in the west, Muslims are still on the receiving end in both ideas and material objects, from philosophy down to fashion. Lacking confidence in their own intellectual tradition, many modernized Muslims are like a blank slate waiting for input from the West, the precise ideas they receive depending on which country or region they have the strongest association with. People rarely bother to adopt a truly Islamic intellectual attitude which operates from an immutable centre and in a positive manner of discernment.

Modernized Muslims praise Islam because they say it paved the way for the Renaissance and Enlightenment. This is true, but is has often been forgotten that the Islamic elements were only used after being deprived of their distinctive character and broader philosophical framework. This value criterion is made doubly ludicrous since it was the Renaissance and Enlightenment which became the breeding grounds for so many of the problems facing humanity today.

Too many Muslims are unaware of not only the roots of western movements, but the history and development of such movements and wait until they occupy centre stage in the western psyche, and only then they start to at like it existed. For example, in the case of environmental degradation, how many Muslims did not wait until Al Gore made his movie based on a Powerpoint presentation before even thinking about it?! And how few have thought about it in the light of the rich intellectual Islamic traditions concerning nature? Unfortunately, such study has mostly been made only as a result of an inferiority complex in an effort to prove that ‘the Muslims did it first’. Rarely is this heritage treated as a legitimate path in itself.

In their attempts to confront the problems of modernity, Muslims are constantly using apologetics and jumping through hoops to show somehow that this or that element of Islam corresponds to whatever is fashionable in the west at the present (I myself admit that I was frequently guilty of this in the past), while other elements for which there are no western equivalent are ignored. For example Muslims often make such a big fuss about the egalitarian nature of Islam not because they necessarily see it as true in the Islamic framework (which it is), but because egalitarianism is what is currently popular in the West. By affirming such obvious and easily defensible things, they have evaded the basic challenge which threatens the heart of Islam itself. It is through the lack of a critical and discerning spirit that many modernized Muslims possess a passive, servile and docile attitude towards whatever thought is in vogue. Superficialities like gangsta rap and what women wear at the beach are easily criticized, but few bother to tackle the fundamental fallacies of our times.

I have talked about the two main groups of the traditionalists and the modernists. But a third group is gradually arising, who are traditional like the ulema but also know the modern world. It is precisely members of this third group that we need more of.

To save Islam, a true intelligentsia needs to be developed which is both traditional and fully conversant with the modern world. Traditionalists as described here too often resort to answering the challenges of the modern West merely through religious jurisprudence (even in interactions with non-Muslims!). Muslims need to revive the study of Islamic sciences and humanities. They need to abandon their sense of inferiority and go on the intellectual offensive and not just the defensive without succumbing to so-called ‘traditional’ ideologies which are ironically actually products of modernist thought, such as Wahabism.

Contemporary Muslims must act from where and what they are – physically, culturally, and spiritually -  if they and humanity in general are to have a hope of coping with the problems of modernism. In turn, by learning from the Islamic intellectual disciplines, the West will greatly benefit by rediscovering the truths which were at the heart of its traditions but were forgotten or discarded with time. By basing their understandings on this rather than subjective and ever-changing modern trends, the East/West divide itself can be transcended, both geographically and within one’s own being.