Muslims and challenges of modernity “
Dikko I am in trouble”, my colleague in a postgraduate class at Bayero University Kano told me. The colleague who was from the South-East Nigeria , said that officials of his town association in Kano came to his house and asked his wife to repeat her complaint in the presence of her husband. She replied: “my husband is at the verge of converting to Islam. He is always defending Muslims and Islam”.
My colleague went further to explain to me the basis of the fear of his wife: “Based on what we learnt in our course (Contemporary Muslim World Political Experience), I am now more informed about Islam. Any time my wife comes with her prejudices against Islam, I always tell her that she was arguing from the position of ignorance. You don’t understand Islam and is not good to argue on what you don’t know, I always tell her.” The man so much liked the course that he wrote his Msc (Political Science) dissertation on modernization and the role of army in Muslim countries, with Pakistan as a case of study.
The teacher of the course, a Professor of Political Science from an Asian country, told us on the first day that it was a Political Science class, therefore, the emphasis was on analysis. “It is good you refer to the Quran, but just put the verses in bracket. If I am in doubt I will check the reference. Do not use lengthy quotations to escape analysis”, he warned. Of course, he knew what he was saying because he had the whole Quran in his head (Hafiz). It was in this class that we successfully answered the question; Is it possible to create an Islamic state in the contemporary world?
The importance of this story is that rather than using the month of Ramadan to attack people who disagree with them, Islamic scholars should use the month to pull the Muslims out of the crises they found themselves in Nigeria. And the way to do it is to emphasize the understanding of the Quran in relation to contemporary issues.
Unless Muslim scholars in Nigeria try to use Islam to solve the contemporary problems of the Muslims in the country, the danger of the emergence of Kamal Ataturk in Nigeria is always there. As you know, Ataturk was the Turkish leader who emerged a hero by transforming Turkey from the “sick man of Europe” to a modern country. And the unfortunate thing about his emergence was that he attributed the underdevelopment of Turkey to Islam. I remember how sober our class was when our history teacher at Bayero University Kano, Professor Minna was analysing the policies of Ataturk in the class (History of the Middle East) especially his deceleration of Turkey a secular state.
John Whitey Hall (editor) explained the policies of Ataturk clearly in a 921-page book (History of the world): “On 14 October 1923 Ankara officially replaced Istanbul as the capital, and on 29 October the Republic was proclaimed, with Mustafa Kemal as its first president. The proclamation of the republic carried with it the end of the sultanate and the caliphate, both abolished on 3 March 1924. Thereafter there were promulgated a series of measures designed to drag the Turkish people, willingly or unwillingly, into line with twentieth-century Europe. The principles behind these measures were defined by Mustafa Kemal as consisting of republicanism, nationalism, populism, statism, secularism and reformism, and in 1937 they were embodied in the Turkish constitution. Nor were they mere slogans, for the architect of the new Turkey was a man of deeds as well as words. In 1926 the Muslim legal system was replaced by legal codes based on Swiss civil and Italian criminal law. The Muslim calendar was abolished, and the working week ran from Sunday to Sunday instead of from Friday to Friday.
The once-powerful dervish orders were suppressed, and in 1928 Latin script replaced Arabic. In 1934 former titles were abolished, and everyone was required to take European-style surname: Mustafa Kemal took the name of Ataturk, and his faithful lieutenant, Ismet Pasha, that of Inonu to commemorate his two early victories over the Greeks. European clothes became obligatory for men, and clerical dress in particular was outlawed, as was the veiling of women. Polygamy was abolished, and women were given the vote.”(page 674)
I always tell people that the best way to understand the recent comments of the Emir of Kano, Muhammad Sanusi II, is to mirror them from the perspective of a bottled anger of a widely travelled and voracious reader who has come to know and see how Muslims in other parts of the world developed their societies without losing their Islamic identity. He can’t understand, for example, how a governor will use fornication to explain meningitis and failure of leadership.
Islam is an intellectually formidable religion. Muslim scholars have made outstanding contributions to knowledge. In our part of the world, three people from one family (Usman Danfodio, Abdullahi Gwandu and Nana Asma’u) have produced over one hundred books. It is from one of them we got the popular saying that a nation can survive with unbelief but no nation can survive with injustice.
In the last Ramadan, one of the scholars in Nigeria raised an alarm on the danger of Muslims in Nigeria pulling out of the world banking system by establishing their Islamic bank. Rather than arranging for an intellectual discussion to prove the scholar wrong, they resorted to media warfare .They used the whole Ramadan period to attack the scholar. We should learn to accommodate divergent views as long as they are rooted in the Quran or Hadith. Muslims in the world are aware of differences among Malik, Hanbal and Shafi’i. And to date, I am yet to know of anybody arguing that if you associate yourself with the interpretation of one, rather than the other, you have gone astray. Also, nobody has argued that after the three scholars no Muslims should disagree on any issue.
Professor Ali Mazrui has said that modernity has come to stay and that Muslims must find a way of accommodating it. The Hausa people say, “Allah ke da zamani:” i.e. time and change belong to God. Some years back, I had the opportunity to interview Professor Ali Mazrui and I asked him: “you were quoted as saying that modernity has come to stay and that the challenge before the Muslims is to find ways of accommodating it. What really do you mean?” Please permit me to quote his answer extensively. After all, a column is not an intellectual contest, therefore, if somebody has made a solid argument on what I want to say, I just quote him. There is no point re-inventing the wheel to produce a worst wheel.
“That is definitely true - modernity is here, and it is true that huge section of the Muslim world were resisting modernity - they feel that we ought to try to re-capture the 7th century Miladiyya. This, I think is unrealistic because we can’t go back to that time. And if we did go back, we will just be colonised. We better catch up with what is going-on otherwise we will be humiliated more than we have been. We were colonised because we lagged behind. The rest of the world was pushing forward and we didn’t succeed in maintaining the level of scientificity and technology in which we were once leaders and then became followers. We were just spectators. We should really resume becoming major participants in important flows of world history so that we are not dominated and subjugated by others”.
“Well we have to get Muslims to pull out of excessive legalism. This is the major problem. Islamic civilisation flourished when it was ready to engage in creative synthesis. We should be prepared to learn from other civilisations and synthesize it with our own. So we could learn from Indians and use mathematics in new ways, we could learn from the Greeks and teach the West about Ancient Greece. We could synthesize creatively in ways which at that time no other people could. But we stopped this. We stopped being ready to learn from others. Once you stop creative synthesis you stop being part of the forces of civilisation. This was replaced by excessive legalism: is this halal (lawful) or haram (unlawful)? There is no constant pre-occupation with pushing the frontiers of knowledge, finding new things, innovating etc. This is the bondage of legalism which our Ulema put us into, and our militants forced us to adhere to. If you depart from the legalism you are in trouble. We hope that some Muslims will initiate important changes, important reinterpretations. If we involve ijtihad we will find new doors to open and reconcile modernity with Islam, we can have discoveries without feeling that we are sinful. Those of us who live outside heavily populated Muslim countries may find the political space to think afresh without worrying about which army is about to say that is Kufr (laughs)”. (Weekly Trust, August 18-24, 2000, page 3) Happy Ramadan!