Let us now praise great Muslims
TRAILBLAZERS: Little-known intellectual giants and icons of the Islamic world With most of the Muslim world plagued by internecine civil war or ideological divides and sociocultural fault lines, Muslim role models are hard to come by these days. At the same time some are either not widely known or do not command the same attention.
MUSLIMS in general don’t do legacy, heritage and remembrance that well. And, when they do, often it is fraught with dogged deference, shameful sycophancy and blind loyalty. Let’s put urban planning, architectural taste, conservation of historical buildings and areas, and the whole gamut of arts, science and even sports aside for the moment, and consider the issue of role models, mentors and even intellectual icons.
Once again, they fall short, perhaps not entirely their own fault, because of the globalisation effects of socialisation and the pervasive influence and reach of social media.
With most of the Muslim world plagued by internecine civil war or ideological divides and socio-cultural fault lines, Muslim role models are hard to come by these days. At the same time some are either not widely known or do not command the same attention.
When it comes to remembrance, once again Muslims are strangely subdued. Those who shirk the act of remembrance tend to be anti-rationalist and yet time and again are caught by the weight of their own contradictions. Those who revel in remembrance are labelled quasi-deviants.
Of course, sometimes there are exceptions to the rule. When former prime minister of Turkey Necmettin Erbakan, doyen of the Islamist movement and the leader of the Refah (Welfare) Party, passed away in February 2011 there was a genuine outpouring of sympathy from friend and foe alike.
Almost half a million people attended Necmettin Hoca’s funeral, including the military top brass, some of whom were responsible for ousting him in a covert coup in 1997. The ruling establishment even had a term of endearment for him — “Hoca” or teacher.
On the other side of the coin, when Muhammad Asad, the author of Road to Mecca and translator of the Quran passed away in February 1992, only five people attended his funeral in a lonely cemetery in Granada, Spain. This was the man who started life as Leopold Weiss, a (Seated) Author of ‘Road to Mecca’ and translator of the Quran, Muhammad Asad, and his wife, in Jauharabad, Pakistan. (circa 1957)
Ukranian Jew, who converted to Islam and was involved in some of the iconic events in the Muslim world in the 20th century.
Assad, for instance, rode with the then Prince Faisal in the campaign to unite the desert tribes of Arabia, which in the process laid the foundation of the modern state of Saudi Arabia. More amazingly, he was the first plenipotentiary to the United Nations of the nascent Islamic Republic of Pakistan, immediately after partition.
As a young man, I corresponded with Assad who was like a mentor. In the last interview he gave me before his demise, he could not hide his increasing disillusionment with the leadership in several Muslim countries, including and especially Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. His death deprived the world of the sequel to the Road to Mecca, which he had completed halfway.
Perhaps, coincidentally on July 15, the day of the foiled coup attempt in Turkey, the Muslim world was mourning another of its heroes, Professor Dr Nevzat Yalcintas, economist, academic, development banker and member of parliament for both the Refah Party under Erbakan and the AK Party under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and one of the intellectuals of the contemporary Islamic finance and economics movement.
His death had nothing to do with coups or generals or public disaffection, but was a sad coincidence having succumbed to the vagaries of a heart attack at the ripe old age of 83. Yalcintas was on his summer vacation in Catalaca where he fell ill and was rushed to the local state hospital. Despite intensive treatment he could not be revived.
The urbane and genteel professor, with his defining shiny grey white mane of hair, was a mentor and intellectual sounding board for the first generation of Islamic bankers and market players in the contemporary Islamic finance movement.
Yalcintas served on the Board of the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) as Turkey’s representative and also worked for the IDB as an economist and adviser.
He studied economics at the Istanbul High School for Economics and obtained his doctorate from Caen University in France. He was an assistant professor at the London School of Economics.
He taught at several universities and published numerous books and academic articles on Islamic economics and finance, governance, diplomacy and culture.
Above all, like others of his generation including his friend Turgut Ozal, the late Turkish prime minister, then president, strongly believed that Islam and democracy and Islam and modern science are totally compatible.
In this respect he was indeed a Muslim patriot.
mushtakparker@yahoo.co.uk
The writer is