Sunday, December 6, 2009
Opening
To know only what is known is a tragedy. (Zhuangzi)
A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war -- wide awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it, will live to regret his steps.
Don Juan Matus (Carlos Castenada)
U R
On the Third Way
So what is the Third Way (3W)?
The Third Way is the Way of the intelligentsia, of the intellectual community.
Who are the members of the intellectual community?
First and foremost everyone who is in a school, college, or university is a member of the intelligentsia. Following them, everyone who has been to the school, college, or university, or who wishes to enter any such institution, is also the member of the intellectual community.
What are the other two ways or perspectives from which the third Way distinguishes itself?
While the first way is advocated by the modernist, secular intelligentsia, the second way is upheld by the religious intelligentsia. The first one was founded by the Western intelligentsia between the 16th to 18th centuries and is now also followed by many in the non-Western world. Modern or secular intelligentsia is internally divided into liberal and Marxist camps. These two camps are together also referred to by the word modernity.
The second way emerged in opposition to the first way after its global domination. It is presently espoused chiefly by the religious intelligentsia in Pakistan and the Islamic world. It is also advocated by the intelligentsias of other religions, such as Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism and so forth.
The advocates of the first and the second ways or perspectives are currently at war with each other. The third Way offers a peaceful way out of this global conflict which is causing great distress and disruption in our everyday life.
The third Way is born in opposition, or through criticism of the two established ways. Through this critique, it is claimed, the 3W provides right (conceptual) tools to make sense of our world as well as means of a peaceful way of life.
The main premise of this critique is this. While the modern, secular, intellectual community sacrifices the past for the sake of the present, the religious intelligentsia rejects the present in its love and glorification of the past. The 3W, on the other hand, celebrates both the present and past and attempts to unify them in a single continuity.
In the following pages is given an understanding of the third Way (which we would also call the Way). It begins with a narrative, or an account of Dr. Shuja Alhaq’s existential crisis which led to his finding of the third perspective.
The third Way is best expounded through the course on History of Knowledge which is currently being given by Dr. Alhaq at the Bahauddin Zakariya University (BZU) Multan, Pakistan. Its course outline, reading list or bibliography and elaboration of some of its main themes is also given below.
The third Way, let us remember, is basically a non-Western perspective of history and looking at the world. It is therefore addressed to the non-Western audience, which may be heard by the Western intelligentsia indirectly.
The whole point of this exercise is that this world will be a different, safe and beautiful place when the third Way becomes the dominant perspective of the intellectual community.
After the narrative about the genesis of the Way, the discourse begins with the principle question of our times, which is the relation between modernity and tradition (or science and religion), or between our present and past. Since the beginning of this century, our world is driven by this question, though both camps of the modern intelligentsia are either not prepared to accept that this is the ultimate question of our times, or continue to come up with the old, stereotyped answers. Their addiction to their past is apparently no less deadly than that of their adversaries’.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Who wants to fight the Taliban?
Or
What is not to be done
Are you with us or with them? (Bush) (Usama)
Abstract
The paper originates from an existential question: As a member of academia or intelligentsia in general what am I supposed to do in the present war that is gaining momentum in South Asia by the day? I have been given three options: To side with the modernist, Western or American party, or the religious intelligentsia led by the Taliban, or side with none and die in collateral damage.
The third option, it is observed in the following, is being pursued, albeit unknowingly, by most of the secular, modernist intelligentsia, along with almost over three quarters of the population of this country. However, as the war escalates, more and more people will leave the middle ground and join their preferred side to become fodder for a war which has no moral legitimacy.
The thesis of this tract is that it is possible that we can escape both the options, dying in collateral damage or siding with either party. This is the desire and wish of our people. They want to live in peace and demand from us, the intelligentsia, to come up with a peaceful way, a perspective, to lead us out of the abyss in which the two warring parties are irretrievably pushing us. This tract is an attempt to meet such demand.
In short, this paper diagnoses the principle question of our time and proposes a solution to it, as suggested by its two titles. For the moment the intended readership of this discourse is the South Asian modernist, secular, whether liberal or Marxist, academia and intelligentsia in general.
In that way it is all a hypothesis. The problem in making sense of this hypothesis is stated at the outset, though. In so far as we have not been through madrassas but modern schools and universities, we have been taught to speak in the language of modernity. Modernity, presently, is a party in war. The other language that has been taught us in this part of the world is religious language. That too is a party in this war. This means that the language in which we are going to speak, the language of the third perspective, of the middle Way, would not immediately make sense from either perspective which is at war presently. But if it would be comprehensible from either perspective, it would not be the third perspective. From the third perspective, though, the two reigning perspectives are clearly comprehensible. For it is the third perspective where the apparently hostile opposites are reconciled.
When a war looms, our natural or instinctive response is to choose the side we want to win. This draft manifesto argues that this is precisely what is not to be done.
But this is not this tract’s only controversial credo. The language that it employs does not lend itself an easy comprehension, because it is non-partisan, it is not the language of any of the two warring parties that might happen to be your preferred one (that you want to win). While the one party glorifies the past at the expense of the present, the other rejects the past in the name of the present. We, on the other hand, considering such partition as illegitimate, seek to celebrate the past and present as an indivisible single continuum. The war occurs and violence erupts when the communication between the two parties breaks down because the language of each becomes incomprehensible and meaningless to the other. This makes every one believe that war is inevitable, it being the only recourse to settle the issues, since mediation through common set of concepts seems to have become impossible.
The following is an attempt to propose a set of new concepts which can help us in not siding with any party in the looming war, for this, we believe, is the only way to Resistance (to this war). War cannot be defeated through war, violence cannot be overcome through violence. This assertion has always been taken as paradoxical and therefore nonsensical. But we will try to show that if, with the help of some new concepts, we can develop a language that can show connections between apparently irreconcilable positions, the war can be averted and peace won over. To draw a parallel from history of science, this might be as consequential as the discovery of the connection between mass and energy, which had hitherto been seen as the two irreconcilable phenomena, and which heralded what is known as the early twentieth century scientific revolution and which, as rightly argued by some, was basically a revolution in thought. For Einstein, one of the chief pioneers of this revolution, the ultimate object and joy of all knowledge was to find connections between seemingly disparate and contradictory phenomena. Darwin, in his field, achieved the same feat by connecting human species with the rest of the animal and living kingdom.
Finally, it must be taken as a hypothesis, a kind of research proposal, or an intellectual construction, a blueprint of a viable alternative world picture, the example being of an architect who brings forth to his fellow colleagues his plan for a new building. Or taking an analogy from computer, it can be compared to a new soft ware to be installed in a computer to replace the two soft wares being employed currently. Of these one can be called religious or traditional software while the other modern or secular, which, employing different languages, are mutually exclusive and therefore are at war with each other. Needless to say, an architect comes up with his plan, or a new software is built on the ground of existing reality, or by way of critiquing the current models. To think of an alternative model in isolation from the existing structures is an obvious absurdity which no serious architect or software engineer would even imagine to speculate.
The third model proposed then obviously draws largely on the concepts already employed in the two existing models or systems of thought. But what it specifically does is to reconfigure and re-understand them by connecting them in a way different than before, with the help of introduction of a network of some new concepts and their connections. So what I am asking you is to not to immediately compare it with whatever software you are employing for your life. Knowing that the existing two models are in deep crisis, almost in tatters and at war with each other, the third model demands a hearing with a scholarly detachment from whichever programme you are living with. This is a necessary condition to get into and comprehend any new research project or experiment. This is how it was intended in the first place, as a kind of thought experiment that might appeal to us aesthetically, giving meanings to our lives which we had not contemplated before.
In short, the object of this document is to open a debate on the issues currently facing us from a different perspective. The change of perspective, we will see, as once again the history of science teaches us, shows us a world that was not visible to us from the frame of reference from which we were looking at it previously. This is what we call changing the world by change in our perspective, in the way we see it. This is only a recapitulation or translation, if you like, of the theory of relativity in the terms of the social and human sciences. What could be a more peaceful way of changing our world? You would have noticed that this concept of change is different from the one held by both religious and secular parties since for both of them violence and war are inseparable from changing the world. So we embark upon changing the world by changing the notion of change itself.
A question of paramount importance
Today, on the 28th of April 2009, we have assembled here to protest at the take over of Swat by the Taliban and also to strongly condemn Pakistan National Assembly’s passage of the Nizam-i Adal Regulation (NAR) which allows the Taliban regime to rule the areas under their control beyond the jurisdiction of the law of the land. The capitulation of Pakistani government has emboldened the Taliban leaders to declare that all the main institutions of Pakistani state, from democratic government to judiciary, are illegal from Islamic perspective. Therefore they need to be dismantled and state offices be filled in by the people educated at the madrassas (traditional religious schools) controlled by the religious intelligentsia, of which the Taliban form the front guard. By all means this is a declaration of war by the Taliban against the state.
The question ‘Who wants to fight the Taliban?’ then has become of paramount importance and concern for every thinking person in this country. To ignore it might lead to consequences which we live to regret.
The Second Global War (SGW) looms, two decades after the end of the First Global War (FGW) 1979-1989, which coincided with the end of the USSR.[1] The battle lines are drawn. When that is the case, it is most opportune to ask: Who are the Taliban and what do they stand for? That is, what’s the battle for? What do they ask and how does their thought structure operate? They are already at our doors, checking our loyalties, and asking us to take sides: Are we their friends or their enemies?
To continue to believe, or pretend, to be more precise, that it is not a state of war is an ‘appeasement’ of worst kind. And I use the word appeasement in its historical context referring to the conditions leading to the Second World War. After the collapse of the Eastern block and the end of the Cold War, the spectre of the third world war seemed to have receded. But now its beginnings once again are not hard to see, though it is going to be truly the first global war. This war, according to many of its zealous fighters, both in the Islamic and American-Jewish world, would truly be the Last War, for it would usher in the era of the Good.
Secondly, are the Taliban outside of our mainstream society, or they are also inside us, being the part of the very fabric of our society, defused rather widely across the various social strata, thus permeating almost all institutions of our polity?
Let me tell a story to illustrate my answer to the second question. My younger brother, aged 43, lives with his family in a rather small, middle class, secured housing society of Model Town Extension (in Lahore). On my first visit to that locality I had noticed its beautiful mosque. The following day I saw that it was run by Jamaat-i Islami. Later when I visited my brother’s house on a weekend (which was immediately after the flogging of a young girl at the hands of the Taliban in Swat), driving me back to my place he told me that his neighbour visited him the other day. He wanted to know if he (my brother) agreed with what had happened in Swat. I nearly shook when I heard that his neighbour had come to convince him that it was rightful act according to the Sharia.[2]
The day before I had participated in a protest march against the atrocity along the Mall organized by various NGOs and some other small groups. Empathizing with my brother, I was obviously terrified that my neighbour had come to me to ask whether I was his friend or his enemy! I could well imagine that my neighbour’s house was armed. My brother was visibly disturbed and I could see his anxiety and helplessness before the either/or choice he was being thrust upon in a war that he didn’t want to fight because he did not believe it was his war. This is primarily the dilemma that most of us face today.
The eye-opening incident just cited furnishes the answer to my second question raised above. The Taliban are both outside and inside us. And to go along with the American argument, largely expounded by the Western intelligentsia and shared by their local counterparts, that Taliban are an evil force extraneous to us that we can eradicate with violence, or counter-violence, if you like, is a folly for which we will have to pay dearly both in terms of blood and general destruction. For it is their (Western) perception, and not necessarily ours. And therefore the compatriot secular intelligentsia, especially the Marxists, find themselves in this embarrassingly unhappy situation that they seem ready to march along the American armies, the chief embodiment of evil for them until yesterday. So they must be seriously out of step with time.
They probably have historical precedents for their ‘joint front’ with the lesser evil in order ultimately to destroy the greater. The most well-known one of course is the Second World War alliance between the Capitalist West and the Communist East against Fascism. But that precedent is invalid in the present situation for valid reasons. First of all, that was the alliance of the states or nations. However, among each nation in this alliance, there was no opposition from within. This is not the case in our situation. As shown above, in all likelihood, we would rather be a minority in our population marching after the American Drones against our own population. That is the most dreadful prospect. It makes the whole effort futile.
How do we unite with our people?
The fundamental question then that we face today is: How do we unite our people around us against the Taliban rather than surrendering them over to them in our hasty alliance with the American armies, or, to be more precise, with the world view that drives them. What, then, is the Western perspective with which Pakistani, and generally non-Western, modern secular intelligentsia, whether liberal or Marxist, allies itself? This is the crucial question that we would deal with later in the second part of this tract. For the moment the point we have tried to make is that the Taliban ideology is neither a peripheral phenomenon, lying on the border areas of NWFP, nor a decaying wall that needs a little push to wither away. However our people may hate the atrocities this ideology perpetuates, they often pray with their ideologues together in Juma prayers in nearly every mosque around the corner.
Furthermore, if we recall the newly elected Amir of Jamaat-i Islami’s refusal to condemn the crime committed in Swat in the name of Sharia,[3] and juxtapose it with similar responses from leaders of various mainstream religious parties and other smaller groups, the truth of the answer just gained will be sustained.[4]
Now in our attempt to articulate our response to this situation, let us proceed by first briefly recounting the historical context of the war and the rise of the Taliban which would shed some light on our first question as to who they are and what do they stand for.
The origins of war
The present situation is the development of the war that Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders started with the bombing of the Twin Towers on 11th September 2001. In retaliation the United States formed a global coalition, Pakistan being the key ally, and attacked Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime from power. After a short while, however, the Taliban were able to regroup and mount armed resistance against the occupying American-led foreign forces.
Until a few months back, though, the war was principally between the Afghanistan based Taliban and the American led Western armies. Pakistan was a party in it only indirectly, providing support to the American forces and then, on the latter’s insistence, fighting against the Taliban fighters taking refuge in the traditionally semi-independent Tribal Areas along the Pak-Afghan border. For the last few months, though, the situation has taken a dramatic turn. The Taliban have taken control of Swat in the north western province of Pakistan and have been able not only to establish their writ there, but also announcing their designs in clear terms that they intend to extend their rule to the whole of Pakistan.
Since 9/11, each party has been urging the world, more especially the people of Pakistan, to enter into the war at its side. Each party proclaimed that the war was between good and evil and therefore it was imperative that each citizen in this country and around the world choose the side they wished to win.
We, the people of Pakistan, have been able to ignore this call until now and maintain largely a neutral stance, occasionally condemning some atrocity committed by one side or the other. But now the situation has changed for worse. With the occupation of Swat by the Taliban and their professed intention to establish their rule over the whole country, the golden age of indifference and apathy seems to have gone.
What is important to note is that the take over of Swat does not mark Taliban’s real major victory after their early rout in 2001. Their real gain is that step by step they are succeeding in dragging Pakistani people into the war by pushing them to make the choice of the side they are with. The question that Bush asked the world before invading Afghanistan and then Iraq was: Are you with us or them? The same question is now being put forth before the Pakistani people by the triumphal Taliban regime. Our society is being polarized with a heady pace.
Are we ready for this choice? We do not need to conduct a gallop poll to find that more than 80% people of this country, as indeed in the whole Islamic world, see this choice as an unwelcome dictation. They live in both worlds, of Islam or tradition (of which the religious intelligentsia claim to be the chief representatives and custodians), and of modernity (of which the Americans or Western secular intelligentsia claim to be the chief representatives and custodians). To side with the one to bury the other seems irrational and absurd to our people. But what is the other, or let’s say, the third way? Or let us put the question another way: Is there a way to oppose war without siding with any party?
The third, or the middle Way
This is the challenge that we, the non-religious intelligentsia from various walks of life, such as students, teachers, media men and women, doctors, lawyers, engineers, office workers and hosts of others, and to which this draft manifesto is addressed. It will be argued here that there is a Way to oppose this war by precisely not siding with any of the two parties, and this is the Way that our people wish to follow. An attempt will be made to lay broad outlines of the third or middle Way with the assumption that war and violence cannot be opposed through war and violence. There must be a peaceful way to do so, knowing that the present war has no end, and if it has, it is of universal, total destruction.
We must concede that this situation is as novel as it is complex. For if today, after our long apathy, we have assembled here to demand that the Pakistani state confront the Taliban and establish the writ of the state in the areas under their occupation, the message to the Taliban and the religious intelligentsia that supports them is clear (that is, this is how it is going to be seen by them): that we, the modernist intelligentsia, have joined the enemies of Taliban, the Americans and the West in general, and so we have become a party in war against them. In this way the 28th of April 2009 might be seen by posterity as the day when the war, or, to be more precise, civil war in Pakistan began. So when you walk back towards your homes after this rally, watch your way.
Western stooges: Is this how we want to be seen?
The argument of this tract is that if we end up as American allies, we are surely going to lose the war, for the religious intelligentsia will eventually win the tacit or active support of our people in the name of the defence of their religion and freedom from Western domination while branding us as Western stooges. Our fate will then be no different than that of the modernist intelligentsia of Iran in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. So the issue is not just of our honour and independence but even of our existence.
The genesis of the Taliban movement
Let us explain the point a little further by going back to the genesis of the Taliban phenomena. The Taliban (the word means students, or youth devoted to the study of Sharia) are the next generation, literally the offspring of the Mujahideen who fought and defeated the Soviet Union in a decade long war that began in 1979. The Mujahideen could not have humbled the might of the USSR in such short span of time had they not been supported and armed to the teeth by the West, led by America, via the Pakistani state, which was then declared as the frontline state of the so-called Free World.
The Afghans have a centuries old tradition of defending their freedom from foreign occupation even when almost the whole planet had gone under the Western yoke. They were the only people that the British could not subdue during their colonial adventure of India. But even though the Afghans fought long to keep their independence, there is no evidence that this in any way led to the enforcement of Sharia in their lands.
Cultural revolution of the last three decades
Or the emergence of religion on the world map
Very few people have taken cognizance of the cultural revolution that has taken place in the world during the last three decades. It was initiated by the Islamic revolution of Iran just over thirty years back from this date. In a world defined by the Cold War, the world mainly shaped by the conflict between capitalism and communism, the Iranian revolution was generally seen as an aberration. It then occurred to no one that it was the heralding of the post-Cold War era in which religion, or tradition, led by Islam, would jump on to the centre stage to question its relegation to the archives of history, and demand a new equation with and place in the modern world.
However, before we proceed further, it needs immediately to be emphasized that, contrary to the claims of both the warring parties, the contemporary resurgence of religion is not the re-birth of religion and tradition as it was in the pre-modern era, or, to be more precise, that produced and governed the civilizations of the pre-modern era, and which was decapitated by the forces of modernity. Rather, this, the Talibanized, clerical form of religion/ tradition was shaped and reconstructed under the all-embracing influence of modern thought and colonial occupation. It means that Western secular intelligentsia’s understanding of religion and modern religious intelligentsia’s claim of being the sole inheritor and embodiment of the religious tradition need to be questioned. This is the great historical task of the non-religious intelligentsia of the non-Western world. The second section of this tract is largely devoted to this task.
Still, the Iranian revolution was a kind of upheaval that radically alters, or demands to re-examine the reigning modes of thought and terms of discourse through which we had been hitherto making sense of the world. Such a change renders a lot of existing knowledge obsolete and asks for the construction of a new knowledge that is in consonance with the changed reality. However, for those who are steeped in the given modes of thought, such a revolution (i.e., the meaning and implications of it) remains largely invisible, and even though it does show itself by any means, they continue in a state of denial.
The Iranian Revolution was such a spectacle of people’s power that few generations in history has the good fortune to witness. The American viceroy, the Shah of Iran, barely managed to board a plane to escape from the land that he had all along hated to see under his feet for his sheer contempt for it. Still, it was seen by the world at large as a historical eccentricity of which there is no dearth in history anyway. The slogan of the nascent revolution, ‘neither communism nor capitalism, neither left nor right,’ was mocked at globally by both sides of the modernist intelligentsia.
The Islamic revolutionaries made no secret of their pretensions to globalize their revolution. So the dictator of the neighbouring state (Iraq), was enlisted, trained and equipped to the teeth by the Americans like a rabid dog and unleashed upon the Islamic Republic which was to engage it for the next eight years in one of the bloodiest wars in history in which the new republic had to virtually throw its young generation on the front like the bags of sand to defend itself. Even though the Islamic republic survived, it might have remained a historical idiosyncrasy but for another theatre of war that opened on its northern border which was to ensure that the era opened by the Russian Revolution of 1917 was indeed coming to a close. This was in fact the beginning of the end of hegemony of the Western mind and the categories of thought imposed by it to make sense of the world.
The situation changed dramatically by the end of the same year (1979) when the Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan in their bid to bolster the revolution made by a small party of Afghan communists. This time it was not a usual case of one nation trying to conquer the other. Rather a new element was introduced, which was religion. Previously, the British had come with a religion of their own, which they kept subservient to the state though. But this time the invading forces were the enemies of religion itself, and for Afghans, like most peoples of the non-Western world, religion and culture are identical and inseparable.
Now there is a very interesting fact of history which it is quite opportune to recount at this hour. Capitalism and Marxism, we know, emerged as the two personas or faces of modernity that overthrew the traditional order of which religion, in one way or the other, formed the core. Marxism arose in opposition to capitalism, as a critical face and alternative version of modernity, but both shared common grounds of origin and shared their conviction that the proper place of religion was the dustbin of history. The much trumpeted credo was based on the identification of science with knowledge and of religion with ignorance, superstition, past-worship, obscurantism and all the other vices that one could think of in an ostensibly future-oriented world of progress and prosperity.
However, there was a disagreement between them over the place of religion in a modern society. While the liberals were prepared to let religion survive as an old relic or as a private profession of individuals, the Marxists were much more apprehensive and not prepared for any such ‘appeasement.’ They believed that the fight between science and religion was absolute and if the roots of religion were not dug out, science and modernity would have a hard time to survive. The intelligentsia of the communist world would accuse their adversaries of hypocrisy, opportunism and, more importantly, of their ignorance of the deadly venom of religion. They warned consistently that the project of modernity might falter if religion were not completely uprooted. They were soon to be proved right, though, ironically, it were they themselves who were going to be the first victim of its fatal bite.
The mobilization of religion in the service of Western capitalism
The West had been all along confident though that they had subdued religion once for all by putting it under the surveillance of the state. They had exorcised the spectre of Christianity which from their perspective was the greatest religion on earth. The rest of the ‘minor’ religions did not seem much of a problem to them. In this self-deception, they woke up the slumbering giant in mountains of Afghanistan in the service of their own war with communism.
Almost the whole of Muslim world was mobilized to fight against the godless monster, or evil empire, as Reagon thundered. The religious warriors from around the Islamic world rushed to fight the classic battle between Islam and kufr. They were called Mujahiddeen, the holy warriors, who were presumably fighting for the freedom of the whole of Free World. It was then that the Afghans entered into the modern world, that is, by way of its military, technological side. They were heavily armed by the West and trained how to fight one of the most formidable military machines in the world. The experience was of course never lost to them.
In the meanwhile, more than three million Afghan refugees settled inside the Pakistani side of the border. There they were provided for much better than the poor Palestinians who were rendered homeless over sixty years ago by way of one of the most brutal projects of colonialism. These encampments along the border ran their own madrassas which proved to be the nurseries where Taliban as children grew up. Not only were they indoctrinated in what we today call Talibanization, but in this endeavour almost the whole of Pakistan was put at their service. A military dictator was bolstered by the West whose vision of Islam and the world was hardly any different from modern day Taliban. He sanctioned barbaric public punishments of convicts and kept hundreds and thousands of political prisoners in jail, many subjected to horrendous tortures. He also bore Talbanic hatred for women, and got a law passed which made a victim of rape subject to prosecution if she failed to come up with four witnesses according to the Sharia ruling.
In short, for their own ends, to settle the scores with their internal enemies, the self-professed leaders of freedom of thought and modernity brought the archaic religious forces from Afghan caves into Manhattan. But this was not all. They identified Islam with the Talibanic vision of it, which served a double purpose, for it made manifest the decadent nature of religion. From this decadent face of religion the West in turn derived legitimacy for modernity as a force of progress and enlightenment.
It was in those fateful ten years that the religious intelligentsia gained foothold in this country, and of course around the world, and acquired technical know-how and skills to work as a global network with the help of modern technology. In the following decade after the war many of their die-hard and soft supporters entered into the Western universities and pooled in their knowledge of the modern world. By the end of the millennium they had truly become modern religious intelligentsia with the confidence that they could take on the ideology of the modern secular intelligentsia around the world. 9/11 was their declaration of war against their Last Enemy.
Their confidence after defeating the second largest military machine in the world was of course well founded. But one thing is rarely acknowledged. And this is that the Mujahideen were clear almost at the outset that the West was by no means their ‘friend’. Recalling the analogy from the Second World War in which capitalism and communism joined hands to defeat Fascism, the greater enemy, the Mujahideen only joined hands with the lesser evil to defeat their greater enemy.
Unaware of the situation, the Americans and their Western allies happily went back home after the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, not knowing the deadly potential of the genii that they had brought out of the bottle, in spite of the earlier Soviet warnings to that effect. The West’s complete inability to grasp the ground reality gave the Mujahideen, and their allies that they had won in the urban middle classes around the Muslim world, a free hand to prepare quietly for the next war. At the end there were three factors which made them ready to take on the heathen enemy at the turn of the millennium. These were, first, a global cadre that included various groups of people such as those trained in modern warfare and weaponry, young people educated in Western universities, most of them based in the West, and missionaries that moved around the world freely. Second, the new generation of holy warriors, called the Taliban, had grown up and taken control of Afghanistan. And, finally, the Talibanization of Pakistan army. That is when the seeds of Second Afghan War were sown, which Obama was sworn in last year to fight.[5]
A powerful global network of modern Islamic religious intelligentsia is formed
I have tried to draw your attention to the fact that during the decade of first Afghan war and the one following it, the seeds of Talibanization were sown not merely in Afghanistan, but also in Pakistan and many other Muslim countries in which mainstream religious parties took active role, with active encouragement and funds generously pouring in from the Western world. In consequence, a global network of modern religious intelligentsia with all the expertise of modern age was formed. In contrast to it the non-religious intelligentsia of this or any other Muslim country was and remains of absolutely no match to the religious intelligentsia’s organization, financial resources, technical know how, military skills, and dedication.
The religious camp has fully indoctrinated cadres in every madrassa which can now be found in almost any other street in Lahore and around. And not just the madrassas, they have established modern schools and even universities which are run strictly according to their ideology and vision of Islam and the world. Further to that they control mosques in almost every quarter. Often these mosques are employed for more than five time prayers. Courses in the Quran and hadith, evidently designed to their perspective, are given in many of them to both children and adults by the teachers educated at the madrassas who often also happen to be religious activists. Some mosques are openly run by the mainstream religious parties.
The most noteworthy aspect of this development, though, is the greater religionization of our people as a whole. They are far more religious now than they were say thirty years ago at the end of Bhutto’s rule. There has been a marked increase in the ritual observances and religious ceremonies. Religion has strangely developed even a sort of entertaining side to it.[6]
Interestingly, the West’s civil war between capitalism and communism has not been the only factor in promoting greater religionization of the Islamic world. As the spectre of communism was overcome, all fetters to the expansion of capitalism were removed. With the unleashing of the forces of market and globalization that were bent upon eroding all the identities with which people around the world had lived for ages, religion emerged as the only bastion of security, an unshakable foothold to stand upon in an increasingly uncertain world. Modernity, ironically, which had come to bury religion, was now promoting it as the last refuge from the heady forces it had unleashed.
I do not intend to frighten you, but since we have assembled here to register our opposition to the prospective Talibanization of our country, we must know where we stand and where are we going from here. For the way back is littered with many ambushes, and we must beware of as many of them as we can if we want to reach home safely. In the protest rally mentioned above that I attended a few weeks ago to express public outrage at the flogging of a young girl in Swat, I noticed that most of the demonstrators had come from affluent families and poorly clad by standers watched us with an amusement which seemed embarrassing to me. After the procession I lost my friend who had brought me there. When I called him he told me that he was at Avari and I could join him there.
So if siding with any one side amounts to escalation of the war, what is the Way to fight this war? What is our theoretical framework and what is our strategy to carry it out? The most misleading belief, as noted earlier, especially popular among the Marxist intelligentsia, is that this is basically a war between two evils, between Western, American imperialist ideology and Taliban ideology, between the ‘two fundamentalisms’, as it is called, from which they can safely sit aside and watch the spectacle from afar.
The problem, however, is that there is no ‘afar’. The battle is going to be on every space, and so there will be no space left for the onlookers. The Taliban, with their armies of would-be martyrs, are going to come hard, and it would be a folly to think that they will be confronted by Pakistan government and army, as we are demanding today. The army, which is itself deeply Talibanized, is basically trained to fight on the front, pre-eminently the Indian front, so it is most likely that it will continue in its hesitation to fight around the streets killing their own people, especially when they do not share the perception that the Taliban are the personification of evil.
Three decisive factors
To recapitulate, we have noted two important developments that have taken place in the cultural revolution that has taken place in the last three decades. The modernization and wider expansion of the religious intelligentsia and their increasing power in resources and organizational skills the world over; and, secondly, the increasing religionization or passive, unconscious Talibanization of our people. One of its most pronounced expressions is the rise of Hamas as the leading party of resistance in a movement which was non-religious and secular in its origins. Needless to say, the Hamas, like the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, was initially nourished by the Israeli-American nexus to break the power of the secular PLO.
So, once again, the most thorny question of all in this context that confronts us is as to how are we going to turn the tide and win our people, whose role will be decisive in the final outcome, to our Way of opposing this war? Even a cursory glance will reveal their deep ambivalence, and there is all the reason to fear that as the war prolongs, as it seems it will, there are three factors which might eventually turn them into the hands of the religious intelligentsia, leaving us in an isolation from where there will be no escape and which once again recalls the fate of the Iranian liberal and Marxist intelligentsia in the after math of Iranian Islamic revolution of 1979.
The first of these factors is our pronounced Westernized or modern profile. Westernization or modernization, wealth as the ultimate value of capitalist system, increasing materialism and hedonism have become universal hallmarks of modern way of life. The most conspicuous consequence of unbridled capitalism is extremely unjust distribution of wealth and widening divide between the rich and the poor. As the conflict escalates, the larger section of the affluent and the wealthy will inevitably side with the American side, while the poor will be eventually pushed to the other party in retaliation. The religious intelligentsia will use the rhetoric of simple life and social justice couched in religious phraseology to win over the poor to their side. It is also most likely that, given their anti-religious attire and rhetoric, most of the modern middle class intelligentsia from universities, media and NGOs will also be seen by people to be on the side of the West, if no concerted efforts are made to prove to the contrary.
The second factor is modern intelligentsia’s alienation from religion, bordering on downright contempt for it. Whether liberal or Marxist, with one voice we identify religion with superstition, ignorance, obscurantism, medievalism, past worship and so forth. The stark fact is that our people do not share this perception of religion. In popular elections they would not vote for religious parties, as the past history tells us. But it is also a blatant fact that almost right from the moment of the birth of this country, the minority parties of religious intelligentsia have exercised a hugely disproportionate power over our society. How do we explain this?
The simple answer that our people are ignorant and superstitious is an expression of modernist arrogance that would make us pay a heavy price. The truth is that our modern prejudice, that religion and Taliban ideology are one and the same thing, and thus our total ignorance of the history of our people’s culture and tradition, of which religion forms the backbone, is bound to isolate us further from our people. They would thus be an easy prey to the superficial, pious rhetoric of the religious intelligentsia.
The third factor is equally if not more important. This is the historical contradiction between the West and the non-West, or more particularly between the West and the Islamic world born initially with the European colonial project started over three or four centuries ago. Two things are to be noted here. First, modernity is still associated with Western domination, a perception now widely and vehemently propagated by the religious intelligentsia.
The second point is that colonization is not a fact of bygone centuries. Even a man in the street knows that the master-slave hierarchical relation established between the West and the non-West has only changed but in form. Our modernist governments are rightly seen as stooges and extended arms of Western American imperialism. No wonder Hamas now carries the anti-imperialist flag in occupied Palestine while it was Turkish prime minister Erdogan, the leader of the Islamist party in Turkey, who had the guts to confront the Israeli president at Davos over Israel’s massacre in Gaza.
The contradiction is getting sharper by the day with the continued American support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine and daily brutalities committed there, the American rape of Iraq and the present American occupation of Afghanistan. Deep resentment and anger over such flouting of all norms of international law and justice, or what is known as Western double standards, are deeply ingrained in the psyche of our people, of the whole peoples in the Islamic world and which is also deeply shared by other peoples of the Third world.
In such circumstances, our siding with the American armies in their forthcoming large-scale operations, of which the Americans are daily issuing clear warning, a programme on which Barrack Obama won his presidency, is going to have disastrous effects, and the chief casualty of it will be our increasing isolation.
Now during the Cold War the mantle of opposition to Western capitalism and its domination of the world was carried by the communist world led by Soviet Union and later also by China. Since the demise of the Soviet block and capitulation of China, the flag of resistance and opposition to the Western domination has been carried over by the Islamic religious intelligentsia, whom we once saw as the lackeys of imperialism. This is perhaps one of the most significant features of the cultural revolution of the preceding three decades. The religious intelligentsia’s avowed opposition to imperialism makes our people inwardly and quietly sympathize with them, while they see us as ‘collaborators’, if not now then soon when they see us marching along the American Drones.
Finally, and crucially, before coming to the second part of our draft manifesto, we must beware that, as the fact just pointed (i.e., the religious intelligentsia’s taking of the mantle of opposition to imperialism) suggests, we cannot carry the old baggage of concepts and the worldview with which we made sense of the world and lived in the days of the Cold War. That war was fought between good and evil, but this is not the war between good and evil.
There is no doubt that both the modern religious intelligentsia and the modern secular intelligentsia do tend to project the same model. According to it, of the two parties one must live while the other must die. But there are host of indications that this model is no more applicable. First of all, the outcome of this war is not going to be as it was in the Cold War, i.e., the victory of the one side over the other. It is going to be an endless war, as Americans keep insisting, which can only end up in wholesale destruction of the two worlds, the only ultimate beneficiary being China, if, God forbid, the present war of terror does not end up in a nuclear holocaust.
Furthermore, as already noted, the overwhelming majority of our people do not see this as a war between good and evil, at least until now, in spite of the both sides’ (Taliban and Americans) insistence to make it as such.
The reason is quite obvious. And which is that people find the warp and woof of their daily lives made up of both modernity and tradition, and thus find the choice between the two illegitimate and unnecessary. But there is clear and present danger that this might not last long, and as the war escalates and polarization intensifies, which both parties now seem to be bent upon, our people might end up rallying behind the religious intelligentsia, leading up to 1979 style Iranian revolution in which Americans along with both the liberal and Marxist intelligentsia were utterly routed.
The problem on our hands
So we must not repeat the mistake that the Iranian modernist intelligentsia made. We must see that our people are deeply rooted in tradition, of which religion is the kernel, but, at the same time, they also do not see modernity as incarnation of evil as the Taliban do. This clearly points to the problem on our hands. They are critical of both worlds in that they are not prepared for whole sale acceptance of either one of them. They are looking for the third or middle Way that leads to some sort of rapprochement and harmony between the two, an aspiration which both the religious and secular intelligentsia find illogical, absurd or nonsensical. But we must remember that tradition or past cannot be destroyed. It can only be recreated and reformed. It would be a great mistake to continue with the modernist dogma that the rightful place for religion is the dustbin of history. The identification of religion with Taliban ideology is a modern dogma that both the Taliban and modernists advocate with equal fervour. In similar vein, modernity cannot be uprooted and destroyed, the democratic freedoms and advances it has made cannot be reversed, as our religious intelligentsia zealously insist. But it can be criticized and reformed. Modernists often cry for reformation of Islam. Seldom do they realize that modernity too is in as much need of reformation.
So we are faced with a huge task of reconstruction of both tradition and modernity in such terms that a bridge can be formed and an equation between them discovered, an equation between past and present that our people so desperately seek. The task seems too daunting indeed, but we must realize that tearing our people apart from one or the other, as each party in war seeks, is a great act of violence that we must not be guilty of perpetuating. If we do not want to enter into war but wish to overcome it, then there is no other way out. We must also remember that if we are dragged into this war, fighting from one or the other side, then this is a sure path to doomsday. Our war is not against any one of the parties, but against the war itself, because we do not recognize the legitimacy of this war, however each side may push us to believe so.
It was said above that in order to achieve this noble goal, we must leave behind the baggage of the Cold War. As we find our one foot in tradition while the other in modernity, we may say that the religious intelligentsia are our neighbours and therefore our brothers in faith. We live with them, often in the same street, even among the same family, as the movie Khuda Ka Lia showed.
In similar vein, we are also moderns who have learnt the tools of our trade and thought from the West. So we are not anti-Western and are not enemies of Western people dubbing them as inherently immoral and treating them as hordes of atheism. And, further, in opposition to the Taliban ideology, we refuse to identify anti-Westernism with anti-imperialism. While we develop our critique of modernity and of the Western intelligentsia, we consider them as our neighbours and brothers. After all quite a large section of our people have made the Western lands as their homes. It would be senile to pose a of friend/enemy dichotomy between them.
You might be amused by such terminology. But ultimately our argument rests on the assumption that both sides are at war with each other because of their flawed perceptions of the world or because of the self-contradictions in their worlviews. Our job, as the members of intelligentsia, is to come up with a perception of the world, or with a worldview which excludes violence from the relationship between tradition and modernity. To use the language of the Quran, the ultimate difference between belief and unbelief is that of knowledge and ignorance.
Finally, if it is a matter of true knowledge, of which each party of the war possess in piecemeal, then the leading forces of Resistance (i.e., resistance to war itself, to the worldviews of both parties of war) must be the intelligentsia. Living in a knowledge society, the leading forces of Resistance must come from the middle strata of society, such as the lawyers, doctors, NGO workers, office workers, media people and, above all, the students and teachers of the school and the university.
I think what makes the students and teachers the vanguard of Resistance is that it is no more the factory but the school and the university that drives the contemporary society, this being the other feature of the cultural revolution of the last three decades, as we will see. But of course this by no means implies that we are seeming to be indifferent to workers, peasants and other groups whom the neo-colonial order has kept deprived of culture. It is precisely for them, that is, in terms comprehensible to them that we must develop a new language and a new lifestyle that should unify the two opposing currents which are tearing us all apart.
In summing up this section, we would outline two modes of the Way to oppose war without joining a warring side, or the two complimentary aspects of the third perspective, or middle Way, that shuns both the extremist, exclusivist positions. For it is their exclusivism which generates violence and war. Let’s remember that modernity’s exclusivism has generated more violence than religion’s. While describing what he calls ‘the dark side of modernity’, Anthony Giddens, a British sociologist (not a postmodernist) has noted that during the twentieth century more than 100 million were killed in wars, far more than any century in history.[7] The idea that religion is prone to hatred and violence while modernity is a discourse of peace and harmony is a modern myth that needs to be exposed and debunked. The crimes of each balance each other as much as their gains. This realization is the first step to form a bridge between the past and present, for it is the conflict between them that is ravaging humanity today.
The two modes of Resistance
There are two modes of Resistance, theoretical, and practical, which are complimentary to each other. The credo of its former side is non-partisanship of thought which we call independence of thought while the credo of the latter is service to humanity which we see as the very condition of self-realization and self-fulfillment.
The theoretical aspect of Resistance, which is basically the task of the university intelligentsia, the teachers and students, is to criticize and expose the fundamental assumption espoused both by the modern religious and modern secular intelligentsias that social change is inseparable from violence and war, that war is the only means of opposing war, or that violence and war are necessary means of social change. We need to produce a theory of peaceful social change that demonstrates separation of social change and violence.
Following this direction, we have designed a course called History of Knowledge to be taught in university, and even in school, that articulates a peaceful theory of social change while showing how it can be applied to the world at large. The basic hypothesis of this course is that the hegemony of Western knowledge is based on its seriously flawed and limited understanding of history and knowledge. Having defined knowledge in its own so-called scientific terms, modern thought drastically and artificially reduced the span of knowledge, limiting it to the three hundred years of Greek thought (from Thales to Aristotle) and then to the four hundred years since 16th century when modern science was born in Europe. In both time and space this history of knowledge is paltry and fundamentally Eurocentric whose object is to exclude the non-Western world from the domain of knowledge and history. The realization of this goal, i.e., exclusion of the non-Western world from the domain of knowledge and history, provided the moral and intellectual legitimacy to colonialism and continues to do so for the present Western domination of the world.
In our understanding of religion and tradition, we argue that the exclusion of it from the domain of knowledge and history is based on a flawed understanding of it by modern secular intelligentsia. To put it simply, religion is identified with the religion as preached and practiced, for instance, by Taliban or by Iranian clerics. With such identification there needs little argument to prove that modernity’s exclusion of religion from the domain of knowledge is justified. And if by this fate of history the poor non-Western peoples are excluded from the court of holy reason, it is seen as a kind of collateral damage that could not be helped.
However, we have tried to demonstrate that religion is fundamentally composed of formal and critical traditions though both modern secular and religious intelligentsias have suppressed the critical history of it. The critical or core tradition of religious history, represented by Sufism in Islam, for instance, was all the way opposed to the formal, clerical side of religion which is now portrayed as its only face. Needless to say, Sufism is the Islamic expression of the core tradition that underlies all religions.[8]
Critical tradition provides historical antecedents for the third perspective. Both credos of Resistance are rooted in this tradition which both modern secular thought and modern religious thought have joined hands to brutally exclude from the cultural map of human past and present.[9] Our opposition and resistance to the contemporary, partisan modes of thought, then, represents our struggle for the discovery and liberation of our history, on the one hand, and for the freedom of thought itself from the fetters imposed on it by the two reigning partisan modes of thought.[10]
Remarkable consequences await us once the fallacy based on monolithic nature of religion is exposed. The most pronounced is the discovery that science and religion are the two languages of knowledge, each employing its own set of concepts to describe the nature of the world, being complimentary to each other rather than contradictory, as both religious and secular intelligentsia argue. Once the so-called inherent anti-thesis between religion and science is overcome, in place of the given paltry histories espoused by the religious and secular intelligentsias the span of knowledge extends right back to the origin of man. For, as the archeologist and social anthropologist Gordon Childe remarked, ‘even a rude Neanderthalar had an ideology,’ by ideology he signified knowledge.[11] The most remarkable consequence of such expansion of history and knowledge, however, would be that the whole humanity would enter into the domain of knowledge and history, which is presently colonized by the West. This liberation alone is the end to die for.
The other, practical side of Resistance concerns registering our opposition in every peaceful way at our disposal to whatever atrocity and injustice that each warring side commits. To this end the leading role can be played by NGOs. They must place opposition to war as their first priority, orienting whatever work they are doing otherwise to this end. They can join hands in setting up centres to coordinate the efforts in resistance to war. An NGO can be founded wholly devoted to Resistance, with the sole objective to reach to the people and educate them on what is happening and how they can contribute to defeat the war. The people who have suffered at the hands of either party must be helped and counseled, and sit-ins and vigils staged in front of the embassies, parliament house and other centres of power.
We also need to organize cultural activities, such as workshops, drama and musical events to raise public consciousness on the perils of war and benefits of peace. Furthermore, every effort should be made to extend the Resistance to global scale. We know that both parties of war have global networks, and resistance to them cannot be fruitful if it is remains provincialized.
A concentrated effort needs to be made to challenge and dismantle the remains of feudalism in this country. Such objective can, however, be part of the most important goal for the NGOs and all other thinking individuals of this country, and which is to work towards universal education for all school going children. The school, we must remember, is the primary humanizing institution in our age. It is indeed the greatest failing of the successive governments of this country that the larger part of our young and even older generation remains deprived of basic education. It is a criminal neglect. We should note that the larger part of the would-be army of the Taliban is nurtured in the madrassas where not only education but also free boarding and food are provided for. In a country where larger part of population lives below poverty line, these services are seen indeed as God-given.
We must build parallel institutions where all the needs of children of poor families are catered for. A huge amount of resources is expended by foreign funded NGOs on myriad projects while the real work of what can be termed as humanization of our young generation is being completely neglected. It is in these schools where we must equip our children with the new knowledge, with the critical history of their tradition, if we are really committed to counter the onslaught of the forces of violence, fanaticism and bigotry.
The new knowledge with which we have to arm our young generation would be chiefly characterized by our questioning of the ideals of modernity that glorify material affluence and consumption, competition and possession, selfishness and egotism as the ultimate values of life. Such ideals, which modernity portrays as almost sacred, are in clear breach of the ethos and sensibility of our people. They instill a deep sense of inferiority in the larger part of our population living hand to mouth, and ultimately foster distrust and even hatred for the modernist forces. Needless to say, this becomes a fertile ground for the Taliban ideology to take roots.
The important component of the schools that we need to establish around the country, then, is the new teaching based on the third perspective that resurrects and brings to life the founding principles of the core tradition, which are founded on the observation that ultimately it is the quality of life that matters, and not the material goods, as modernity insists. The course on History of Knowledge just mentioned can play a major role in the preparation of the cadres and teachers to this end.
Such humanitarian work, which also involves building dispensaries and small hospitals around the country and providing other facilities such as clean water and so forth, must be carried out on war footing, with the clear objective of producing concrete results in the next five to ten years. This is the only way of winning our people to our side and to make them believe that we are on their side. The dire implications of our failing in the realization of this goal need not be mentioned.
To sum up this section, we have tried to stress that resistance to Taliban and the tradition that they claim to inherit, on the one hand, and resistance to modernity and Western intelligentsia (who drive the Western power), with their ideals of progress in terms of material affluence and consumption, are the two faces of Resistance to war that is being imposed upon us. To think that one can be carried out while overlooking the other will only further the flames of war, a sure recipe for disaster.
So, if we started this document with the question that is being imposed on us, that is, Are you with us or with them? we conclude it by counter posing our question: Are you for War or Resistance?
Postscript: 08 May 2009
Notes
[1] The two better known world wars were basically European or Western wars (which can be called European civil wars) fought around the world. The non-Western world was not a party in either of them. The FGW marked the transitional phase from the Western to global era whereas the SGW apparently aims at ending the divide between the West and the non-West as the opposite power bases once for all. It obviously recalls Samuel Huntington’s famous paper, ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ (1993) which was later expanded into a book form. Most of the Western intelligentsia disagreed, even abhorred his argument, for they did not believe, for one, that religion would rise from the grave to pose any resistance to the might and rationality of the West. Perhaps they thought it below their dignity to even contemplate fighting the religious zealots in a battlefield (and this was in spite of the fact that they had just witnessed the spectacle of their internal foe falling into such disgrace, and, worst, being utterly routed at the end. But they thought that it was basically the Western might that had routed USSR, an obvious self-deception as the events later proved). Huntington’s moral of the argument was that the war between the Western and Islamic civilizations being inevitable, the West must prepare for it. That his argument was largely ignored by the Western intelligentsia and establishment alike proved a blessing for the religious forces, for it gave them time for their preparations. I was one of those who supported Huntington’s argument, though not the moral of it. I proposed the way to avert it, but the paper (which I have lost now), was declined by the magazine to which it was sent.
[2] When I visited my brother two weeks later, they had another story to tell. My brother’s wife told me that the other day in a local market a bearded man stopped a woman, in short sleeves shirt and trousers, and admonished her sternly by saying: Come to your senses, know that we are coming.
[3] When asked by the media if he condemned the flogging, he responded by saying that he condemned the attacks by American Drones inside the Pakistani territory.
[4] Incidentally, one wonders if our budding politician, Imran Khan, has the same affection for the newly elected Amir as he has nourished for Qazi Hussain Ahmad (the former Amir), since his ‘conversion’!
[5] Barrack Hussain Obama opposed the Iraq war from the outset. This is generally considered as the principal factor in his winning over the war-weary American electorate. But America is hardly a country ready for a peace loving president. The real reason for Obama’s acceptance by American establishment as a candidate for presidency lay in his ‘prophecy’, (a devout convert to Christianity that he happens to be), that the real war that America had to fight was not in Iraq, but in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He argued rightly that America had wasted another five years (2003-2008) in fighting at a wrong front. By 2008 he had nearly won the argument and which got him the keys to the White House.
[6] This I noticed in recent proliferation of na’t (hymns in praise of the Prophet) recitations to which whole evenings are devoted in a public ceremony. Though no musical instruments are employed, some reciters have beautiful voices and they really sing well. I never thought it could be an entertaining event. But one day I found out such a ceremony going on in my neighbourhood in a small lawn overlooking my back balcony where men and women sat quietly for nearly four hours and, after my initial hesitation, I started enjoying it, to my surprise.
[7] Anthony Giddens, (1991), The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity, p. 11.
[8] The argument cannot be dealt in detail here. Though the second part of the draft manifesto is largely devoted to it, it was initially developed in Shuja Alhaq, (1996), A Forgotten Vision: A Study of Human Spirituality in the Light of the Islamic Tradition, Lahore: Vanguard (also published in 2 volumes by Vikas, New Delhi). The crux of the theory of religion propounded in it was that, contrary to the both modern and religious perspectives, religion was not a stagnant, monolithic phenomenon. Rather it was a composite or unity of two opposite, but complimentary at the same time, traditions which can be variously termed as religious and spiritual, outer and inner, formal and critical, and so forth. (My articles cited below, and the second section of this tract, relate to the argument). In support of this theory, a detailed historical study of the two of great religions, of Islam and Hinduism, with special reference to their spiritual traditions, was furnished. The relation between Islam (as a representative of tradition), and modernity was treated in the article titled ‘Islam and Modernity: Towards a New Paradigm.’ Three other articles, ‘The Sufi Tradition and the Postcolonial Condition,’ ‘A Contribution to the Development of Parallel Culture,’ and a review article on Pickthall’s English translation of the Quran, ‘The Allah of the Quran: A Contribution to the Structure of Premodern Civilizations,’ are further elaborations of the same theme. All the four articles, produced in the last two years, are available on the internet, besides some other relevant writings, including an outline of the Course on History of Knowledge. And, finally, the same author’s (2008) Scientists are Human: A Humorous Side of Science, Lahore: Sanjh, is also useful for references from history of science. The Course on History of Knowledge, initially taught to the MPhil students of history at GCU, Lahore (2008-2009), as well as the present tract draws largely on these sources. The Course was stopped after the first semester by the VC of GCU, who refused to extend my contract while declining to give any reason for it.
[9] While modern thought’s hostility to religion and more especially to its core tradition is well-known, modern religious intelligentsia’s contempt and rejection of its opposing tradition is less widely recognized. Three countries from Islamic world, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia, provide interesting varied cases of organized attempts to denounce and uproot the critical tradition from their midst. While in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the leaders of Islam’s two leading sects, Sunni and Shia respectively, the denunciation of Sufism was carried out in the name of ‘purification’ of Islam, in Turkey it was undertaken in an almost morbid race to modernize Turkey and make it part of Europe in a fantastic continental shift after the collapse of the Ottoman empire and founding of the Turkish Republic by Ataturk. In most non-Western countries of the world modernity and tradition continued to co-exist in an uneasy, contentious relationship that often conceals modernity’s rejection of tradition. But modern Turkey provides a very revealing case study of modernity’s perception of tradition as its enemy and consequently the wedge that it drives between human past and present. See Kudsi Ergunen (2005), Journeys of a Sufi Musician, trans. from French by A. C. Mayers, London: Saqi, for the story of a ruthless uprooting of the past, of which Sufism was seen as the most pronounced expression, at the hands of the Ataturk regime, that often recalls Nazi expulsion of all alleged non-German elements from their midst.
[10] For an introduction to the texts from core tradition, see Robert Van de Weyer (2006) 366 Readings from World Religions, Mumbai. Due to theocratic bias of the author, the book should be read with caution. The section on Sufism, alas, is very weak. Perhaps the best book to get into the core tradition is The Book of Chuang Tzu and after that Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching [Treatise of the Tao and the Virtue]. The former is in fact a preparation to read the second, which is actually the first paramount [formulation of] doctrine of the Chinese core tradition. The foremost introduction to the core or mystic tradition, however, remain the Upanishads that created the Buddha who was roughly contemporary to Lao Tzu. Both Buddha and Lao Tzu spoke the same language. It was the awareness and control of desire or need, and finding the middle path between the two opposites, as of forming a bridge between them, that formed the core of their thought and teaching. Both of them were heralding new knowledge revolutions in their respective regions. If Buddhism has been described as the religion of an atheist, Tao Te Ching would be really harder for the atheists.
[11] Gordon Childe (1946) What Happened in History. Penguin, p. 32. The Neanderthals were a human species that perished around 28000 years ago. The present human race, the homo sapiens, is the offspring of the black Africans who started migrating out of Africa at the time when Neanderthals were on their way of extinction.
Or
What is not to be done
Are you with us or with them? (Bush) (Usama)
Abstract
The paper originates from an existential question: As a member of academia or intelligentsia in general what am I supposed to do in the present war that is gaining momentum in South Asia by the day? I have been given three options: To side with the modernist, Western or American party, or the religious intelligentsia led by the Taliban, or side with none and die in collateral damage.
The third option, it is observed in the following, is being pursued, albeit unknowingly, by most of the secular, modernist intelligentsia, along with almost over three quarters of the population of this country. However, as the war escalates, more and more people will leave the middle ground and join their preferred side to become fodder for a war which has no moral legitimacy.
The thesis of this tract is that it is possible that we can escape both the options, dying in collateral damage or siding with either party. This is the desire and wish of our people. They want to live in peace and demand from us, the intelligentsia, to come up with a peaceful way, a perspective, to lead us out of the abyss in which the two warring parties are irretrievably pushing us. This tract is an attempt to meet such demand.
In short, this paper diagnoses the principle question of our time and proposes a solution to it, as suggested by its two titles. For the moment the intended readership of this discourse is the South Asian modernist, secular, whether liberal or Marxist, academia and intelligentsia in general.
In that way it is all a hypothesis. The problem in making sense of this hypothesis is stated at the outset, though. In so far as we have not been through madrassas but modern schools and universities, we have been taught to speak in the language of modernity. Modernity, presently, is a party in war. The other language that has been taught us in this part of the world is religious language. That too is a party in this war. This means that the language in which we are going to speak, the language of the third perspective, of the middle Way, would not immediately make sense from either perspective which is at war presently. But if it would be comprehensible from either perspective, it would not be the third perspective. From the third perspective, though, the two reigning perspectives are clearly comprehensible. For it is the third perspective where the apparently hostile opposites are reconciled.
When a war looms, our natural or instinctive response is to choose the side we want to win. This draft manifesto argues that this is precisely what is not to be done.
But this is not this tract’s only controversial credo. The language that it employs does not lend itself an easy comprehension, because it is non-partisan, it is not the language of any of the two warring parties that might happen to be your preferred one (that you want to win). While the one party glorifies the past at the expense of the present, the other rejects the past in the name of the present. We, on the other hand, considering such partition as illegitimate, seek to celebrate the past and present as an indivisible single continuum. The war occurs and violence erupts when the communication between the two parties breaks down because the language of each becomes incomprehensible and meaningless to the other. This makes every one believe that war is inevitable, it being the only recourse to settle the issues, since mediation through common set of concepts seems to have become impossible.
The following is an attempt to propose a set of new concepts which can help us in not siding with any party in the looming war, for this, we believe, is the only way to Resistance (to this war). War cannot be defeated through war, violence cannot be overcome through violence. This assertion has always been taken as paradoxical and therefore nonsensical. But we will try to show that if, with the help of some new concepts, we can develop a language that can show connections between apparently irreconcilable positions, the war can be averted and peace won over. To draw a parallel from history of science, this might be as consequential as the discovery of the connection between mass and energy, which had hitherto been seen as the two irreconcilable phenomena, and which heralded what is known as the early twentieth century scientific revolution and which, as rightly argued by some, was basically a revolution in thought. For Einstein, one of the chief pioneers of this revolution, the ultimate object and joy of all knowledge was to find connections between seemingly disparate and contradictory phenomena. Darwin, in his field, achieved the same feat by connecting human species with the rest of the animal and living kingdom.
Finally, it must be taken as a hypothesis, a kind of research proposal, or an intellectual construction, a blueprint of a viable alternative world picture, the example being of an architect who brings forth to his fellow colleagues his plan for a new building. Or taking an analogy from computer, it can be compared to a new soft ware to be installed in a computer to replace the two soft wares being employed currently. Of these one can be called religious or traditional software while the other modern or secular, which, employing different languages, are mutually exclusive and therefore are at war with each other. Needless to say, an architect comes up with his plan, or a new software is built on the ground of existing reality, or by way of critiquing the current models. To think of an alternative model in isolation from the existing structures is an obvious absurdity which no serious architect or software engineer would even imagine to speculate.
The third model proposed then obviously draws largely on the concepts already employed in the two existing models or systems of thought. But what it specifically does is to reconfigure and re-understand them by connecting them in a way different than before, with the help of introduction of a network of some new concepts and their connections. So what I am asking you is to not to immediately compare it with whatever software you are employing for your life. Knowing that the existing two models are in deep crisis, almost in tatters and at war with each other, the third model demands a hearing with a scholarly detachment from whichever programme you are living with. This is a necessary condition to get into and comprehend any new research project or experiment. This is how it was intended in the first place, as a kind of thought experiment that might appeal to us aesthetically, giving meanings to our lives which we had not contemplated before.
In short, the object of this document is to open a debate on the issues currently facing us from a different perspective. The change of perspective, we will see, as once again the history of science teaches us, shows us a world that was not visible to us from the frame of reference from which we were looking at it previously. This is what we call changing the world by change in our perspective, in the way we see it. This is only a recapitulation or translation, if you like, of the theory of relativity in the terms of the social and human sciences. What could be a more peaceful way of changing our world? You would have noticed that this concept of change is different from the one held by both religious and secular parties since for both of them violence and war are inseparable from changing the world. So we embark upon changing the world by changing the notion of change itself.
A question of paramount importance
Today, on the 28th of April 2009, we have assembled here to protest at the take over of Swat by the Taliban and also to strongly condemn Pakistan National Assembly’s passage of the Nizam-i Adal Regulation (NAR) which allows the Taliban regime to rule the areas under their control beyond the jurisdiction of the law of the land. The capitulation of Pakistani government has emboldened the Taliban leaders to declare that all the main institutions of Pakistani state, from democratic government to judiciary, are illegal from Islamic perspective. Therefore they need to be dismantled and state offices be filled in by the people educated at the madrassas (traditional religious schools) controlled by the religious intelligentsia, of which the Taliban form the front guard. By all means this is a declaration of war by the Taliban against the state.
The question ‘Who wants to fight the Taliban?’ then has become of paramount importance and concern for every thinking person in this country. To ignore it might lead to consequences which we live to regret.
The Second Global War (SGW) looms, two decades after the end of the First Global War (FGW) 1979-1989, which coincided with the end of the USSR.[1] The battle lines are drawn. When that is the case, it is most opportune to ask: Who are the Taliban and what do they stand for? That is, what’s the battle for? What do they ask and how does their thought structure operate? They are already at our doors, checking our loyalties, and asking us to take sides: Are we their friends or their enemies?
To continue to believe, or pretend, to be more precise, that it is not a state of war is an ‘appeasement’ of worst kind. And I use the word appeasement in its historical context referring to the conditions leading to the Second World War. After the collapse of the Eastern block and the end of the Cold War, the spectre of the third world war seemed to have receded. But now its beginnings once again are not hard to see, though it is going to be truly the first global war. This war, according to many of its zealous fighters, both in the Islamic and American-Jewish world, would truly be the Last War, for it would usher in the era of the Good.
Secondly, are the Taliban outside of our mainstream society, or they are also inside us, being the part of the very fabric of our society, defused rather widely across the various social strata, thus permeating almost all institutions of our polity?
Let me tell a story to illustrate my answer to the second question. My younger brother, aged 43, lives with his family in a rather small, middle class, secured housing society of Model Town Extension (in Lahore). On my first visit to that locality I had noticed its beautiful mosque. The following day I saw that it was run by Jamaat-i Islami. Later when I visited my brother’s house on a weekend (which was immediately after the flogging of a young girl at the hands of the Taliban in Swat), driving me back to my place he told me that his neighbour visited him the other day. He wanted to know if he (my brother) agreed with what had happened in Swat. I nearly shook when I heard that his neighbour had come to convince him that it was rightful act according to the Sharia.[2]
The day before I had participated in a protest march against the atrocity along the Mall organized by various NGOs and some other small groups. Empathizing with my brother, I was obviously terrified that my neighbour had come to me to ask whether I was his friend or his enemy! I could well imagine that my neighbour’s house was armed. My brother was visibly disturbed and I could see his anxiety and helplessness before the either/or choice he was being thrust upon in a war that he didn’t want to fight because he did not believe it was his war. This is primarily the dilemma that most of us face today.
The eye-opening incident just cited furnishes the answer to my second question raised above. The Taliban are both outside and inside us. And to go along with the American argument, largely expounded by the Western intelligentsia and shared by their local counterparts, that Taliban are an evil force extraneous to us that we can eradicate with violence, or counter-violence, if you like, is a folly for which we will have to pay dearly both in terms of blood and general destruction. For it is their (Western) perception, and not necessarily ours. And therefore the compatriot secular intelligentsia, especially the Marxists, find themselves in this embarrassingly unhappy situation that they seem ready to march along the American armies, the chief embodiment of evil for them until yesterday. So they must be seriously out of step with time.
They probably have historical precedents for their ‘joint front’ with the lesser evil in order ultimately to destroy the greater. The most well-known one of course is the Second World War alliance between the Capitalist West and the Communist East against Fascism. But that precedent is invalid in the present situation for valid reasons. First of all, that was the alliance of the states or nations. However, among each nation in this alliance, there was no opposition from within. This is not the case in our situation. As shown above, in all likelihood, we would rather be a minority in our population marching after the American Drones against our own population. That is the most dreadful prospect. It makes the whole effort futile.
How do we unite with our people?
The fundamental question then that we face today is: How do we unite our people around us against the Taliban rather than surrendering them over to them in our hasty alliance with the American armies, or, to be more precise, with the world view that drives them. What, then, is the Western perspective with which Pakistani, and generally non-Western, modern secular intelligentsia, whether liberal or Marxist, allies itself? This is the crucial question that we would deal with later in the second part of this tract. For the moment the point we have tried to make is that the Taliban ideology is neither a peripheral phenomenon, lying on the border areas of NWFP, nor a decaying wall that needs a little push to wither away. However our people may hate the atrocities this ideology perpetuates, they often pray with their ideologues together in Juma prayers in nearly every mosque around the corner.
Furthermore, if we recall the newly elected Amir of Jamaat-i Islami’s refusal to condemn the crime committed in Swat in the name of Sharia,[3] and juxtapose it with similar responses from leaders of various mainstream religious parties and other smaller groups, the truth of the answer just gained will be sustained.[4]
Now in our attempt to articulate our response to this situation, let us proceed by first briefly recounting the historical context of the war and the rise of the Taliban which would shed some light on our first question as to who they are and what do they stand for.
The origins of war
The present situation is the development of the war that Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders started with the bombing of the Twin Towers on 11th September 2001. In retaliation the United States formed a global coalition, Pakistan being the key ally, and attacked Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime from power. After a short while, however, the Taliban were able to regroup and mount armed resistance against the occupying American-led foreign forces.
Until a few months back, though, the war was principally between the Afghanistan based Taliban and the American led Western armies. Pakistan was a party in it only indirectly, providing support to the American forces and then, on the latter’s insistence, fighting against the Taliban fighters taking refuge in the traditionally semi-independent Tribal Areas along the Pak-Afghan border. For the last few months, though, the situation has taken a dramatic turn. The Taliban have taken control of Swat in the north western province of Pakistan and have been able not only to establish their writ there, but also announcing their designs in clear terms that they intend to extend their rule to the whole of Pakistan.
Since 9/11, each party has been urging the world, more especially the people of Pakistan, to enter into the war at its side. Each party proclaimed that the war was between good and evil and therefore it was imperative that each citizen in this country and around the world choose the side they wished to win.
We, the people of Pakistan, have been able to ignore this call until now and maintain largely a neutral stance, occasionally condemning some atrocity committed by one side or the other. But now the situation has changed for worse. With the occupation of Swat by the Taliban and their professed intention to establish their rule over the whole country, the golden age of indifference and apathy seems to have gone.
What is important to note is that the take over of Swat does not mark Taliban’s real major victory after their early rout in 2001. Their real gain is that step by step they are succeeding in dragging Pakistani people into the war by pushing them to make the choice of the side they are with. The question that Bush asked the world before invading Afghanistan and then Iraq was: Are you with us or them? The same question is now being put forth before the Pakistani people by the triumphal Taliban regime. Our society is being polarized with a heady pace.
Are we ready for this choice? We do not need to conduct a gallop poll to find that more than 80% people of this country, as indeed in the whole Islamic world, see this choice as an unwelcome dictation. They live in both worlds, of Islam or tradition (of which the religious intelligentsia claim to be the chief representatives and custodians), and of modernity (of which the Americans or Western secular intelligentsia claim to be the chief representatives and custodians). To side with the one to bury the other seems irrational and absurd to our people. But what is the other, or let’s say, the third way? Or let us put the question another way: Is there a way to oppose war without siding with any party?
The third, or the middle Way
This is the challenge that we, the non-religious intelligentsia from various walks of life, such as students, teachers, media men and women, doctors, lawyers, engineers, office workers and hosts of others, and to which this draft manifesto is addressed. It will be argued here that there is a Way to oppose this war by precisely not siding with any of the two parties, and this is the Way that our people wish to follow. An attempt will be made to lay broad outlines of the third or middle Way with the assumption that war and violence cannot be opposed through war and violence. There must be a peaceful way to do so, knowing that the present war has no end, and if it has, it is of universal, total destruction.
We must concede that this situation is as novel as it is complex. For if today, after our long apathy, we have assembled here to demand that the Pakistani state confront the Taliban and establish the writ of the state in the areas under their occupation, the message to the Taliban and the religious intelligentsia that supports them is clear (that is, this is how it is going to be seen by them): that we, the modernist intelligentsia, have joined the enemies of Taliban, the Americans and the West in general, and so we have become a party in war against them. In this way the 28th of April 2009 might be seen by posterity as the day when the war, or, to be more precise, civil war in Pakistan began. So when you walk back towards your homes after this rally, watch your way.
Western stooges: Is this how we want to be seen?
The argument of this tract is that if we end up as American allies, we are surely going to lose the war, for the religious intelligentsia will eventually win the tacit or active support of our people in the name of the defence of their religion and freedom from Western domination while branding us as Western stooges. Our fate will then be no different than that of the modernist intelligentsia of Iran in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. So the issue is not just of our honour and independence but even of our existence.
The genesis of the Taliban movement
Let us explain the point a little further by going back to the genesis of the Taliban phenomena. The Taliban (the word means students, or youth devoted to the study of Sharia) are the next generation, literally the offspring of the Mujahideen who fought and defeated the Soviet Union in a decade long war that began in 1979. The Mujahideen could not have humbled the might of the USSR in such short span of time had they not been supported and armed to the teeth by the West, led by America, via the Pakistani state, which was then declared as the frontline state of the so-called Free World.
The Afghans have a centuries old tradition of defending their freedom from foreign occupation even when almost the whole planet had gone under the Western yoke. They were the only people that the British could not subdue during their colonial adventure of India. But even though the Afghans fought long to keep their independence, there is no evidence that this in any way led to the enforcement of Sharia in their lands.
Cultural revolution of the last three decades
Or the emergence of religion on the world map
Very few people have taken cognizance of the cultural revolution that has taken place in the world during the last three decades. It was initiated by the Islamic revolution of Iran just over thirty years back from this date. In a world defined by the Cold War, the world mainly shaped by the conflict between capitalism and communism, the Iranian revolution was generally seen as an aberration. It then occurred to no one that it was the heralding of the post-Cold War era in which religion, or tradition, led by Islam, would jump on to the centre stage to question its relegation to the archives of history, and demand a new equation with and place in the modern world.
However, before we proceed further, it needs immediately to be emphasized that, contrary to the claims of both the warring parties, the contemporary resurgence of religion is not the re-birth of religion and tradition as it was in the pre-modern era, or, to be more precise, that produced and governed the civilizations of the pre-modern era, and which was decapitated by the forces of modernity. Rather, this, the Talibanized, clerical form of religion/ tradition was shaped and reconstructed under the all-embracing influence of modern thought and colonial occupation. It means that Western secular intelligentsia’s understanding of religion and modern religious intelligentsia’s claim of being the sole inheritor and embodiment of the religious tradition need to be questioned. This is the great historical task of the non-religious intelligentsia of the non-Western world. The second section of this tract is largely devoted to this task.
Still, the Iranian revolution was a kind of upheaval that radically alters, or demands to re-examine the reigning modes of thought and terms of discourse through which we had been hitherto making sense of the world. Such a change renders a lot of existing knowledge obsolete and asks for the construction of a new knowledge that is in consonance with the changed reality. However, for those who are steeped in the given modes of thought, such a revolution (i.e., the meaning and implications of it) remains largely invisible, and even though it does show itself by any means, they continue in a state of denial.
The Iranian Revolution was such a spectacle of people’s power that few generations in history has the good fortune to witness. The American viceroy, the Shah of Iran, barely managed to board a plane to escape from the land that he had all along hated to see under his feet for his sheer contempt for it. Still, it was seen by the world at large as a historical eccentricity of which there is no dearth in history anyway. The slogan of the nascent revolution, ‘neither communism nor capitalism, neither left nor right,’ was mocked at globally by both sides of the modernist intelligentsia.
The Islamic revolutionaries made no secret of their pretensions to globalize their revolution. So the dictator of the neighbouring state (Iraq), was enlisted, trained and equipped to the teeth by the Americans like a rabid dog and unleashed upon the Islamic Republic which was to engage it for the next eight years in one of the bloodiest wars in history in which the new republic had to virtually throw its young generation on the front like the bags of sand to defend itself. Even though the Islamic republic survived, it might have remained a historical idiosyncrasy but for another theatre of war that opened on its northern border which was to ensure that the era opened by the Russian Revolution of 1917 was indeed coming to a close. This was in fact the beginning of the end of hegemony of the Western mind and the categories of thought imposed by it to make sense of the world.
The situation changed dramatically by the end of the same year (1979) when the Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan in their bid to bolster the revolution made by a small party of Afghan communists. This time it was not a usual case of one nation trying to conquer the other. Rather a new element was introduced, which was religion. Previously, the British had come with a religion of their own, which they kept subservient to the state though. But this time the invading forces were the enemies of religion itself, and for Afghans, like most peoples of the non-Western world, religion and culture are identical and inseparable.
Now there is a very interesting fact of history which it is quite opportune to recount at this hour. Capitalism and Marxism, we know, emerged as the two personas or faces of modernity that overthrew the traditional order of which religion, in one way or the other, formed the core. Marxism arose in opposition to capitalism, as a critical face and alternative version of modernity, but both shared common grounds of origin and shared their conviction that the proper place of religion was the dustbin of history. The much trumpeted credo was based on the identification of science with knowledge and of religion with ignorance, superstition, past-worship, obscurantism and all the other vices that one could think of in an ostensibly future-oriented world of progress and prosperity.
However, there was a disagreement between them over the place of religion in a modern society. While the liberals were prepared to let religion survive as an old relic or as a private profession of individuals, the Marxists were much more apprehensive and not prepared for any such ‘appeasement.’ They believed that the fight between science and religion was absolute and if the roots of religion were not dug out, science and modernity would have a hard time to survive. The intelligentsia of the communist world would accuse their adversaries of hypocrisy, opportunism and, more importantly, of their ignorance of the deadly venom of religion. They warned consistently that the project of modernity might falter if religion were not completely uprooted. They were soon to be proved right, though, ironically, it were they themselves who were going to be the first victim of its fatal bite.
The mobilization of religion in the service of Western capitalism
The West had been all along confident though that they had subdued religion once for all by putting it under the surveillance of the state. They had exorcised the spectre of Christianity which from their perspective was the greatest religion on earth. The rest of the ‘minor’ religions did not seem much of a problem to them. In this self-deception, they woke up the slumbering giant in mountains of Afghanistan in the service of their own war with communism.
Almost the whole of Muslim world was mobilized to fight against the godless monster, or evil empire, as Reagon thundered. The religious warriors from around the Islamic world rushed to fight the classic battle between Islam and kufr. They were called Mujahiddeen, the holy warriors, who were presumably fighting for the freedom of the whole of Free World. It was then that the Afghans entered into the modern world, that is, by way of its military, technological side. They were heavily armed by the West and trained how to fight one of the most formidable military machines in the world. The experience was of course never lost to them.
In the meanwhile, more than three million Afghan refugees settled inside the Pakistani side of the border. There they were provided for much better than the poor Palestinians who were rendered homeless over sixty years ago by way of one of the most brutal projects of colonialism. These encampments along the border ran their own madrassas which proved to be the nurseries where Taliban as children grew up. Not only were they indoctrinated in what we today call Talibanization, but in this endeavour almost the whole of Pakistan was put at their service. A military dictator was bolstered by the West whose vision of Islam and the world was hardly any different from modern day Taliban. He sanctioned barbaric public punishments of convicts and kept hundreds and thousands of political prisoners in jail, many subjected to horrendous tortures. He also bore Talbanic hatred for women, and got a law passed which made a victim of rape subject to prosecution if she failed to come up with four witnesses according to the Sharia ruling.
In short, for their own ends, to settle the scores with their internal enemies, the self-professed leaders of freedom of thought and modernity brought the archaic religious forces from Afghan caves into Manhattan. But this was not all. They identified Islam with the Talibanic vision of it, which served a double purpose, for it made manifest the decadent nature of religion. From this decadent face of religion the West in turn derived legitimacy for modernity as a force of progress and enlightenment.
It was in those fateful ten years that the religious intelligentsia gained foothold in this country, and of course around the world, and acquired technical know-how and skills to work as a global network with the help of modern technology. In the following decade after the war many of their die-hard and soft supporters entered into the Western universities and pooled in their knowledge of the modern world. By the end of the millennium they had truly become modern religious intelligentsia with the confidence that they could take on the ideology of the modern secular intelligentsia around the world. 9/11 was their declaration of war against their Last Enemy.
Their confidence after defeating the second largest military machine in the world was of course well founded. But one thing is rarely acknowledged. And this is that the Mujahideen were clear almost at the outset that the West was by no means their ‘friend’. Recalling the analogy from the Second World War in which capitalism and communism joined hands to defeat Fascism, the greater enemy, the Mujahideen only joined hands with the lesser evil to defeat their greater enemy.
Unaware of the situation, the Americans and their Western allies happily went back home after the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, not knowing the deadly potential of the genii that they had brought out of the bottle, in spite of the earlier Soviet warnings to that effect. The West’s complete inability to grasp the ground reality gave the Mujahideen, and their allies that they had won in the urban middle classes around the Muslim world, a free hand to prepare quietly for the next war. At the end there were three factors which made them ready to take on the heathen enemy at the turn of the millennium. These were, first, a global cadre that included various groups of people such as those trained in modern warfare and weaponry, young people educated in Western universities, most of them based in the West, and missionaries that moved around the world freely. Second, the new generation of holy warriors, called the Taliban, had grown up and taken control of Afghanistan. And, finally, the Talibanization of Pakistan army. That is when the seeds of Second Afghan War were sown, which Obama was sworn in last year to fight.[5]
A powerful global network of modern Islamic religious intelligentsia is formed
I have tried to draw your attention to the fact that during the decade of first Afghan war and the one following it, the seeds of Talibanization were sown not merely in Afghanistan, but also in Pakistan and many other Muslim countries in which mainstream religious parties took active role, with active encouragement and funds generously pouring in from the Western world. In consequence, a global network of modern religious intelligentsia with all the expertise of modern age was formed. In contrast to it the non-religious intelligentsia of this or any other Muslim country was and remains of absolutely no match to the religious intelligentsia’s organization, financial resources, technical know how, military skills, and dedication.
The religious camp has fully indoctrinated cadres in every madrassa which can now be found in almost any other street in Lahore and around. And not just the madrassas, they have established modern schools and even universities which are run strictly according to their ideology and vision of Islam and the world. Further to that they control mosques in almost every quarter. Often these mosques are employed for more than five time prayers. Courses in the Quran and hadith, evidently designed to their perspective, are given in many of them to both children and adults by the teachers educated at the madrassas who often also happen to be religious activists. Some mosques are openly run by the mainstream religious parties.
The most noteworthy aspect of this development, though, is the greater religionization of our people as a whole. They are far more religious now than they were say thirty years ago at the end of Bhutto’s rule. There has been a marked increase in the ritual observances and religious ceremonies. Religion has strangely developed even a sort of entertaining side to it.[6]
Interestingly, the West’s civil war between capitalism and communism has not been the only factor in promoting greater religionization of the Islamic world. As the spectre of communism was overcome, all fetters to the expansion of capitalism were removed. With the unleashing of the forces of market and globalization that were bent upon eroding all the identities with which people around the world had lived for ages, religion emerged as the only bastion of security, an unshakable foothold to stand upon in an increasingly uncertain world. Modernity, ironically, which had come to bury religion, was now promoting it as the last refuge from the heady forces it had unleashed.
I do not intend to frighten you, but since we have assembled here to register our opposition to the prospective Talibanization of our country, we must know where we stand and where are we going from here. For the way back is littered with many ambushes, and we must beware of as many of them as we can if we want to reach home safely. In the protest rally mentioned above that I attended a few weeks ago to express public outrage at the flogging of a young girl in Swat, I noticed that most of the demonstrators had come from affluent families and poorly clad by standers watched us with an amusement which seemed embarrassing to me. After the procession I lost my friend who had brought me there. When I called him he told me that he was at Avari and I could join him there.
So if siding with any one side amounts to escalation of the war, what is the Way to fight this war? What is our theoretical framework and what is our strategy to carry it out? The most misleading belief, as noted earlier, especially popular among the Marxist intelligentsia, is that this is basically a war between two evils, between Western, American imperialist ideology and Taliban ideology, between the ‘two fundamentalisms’, as it is called, from which they can safely sit aside and watch the spectacle from afar.
The problem, however, is that there is no ‘afar’. The battle is going to be on every space, and so there will be no space left for the onlookers. The Taliban, with their armies of would-be martyrs, are going to come hard, and it would be a folly to think that they will be confronted by Pakistan government and army, as we are demanding today. The army, which is itself deeply Talibanized, is basically trained to fight on the front, pre-eminently the Indian front, so it is most likely that it will continue in its hesitation to fight around the streets killing their own people, especially when they do not share the perception that the Taliban are the personification of evil.
Three decisive factors
To recapitulate, we have noted two important developments that have taken place in the cultural revolution that has taken place in the last three decades. The modernization and wider expansion of the religious intelligentsia and their increasing power in resources and organizational skills the world over; and, secondly, the increasing religionization or passive, unconscious Talibanization of our people. One of its most pronounced expressions is the rise of Hamas as the leading party of resistance in a movement which was non-religious and secular in its origins. Needless to say, the Hamas, like the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, was initially nourished by the Israeli-American nexus to break the power of the secular PLO.
So, once again, the most thorny question of all in this context that confronts us is as to how are we going to turn the tide and win our people, whose role will be decisive in the final outcome, to our Way of opposing this war? Even a cursory glance will reveal their deep ambivalence, and there is all the reason to fear that as the war prolongs, as it seems it will, there are three factors which might eventually turn them into the hands of the religious intelligentsia, leaving us in an isolation from where there will be no escape and which once again recalls the fate of the Iranian liberal and Marxist intelligentsia in the after math of Iranian Islamic revolution of 1979.
The first of these factors is our pronounced Westernized or modern profile. Westernization or modernization, wealth as the ultimate value of capitalist system, increasing materialism and hedonism have become universal hallmarks of modern way of life. The most conspicuous consequence of unbridled capitalism is extremely unjust distribution of wealth and widening divide between the rich and the poor. As the conflict escalates, the larger section of the affluent and the wealthy will inevitably side with the American side, while the poor will be eventually pushed to the other party in retaliation. The religious intelligentsia will use the rhetoric of simple life and social justice couched in religious phraseology to win over the poor to their side. It is also most likely that, given their anti-religious attire and rhetoric, most of the modern middle class intelligentsia from universities, media and NGOs will also be seen by people to be on the side of the West, if no concerted efforts are made to prove to the contrary.
The second factor is modern intelligentsia’s alienation from religion, bordering on downright contempt for it. Whether liberal or Marxist, with one voice we identify religion with superstition, ignorance, obscurantism, medievalism, past worship and so forth. The stark fact is that our people do not share this perception of religion. In popular elections they would not vote for religious parties, as the past history tells us. But it is also a blatant fact that almost right from the moment of the birth of this country, the minority parties of religious intelligentsia have exercised a hugely disproportionate power over our society. How do we explain this?
The simple answer that our people are ignorant and superstitious is an expression of modernist arrogance that would make us pay a heavy price. The truth is that our modern prejudice, that religion and Taliban ideology are one and the same thing, and thus our total ignorance of the history of our people’s culture and tradition, of which religion forms the backbone, is bound to isolate us further from our people. They would thus be an easy prey to the superficial, pious rhetoric of the religious intelligentsia.
The third factor is equally if not more important. This is the historical contradiction between the West and the non-West, or more particularly between the West and the Islamic world born initially with the European colonial project started over three or four centuries ago. Two things are to be noted here. First, modernity is still associated with Western domination, a perception now widely and vehemently propagated by the religious intelligentsia.
The second point is that colonization is not a fact of bygone centuries. Even a man in the street knows that the master-slave hierarchical relation established between the West and the non-West has only changed but in form. Our modernist governments are rightly seen as stooges and extended arms of Western American imperialism. No wonder Hamas now carries the anti-imperialist flag in occupied Palestine while it was Turkish prime minister Erdogan, the leader of the Islamist party in Turkey, who had the guts to confront the Israeli president at Davos over Israel’s massacre in Gaza.
The contradiction is getting sharper by the day with the continued American support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine and daily brutalities committed there, the American rape of Iraq and the present American occupation of Afghanistan. Deep resentment and anger over such flouting of all norms of international law and justice, or what is known as Western double standards, are deeply ingrained in the psyche of our people, of the whole peoples in the Islamic world and which is also deeply shared by other peoples of the Third world.
In such circumstances, our siding with the American armies in their forthcoming large-scale operations, of which the Americans are daily issuing clear warning, a programme on which Barrack Obama won his presidency, is going to have disastrous effects, and the chief casualty of it will be our increasing isolation.
Now during the Cold War the mantle of opposition to Western capitalism and its domination of the world was carried by the communist world led by Soviet Union and later also by China. Since the demise of the Soviet block and capitulation of China, the flag of resistance and opposition to the Western domination has been carried over by the Islamic religious intelligentsia, whom we once saw as the lackeys of imperialism. This is perhaps one of the most significant features of the cultural revolution of the preceding three decades. The religious intelligentsia’s avowed opposition to imperialism makes our people inwardly and quietly sympathize with them, while they see us as ‘collaborators’, if not now then soon when they see us marching along the American Drones.
Finally, and crucially, before coming to the second part of our draft manifesto, we must beware that, as the fact just pointed (i.e., the religious intelligentsia’s taking of the mantle of opposition to imperialism) suggests, we cannot carry the old baggage of concepts and the worldview with which we made sense of the world and lived in the days of the Cold War. That war was fought between good and evil, but this is not the war between good and evil.
There is no doubt that both the modern religious intelligentsia and the modern secular intelligentsia do tend to project the same model. According to it, of the two parties one must live while the other must die. But there are host of indications that this model is no more applicable. First of all, the outcome of this war is not going to be as it was in the Cold War, i.e., the victory of the one side over the other. It is going to be an endless war, as Americans keep insisting, which can only end up in wholesale destruction of the two worlds, the only ultimate beneficiary being China, if, God forbid, the present war of terror does not end up in a nuclear holocaust.
Furthermore, as already noted, the overwhelming majority of our people do not see this as a war between good and evil, at least until now, in spite of the both sides’ (Taliban and Americans) insistence to make it as such.
The reason is quite obvious. And which is that people find the warp and woof of their daily lives made up of both modernity and tradition, and thus find the choice between the two illegitimate and unnecessary. But there is clear and present danger that this might not last long, and as the war escalates and polarization intensifies, which both parties now seem to be bent upon, our people might end up rallying behind the religious intelligentsia, leading up to 1979 style Iranian revolution in which Americans along with both the liberal and Marxist intelligentsia were utterly routed.
The problem on our hands
So we must not repeat the mistake that the Iranian modernist intelligentsia made. We must see that our people are deeply rooted in tradition, of which religion is the kernel, but, at the same time, they also do not see modernity as incarnation of evil as the Taliban do. This clearly points to the problem on our hands. They are critical of both worlds in that they are not prepared for whole sale acceptance of either one of them. They are looking for the third or middle Way that leads to some sort of rapprochement and harmony between the two, an aspiration which both the religious and secular intelligentsia find illogical, absurd or nonsensical. But we must remember that tradition or past cannot be destroyed. It can only be recreated and reformed. It would be a great mistake to continue with the modernist dogma that the rightful place for religion is the dustbin of history. The identification of religion with Taliban ideology is a modern dogma that both the Taliban and modernists advocate with equal fervour. In similar vein, modernity cannot be uprooted and destroyed, the democratic freedoms and advances it has made cannot be reversed, as our religious intelligentsia zealously insist. But it can be criticized and reformed. Modernists often cry for reformation of Islam. Seldom do they realize that modernity too is in as much need of reformation.
So we are faced with a huge task of reconstruction of both tradition and modernity in such terms that a bridge can be formed and an equation between them discovered, an equation between past and present that our people so desperately seek. The task seems too daunting indeed, but we must realize that tearing our people apart from one or the other, as each party in war seeks, is a great act of violence that we must not be guilty of perpetuating. If we do not want to enter into war but wish to overcome it, then there is no other way out. We must also remember that if we are dragged into this war, fighting from one or the other side, then this is a sure path to doomsday. Our war is not against any one of the parties, but against the war itself, because we do not recognize the legitimacy of this war, however each side may push us to believe so.
It was said above that in order to achieve this noble goal, we must leave behind the baggage of the Cold War. As we find our one foot in tradition while the other in modernity, we may say that the religious intelligentsia are our neighbours and therefore our brothers in faith. We live with them, often in the same street, even among the same family, as the movie Khuda Ka Lia showed.
In similar vein, we are also moderns who have learnt the tools of our trade and thought from the West. So we are not anti-Western and are not enemies of Western people dubbing them as inherently immoral and treating them as hordes of atheism. And, further, in opposition to the Taliban ideology, we refuse to identify anti-Westernism with anti-imperialism. While we develop our critique of modernity and of the Western intelligentsia, we consider them as our neighbours and brothers. After all quite a large section of our people have made the Western lands as their homes. It would be senile to pose a of friend/enemy dichotomy between them.
You might be amused by such terminology. But ultimately our argument rests on the assumption that both sides are at war with each other because of their flawed perceptions of the world or because of the self-contradictions in their worlviews. Our job, as the members of intelligentsia, is to come up with a perception of the world, or with a worldview which excludes violence from the relationship between tradition and modernity. To use the language of the Quran, the ultimate difference between belief and unbelief is that of knowledge and ignorance.
Finally, if it is a matter of true knowledge, of which each party of the war possess in piecemeal, then the leading forces of Resistance (i.e., resistance to war itself, to the worldviews of both parties of war) must be the intelligentsia. Living in a knowledge society, the leading forces of Resistance must come from the middle strata of society, such as the lawyers, doctors, NGO workers, office workers, media people and, above all, the students and teachers of the school and the university.
I think what makes the students and teachers the vanguard of Resistance is that it is no more the factory but the school and the university that drives the contemporary society, this being the other feature of the cultural revolution of the last three decades, as we will see. But of course this by no means implies that we are seeming to be indifferent to workers, peasants and other groups whom the neo-colonial order has kept deprived of culture. It is precisely for them, that is, in terms comprehensible to them that we must develop a new language and a new lifestyle that should unify the two opposing currents which are tearing us all apart.
In summing up this section, we would outline two modes of the Way to oppose war without joining a warring side, or the two complimentary aspects of the third perspective, or middle Way, that shuns both the extremist, exclusivist positions. For it is their exclusivism which generates violence and war. Let’s remember that modernity’s exclusivism has generated more violence than religion’s. While describing what he calls ‘the dark side of modernity’, Anthony Giddens, a British sociologist (not a postmodernist) has noted that during the twentieth century more than 100 million were killed in wars, far more than any century in history.[7] The idea that religion is prone to hatred and violence while modernity is a discourse of peace and harmony is a modern myth that needs to be exposed and debunked. The crimes of each balance each other as much as their gains. This realization is the first step to form a bridge between the past and present, for it is the conflict between them that is ravaging humanity today.
The two modes of Resistance
There are two modes of Resistance, theoretical, and practical, which are complimentary to each other. The credo of its former side is non-partisanship of thought which we call independence of thought while the credo of the latter is service to humanity which we see as the very condition of self-realization and self-fulfillment.
The theoretical aspect of Resistance, which is basically the task of the university intelligentsia, the teachers and students, is to criticize and expose the fundamental assumption espoused both by the modern religious and modern secular intelligentsias that social change is inseparable from violence and war, that war is the only means of opposing war, or that violence and war are necessary means of social change. We need to produce a theory of peaceful social change that demonstrates separation of social change and violence.
Following this direction, we have designed a course called History of Knowledge to be taught in university, and even in school, that articulates a peaceful theory of social change while showing how it can be applied to the world at large. The basic hypothesis of this course is that the hegemony of Western knowledge is based on its seriously flawed and limited understanding of history and knowledge. Having defined knowledge in its own so-called scientific terms, modern thought drastically and artificially reduced the span of knowledge, limiting it to the three hundred years of Greek thought (from Thales to Aristotle) and then to the four hundred years since 16th century when modern science was born in Europe. In both time and space this history of knowledge is paltry and fundamentally Eurocentric whose object is to exclude the non-Western world from the domain of knowledge and history. The realization of this goal, i.e., exclusion of the non-Western world from the domain of knowledge and history, provided the moral and intellectual legitimacy to colonialism and continues to do so for the present Western domination of the world.
In our understanding of religion and tradition, we argue that the exclusion of it from the domain of knowledge and history is based on a flawed understanding of it by modern secular intelligentsia. To put it simply, religion is identified with the religion as preached and practiced, for instance, by Taliban or by Iranian clerics. With such identification there needs little argument to prove that modernity’s exclusion of religion from the domain of knowledge is justified. And if by this fate of history the poor non-Western peoples are excluded from the court of holy reason, it is seen as a kind of collateral damage that could not be helped.
However, we have tried to demonstrate that religion is fundamentally composed of formal and critical traditions though both modern secular and religious intelligentsias have suppressed the critical history of it. The critical or core tradition of religious history, represented by Sufism in Islam, for instance, was all the way opposed to the formal, clerical side of religion which is now portrayed as its only face. Needless to say, Sufism is the Islamic expression of the core tradition that underlies all religions.[8]
Critical tradition provides historical antecedents for the third perspective. Both credos of Resistance are rooted in this tradition which both modern secular thought and modern religious thought have joined hands to brutally exclude from the cultural map of human past and present.[9] Our opposition and resistance to the contemporary, partisan modes of thought, then, represents our struggle for the discovery and liberation of our history, on the one hand, and for the freedom of thought itself from the fetters imposed on it by the two reigning partisan modes of thought.[10]
Remarkable consequences await us once the fallacy based on monolithic nature of religion is exposed. The most pronounced is the discovery that science and religion are the two languages of knowledge, each employing its own set of concepts to describe the nature of the world, being complimentary to each other rather than contradictory, as both religious and secular intelligentsia argue. Once the so-called inherent anti-thesis between religion and science is overcome, in place of the given paltry histories espoused by the religious and secular intelligentsias the span of knowledge extends right back to the origin of man. For, as the archeologist and social anthropologist Gordon Childe remarked, ‘even a rude Neanderthalar had an ideology,’ by ideology he signified knowledge.[11] The most remarkable consequence of such expansion of history and knowledge, however, would be that the whole humanity would enter into the domain of knowledge and history, which is presently colonized by the West. This liberation alone is the end to die for.
The other, practical side of Resistance concerns registering our opposition in every peaceful way at our disposal to whatever atrocity and injustice that each warring side commits. To this end the leading role can be played by NGOs. They must place opposition to war as their first priority, orienting whatever work they are doing otherwise to this end. They can join hands in setting up centres to coordinate the efforts in resistance to war. An NGO can be founded wholly devoted to Resistance, with the sole objective to reach to the people and educate them on what is happening and how they can contribute to defeat the war. The people who have suffered at the hands of either party must be helped and counseled, and sit-ins and vigils staged in front of the embassies, parliament house and other centres of power.
We also need to organize cultural activities, such as workshops, drama and musical events to raise public consciousness on the perils of war and benefits of peace. Furthermore, every effort should be made to extend the Resistance to global scale. We know that both parties of war have global networks, and resistance to them cannot be fruitful if it is remains provincialized.
A concentrated effort needs to be made to challenge and dismantle the remains of feudalism in this country. Such objective can, however, be part of the most important goal for the NGOs and all other thinking individuals of this country, and which is to work towards universal education for all school going children. The school, we must remember, is the primary humanizing institution in our age. It is indeed the greatest failing of the successive governments of this country that the larger part of our young and even older generation remains deprived of basic education. It is a criminal neglect. We should note that the larger part of the would-be army of the Taliban is nurtured in the madrassas where not only education but also free boarding and food are provided for. In a country where larger part of population lives below poverty line, these services are seen indeed as God-given.
We must build parallel institutions where all the needs of children of poor families are catered for. A huge amount of resources is expended by foreign funded NGOs on myriad projects while the real work of what can be termed as humanization of our young generation is being completely neglected. It is in these schools where we must equip our children with the new knowledge, with the critical history of their tradition, if we are really committed to counter the onslaught of the forces of violence, fanaticism and bigotry.
The new knowledge with which we have to arm our young generation would be chiefly characterized by our questioning of the ideals of modernity that glorify material affluence and consumption, competition and possession, selfishness and egotism as the ultimate values of life. Such ideals, which modernity portrays as almost sacred, are in clear breach of the ethos and sensibility of our people. They instill a deep sense of inferiority in the larger part of our population living hand to mouth, and ultimately foster distrust and even hatred for the modernist forces. Needless to say, this becomes a fertile ground for the Taliban ideology to take roots.
The important component of the schools that we need to establish around the country, then, is the new teaching based on the third perspective that resurrects and brings to life the founding principles of the core tradition, which are founded on the observation that ultimately it is the quality of life that matters, and not the material goods, as modernity insists. The course on History of Knowledge just mentioned can play a major role in the preparation of the cadres and teachers to this end.
Such humanitarian work, which also involves building dispensaries and small hospitals around the country and providing other facilities such as clean water and so forth, must be carried out on war footing, with the clear objective of producing concrete results in the next five to ten years. This is the only way of winning our people to our side and to make them believe that we are on their side. The dire implications of our failing in the realization of this goal need not be mentioned.
To sum up this section, we have tried to stress that resistance to Taliban and the tradition that they claim to inherit, on the one hand, and resistance to modernity and Western intelligentsia (who drive the Western power), with their ideals of progress in terms of material affluence and consumption, are the two faces of Resistance to war that is being imposed upon us. To think that one can be carried out while overlooking the other will only further the flames of war, a sure recipe for disaster.
So, if we started this document with the question that is being imposed on us, that is, Are you with us or with them? we conclude it by counter posing our question: Are you for War or Resistance?
Postscript: 08 May 2009
Notes
[1] The two better known world wars were basically European or Western wars (which can be called European civil wars) fought around the world. The non-Western world was not a party in either of them. The FGW marked the transitional phase from the Western to global era whereas the SGW apparently aims at ending the divide between the West and the non-West as the opposite power bases once for all. It obviously recalls Samuel Huntington’s famous paper, ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ (1993) which was later expanded into a book form. Most of the Western intelligentsia disagreed, even abhorred his argument, for they did not believe, for one, that religion would rise from the grave to pose any resistance to the might and rationality of the West. Perhaps they thought it below their dignity to even contemplate fighting the religious zealots in a battlefield (and this was in spite of the fact that they had just witnessed the spectacle of their internal foe falling into such disgrace, and, worst, being utterly routed at the end. But they thought that it was basically the Western might that had routed USSR, an obvious self-deception as the events later proved). Huntington’s moral of the argument was that the war between the Western and Islamic civilizations being inevitable, the West must prepare for it. That his argument was largely ignored by the Western intelligentsia and establishment alike proved a blessing for the religious forces, for it gave them time for their preparations. I was one of those who supported Huntington’s argument, though not the moral of it. I proposed the way to avert it, but the paper (which I have lost now), was declined by the magazine to which it was sent.
[2] When I visited my brother two weeks later, they had another story to tell. My brother’s wife told me that the other day in a local market a bearded man stopped a woman, in short sleeves shirt and trousers, and admonished her sternly by saying: Come to your senses, know that we are coming.
[3] When asked by the media if he condemned the flogging, he responded by saying that he condemned the attacks by American Drones inside the Pakistani territory.
[4] Incidentally, one wonders if our budding politician, Imran Khan, has the same affection for the newly elected Amir as he has nourished for Qazi Hussain Ahmad (the former Amir), since his ‘conversion’!
[5] Barrack Hussain Obama opposed the Iraq war from the outset. This is generally considered as the principal factor in his winning over the war-weary American electorate. But America is hardly a country ready for a peace loving president. The real reason for Obama’s acceptance by American establishment as a candidate for presidency lay in his ‘prophecy’, (a devout convert to Christianity that he happens to be), that the real war that America had to fight was not in Iraq, but in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He argued rightly that America had wasted another five years (2003-2008) in fighting at a wrong front. By 2008 he had nearly won the argument and which got him the keys to the White House.
[6] This I noticed in recent proliferation of na’t (hymns in praise of the Prophet) recitations to which whole evenings are devoted in a public ceremony. Though no musical instruments are employed, some reciters have beautiful voices and they really sing well. I never thought it could be an entertaining event. But one day I found out such a ceremony going on in my neighbourhood in a small lawn overlooking my back balcony where men and women sat quietly for nearly four hours and, after my initial hesitation, I started enjoying it, to my surprise.
[7] Anthony Giddens, (1991), The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity, p. 11.
[8] The argument cannot be dealt in detail here. Though the second part of the draft manifesto is largely devoted to it, it was initially developed in Shuja Alhaq, (1996), A Forgotten Vision: A Study of Human Spirituality in the Light of the Islamic Tradition, Lahore: Vanguard (also published in 2 volumes by Vikas, New Delhi). The crux of the theory of religion propounded in it was that, contrary to the both modern and religious perspectives, religion was not a stagnant, monolithic phenomenon. Rather it was a composite or unity of two opposite, but complimentary at the same time, traditions which can be variously termed as religious and spiritual, outer and inner, formal and critical, and so forth. (My articles cited below, and the second section of this tract, relate to the argument). In support of this theory, a detailed historical study of the two of great religions, of Islam and Hinduism, with special reference to their spiritual traditions, was furnished. The relation between Islam (as a representative of tradition), and modernity was treated in the article titled ‘Islam and Modernity: Towards a New Paradigm.’ Three other articles, ‘The Sufi Tradition and the Postcolonial Condition,’ ‘A Contribution to the Development of Parallel Culture,’ and a review article on Pickthall’s English translation of the Quran, ‘The Allah of the Quran: A Contribution to the Structure of Premodern Civilizations,’ are further elaborations of the same theme. All the four articles, produced in the last two years, are available on the internet, besides some other relevant writings, including an outline of the Course on History of Knowledge. And, finally, the same author’s (2008) Scientists are Human: A Humorous Side of Science, Lahore: Sanjh, is also useful for references from history of science. The Course on History of Knowledge, initially taught to the MPhil students of history at GCU, Lahore (2008-2009), as well as the present tract draws largely on these sources. The Course was stopped after the first semester by the VC of GCU, who refused to extend my contract while declining to give any reason for it.
[9] While modern thought’s hostility to religion and more especially to its core tradition is well-known, modern religious intelligentsia’s contempt and rejection of its opposing tradition is less widely recognized. Three countries from Islamic world, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia, provide interesting varied cases of organized attempts to denounce and uproot the critical tradition from their midst. While in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the leaders of Islam’s two leading sects, Sunni and Shia respectively, the denunciation of Sufism was carried out in the name of ‘purification’ of Islam, in Turkey it was undertaken in an almost morbid race to modernize Turkey and make it part of Europe in a fantastic continental shift after the collapse of the Ottoman empire and founding of the Turkish Republic by Ataturk. In most non-Western countries of the world modernity and tradition continued to co-exist in an uneasy, contentious relationship that often conceals modernity’s rejection of tradition. But modern Turkey provides a very revealing case study of modernity’s perception of tradition as its enemy and consequently the wedge that it drives between human past and present. See Kudsi Ergunen (2005), Journeys of a Sufi Musician, trans. from French by A. C. Mayers, London: Saqi, for the story of a ruthless uprooting of the past, of which Sufism was seen as the most pronounced expression, at the hands of the Ataturk regime, that often recalls Nazi expulsion of all alleged non-German elements from their midst.
[10] For an introduction to the texts from core tradition, see Robert Van de Weyer (2006) 366 Readings from World Religions, Mumbai. Due to theocratic bias of the author, the book should be read with caution. The section on Sufism, alas, is very weak. Perhaps the best book to get into the core tradition is The Book of Chuang Tzu and after that Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching [Treatise of the Tao and the Virtue]. The former is in fact a preparation to read the second, which is actually the first paramount [formulation of] doctrine of the Chinese core tradition. The foremost introduction to the core or mystic tradition, however, remain the Upanishads that created the Buddha who was roughly contemporary to Lao Tzu. Both Buddha and Lao Tzu spoke the same language. It was the awareness and control of desire or need, and finding the middle path between the two opposites, as of forming a bridge between them, that formed the core of their thought and teaching. Both of them were heralding new knowledge revolutions in their respective regions. If Buddhism has been described as the religion of an atheist, Tao Te Ching would be really harder for the atheists.
[11] Gordon Childe (1946) What Happened in History. Penguin, p. 32. The Neanderthals were a human species that perished around 28000 years ago. The present human race, the homo sapiens, is the offspring of the black Africans who started migrating out of Africa at the time when Neanderthals were on their way of extinction.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
6. A Confrontation with the Native Europeans
A Confrontation with the Native Europeans
01 01 09
(This piece is in the form of two letters, that need a brief foreword. I have stayed in UK for about two decades and was associated with SOAS all along first as PhD student and then as a research associate. In March 2007 I was invited to teach in the department of philosophy at my alma Mater, now GC University, which I was happy to accept. But my family is still based in London. I have three daughters and a son, Nirvan, the youngest one, now 18 is doing his A Levels. Meera is his older sister who has just graduated.
What happened is that my family planned to visit New York this year (they got there the new year day). Nirvan, who has been very keen of this visit, however, opted out for his school work and other things. I then wrote to him that he might go to Obama's America in June. His response rather surprised me and triggered a response of my own. Both are attached for your reading. Hope you would enjoy it and I would love to hear your comments)
31 012 08
Dad,Yeah i will try and visit one day, maybe with friends, although I'm not sure at the moment. Also would it be different with Obama there? I think people are slightly getting ahead of themselves at the moment with Obama. I believe he is a strong symbol, especially for black Americans, although what are his policies of change he brags about? Meera is currently put -off by Obama as apparently he supports the Israelis, rather than Palestinian people. She thinks it's an anti- Muslim view maybe.Also Good luck with your course, wasn't there a book by the same title. Also it sounds quiet broad, but Philosophy always is i suppose.Happy New Year, to you also, currently we are 2 and a half hours away from the countdown.Love,Nirvan.
****
01 01 09
Dear Nirvava
Salaam
I must say that I was a pleased as I was surprised to read your email. Your writing was mature, perhaps a different genre from what you used to write few years ago. You really sound like an A Level student who is ready to go to the university.
You brief note about Obama and his America was very succinct, while both critical and appreciative. This sentence f yours, 'I think people are slightly getting ahead of themselves at the moment with Obama,' said a whole lot of things and I was much pleased with this expression. May be one day you become a pretty good columnist of a paper, if you ever turn to it.
Being of a non-European origin while being born in Europe gives you an edge that your reference to Meera beautifully indicates. You can see from the other perspective that a native European cannot. No one in modern lexicon has used this phrase, namely, native European. As if natives just live outside Europe. But the truth is that there is the large minority of people of non-Western ethnic origin in the West, born and raised in the Western system of education though, of which you and Meera are the two specimens, for instance, in relation to whom the ethnic Europeans become natives.
So there are two Western perspectives: one of ethnic or native Europeans who believe in the Israeli side of the narrative as absolute narrative and see the world system from that narrative.
The other perspective is of course yours, the non-natives’ of the West, who have to demonstrate that the above narrative is deeply Eurocentric, and it is constructed not by the Israelis but the native Europeans. So any rarely coming apologies for this blatant imbalance are rather mute. The most humanists among them say that they have no power to reign in the Israelis. They are the victim of the situation.
The problem is it is the European natives themselves who are the victim of the situation, who cannot reign in themselves, that is, their imperial legacy. On what grounds the colonialism that created Israel has been given legitimacy while the rest part of it is now deligitimized?
Laughingly, the grounds are religious for a system that seeks its identification and legitimacy from science, the anti-thesis of religion, is a contradiction that a native European cannot see. So in this case the native is really handicapped, though in this instance it happens to be the European itself. (Laughter)
To seek justification for the monolith Jewish Israel from history of religion for a civilization that roots itself firmly in the history of science is an interesting phenomenon that only a non-European can enjoy. Hugely funny but not funny at all for the natives.
Obama is as firmly rooted in the native tradition as is the American and Western democracy at large. It’s a huge limitation of modern Western democracy that is increasingly making it so weak. The construction or appearance of Guantanamo Bay is a clear symptom of this weakness. The native shudders to think that it could ever degenerate to fascism as it earlier did in the 1930s due to internal and external pressures. But it has no safety system, to be honest, and the appearance of Guantanamo Bay, a surreal construction, as if taken out of some futuristic fiction, is a clear proof of that. This ‘lawless space’ suggests that it has potential of spreading. And in the current war on terror, George Bush, who masterminded this torture camp, made no qualms about that.
So it is not just Israel that is going to test Obama’s rhetoric. On Camp Delta too he is going to face the trial of his life. And I wonder he is ready for it or has even thought to it. He happens to be professionally a lawyer, so let him prepare his own case.
Rhetoric, you know, those trained in classics know too, is a form of persuasive logical argument invented by the ancient Greeks. Generally, Perecles is cited as one of the masters of rhetoric. Perhaps he was the one who made this form of speech so popular in Greece and particularly in Athens’ city life. It was instrumental in generating the great movement in Greek thought, namely, Sophism. This movement finally created Socrates who turned it upside down and laid the seeds for Plato in Greek soil.
I won’t go much further on this point. Rather would just cite the opening sentence of Socrates’ defence that he presented during his trial. It refers to the masterful rhetoric of his accusers that almost carried away even Socrates himself, his biting irony notwithstanding.
The suggestion that native European is the modern descendent of the Sophists would hurt them a lot. But lets for the moment turn to what’s going to hurt them in the immediate present. For Obama will have to clarify his rhetoric, is it that of the Sophists, the great ancestors of modern man, the white native, or that of Socrates. The latter lost his life though, but he won his case and routed the Sophists so comprehensively that their work disappeared from the Greek horizon. They met the worst humiliation that any intellectual movement can imagine, namely, to survive through its adversaries. (Laughter) So Socrates opened his defence with these words:
I do not know, men of Athens, how my accusers affected you; as for me, I was almost carried away in spite of myself, so persuasively did they speak.
For Obama it would not be enough at all just to close the Guantanamo Bay down and wash it off from the face of history. He would have to order an independent tribunal to establish how this crime against humanity, crime against the black human was committed in the first decade of the twenty first century by the most advanced democratic state. Who masterminded it? Whose idea was it? Obviously Bush and his immediate associates would have to answer. The journey from White House to trial room might not be that long.
Finally the moment has come to bring Socrates’ accusers to the trial, for wrongful death sentence because he did not belong to the same system of belief.
01 01 09
(This piece is in the form of two letters, that need a brief foreword. I have stayed in UK for about two decades and was associated with SOAS all along first as PhD student and then as a research associate. In March 2007 I was invited to teach in the department of philosophy at my alma Mater, now GC University, which I was happy to accept. But my family is still based in London. I have three daughters and a son, Nirvan, the youngest one, now 18 is doing his A Levels. Meera is his older sister who has just graduated.
What happened is that my family planned to visit New York this year (they got there the new year day). Nirvan, who has been very keen of this visit, however, opted out for his school work and other things. I then wrote to him that he might go to Obama's America in June. His response rather surprised me and triggered a response of my own. Both are attached for your reading. Hope you would enjoy it and I would love to hear your comments)
31 012 08
Dad,Yeah i will try and visit one day, maybe with friends, although I'm not sure at the moment. Also would it be different with Obama there? I think people are slightly getting ahead of themselves at the moment with Obama. I believe he is a strong symbol, especially for black Americans, although what are his policies of change he brags about? Meera is currently put -off by Obama as apparently he supports the Israelis, rather than Palestinian people. She thinks it's an anti- Muslim view maybe.Also Good luck with your course, wasn't there a book by the same title. Also it sounds quiet broad, but Philosophy always is i suppose.Happy New Year, to you also, currently we are 2 and a half hours away from the countdown.Love,Nirvan.
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01 01 09
Dear Nirvava
Salaam
I must say that I was a pleased as I was surprised to read your email. Your writing was mature, perhaps a different genre from what you used to write few years ago. You really sound like an A Level student who is ready to go to the university.
You brief note about Obama and his America was very succinct, while both critical and appreciative. This sentence f yours, 'I think people are slightly getting ahead of themselves at the moment with Obama,' said a whole lot of things and I was much pleased with this expression. May be one day you become a pretty good columnist of a paper, if you ever turn to it.
Being of a non-European origin while being born in Europe gives you an edge that your reference to Meera beautifully indicates. You can see from the other perspective that a native European cannot. No one in modern lexicon has used this phrase, namely, native European. As if natives just live outside Europe. But the truth is that there is the large minority of people of non-Western ethnic origin in the West, born and raised in the Western system of education though, of which you and Meera are the two specimens, for instance, in relation to whom the ethnic Europeans become natives.
So there are two Western perspectives: one of ethnic or native Europeans who believe in the Israeli side of the narrative as absolute narrative and see the world system from that narrative.
The other perspective is of course yours, the non-natives’ of the West, who have to demonstrate that the above narrative is deeply Eurocentric, and it is constructed not by the Israelis but the native Europeans. So any rarely coming apologies for this blatant imbalance are rather mute. The most humanists among them say that they have no power to reign in the Israelis. They are the victim of the situation.
The problem is it is the European natives themselves who are the victim of the situation, who cannot reign in themselves, that is, their imperial legacy. On what grounds the colonialism that created Israel has been given legitimacy while the rest part of it is now deligitimized?
Laughingly, the grounds are religious for a system that seeks its identification and legitimacy from science, the anti-thesis of religion, is a contradiction that a native European cannot see. So in this case the native is really handicapped, though in this instance it happens to be the European itself. (Laughter)
To seek justification for the monolith Jewish Israel from history of religion for a civilization that roots itself firmly in the history of science is an interesting phenomenon that only a non-European can enjoy. Hugely funny but not funny at all for the natives.
Obama is as firmly rooted in the native tradition as is the American and Western democracy at large. It’s a huge limitation of modern Western democracy that is increasingly making it so weak. The construction or appearance of Guantanamo Bay is a clear symptom of this weakness. The native shudders to think that it could ever degenerate to fascism as it earlier did in the 1930s due to internal and external pressures. But it has no safety system, to be honest, and the appearance of Guantanamo Bay, a surreal construction, as if taken out of some futuristic fiction, is a clear proof of that. This ‘lawless space’ suggests that it has potential of spreading. And in the current war on terror, George Bush, who masterminded this torture camp, made no qualms about that.
So it is not just Israel that is going to test Obama’s rhetoric. On Camp Delta too he is going to face the trial of his life. And I wonder he is ready for it or has even thought to it. He happens to be professionally a lawyer, so let him prepare his own case.
Rhetoric, you know, those trained in classics know too, is a form of persuasive logical argument invented by the ancient Greeks. Generally, Perecles is cited as one of the masters of rhetoric. Perhaps he was the one who made this form of speech so popular in Greece and particularly in Athens’ city life. It was instrumental in generating the great movement in Greek thought, namely, Sophism. This movement finally created Socrates who turned it upside down and laid the seeds for Plato in Greek soil.
I won’t go much further on this point. Rather would just cite the opening sentence of Socrates’ defence that he presented during his trial. It refers to the masterful rhetoric of his accusers that almost carried away even Socrates himself, his biting irony notwithstanding.
The suggestion that native European is the modern descendent of the Sophists would hurt them a lot. But lets for the moment turn to what’s going to hurt them in the immediate present. For Obama will have to clarify his rhetoric, is it that of the Sophists, the great ancestors of modern man, the white native, or that of Socrates. The latter lost his life though, but he won his case and routed the Sophists so comprehensively that their work disappeared from the Greek horizon. They met the worst humiliation that any intellectual movement can imagine, namely, to survive through its adversaries. (Laughter) So Socrates opened his defence with these words:
I do not know, men of Athens, how my accusers affected you; as for me, I was almost carried away in spite of myself, so persuasively did they speak.
For Obama it would not be enough at all just to close the Guantanamo Bay down and wash it off from the face of history. He would have to order an independent tribunal to establish how this crime against humanity, crime against the black human was committed in the first decade of the twenty first century by the most advanced democratic state. Who masterminded it? Whose idea was it? Obviously Bush and his immediate associates would have to answer. The journey from White House to trial room might not be that long.
Finally the moment has come to bring Socrates’ accusers to the trial, for wrongful death sentence because he did not belong to the same system of belief.
5. The Allah of the Quran
The Allah of the Quran
A special contribution to the structure of pre-modern civilizations
Book review
Thus thy Lord will…teach thee (Joseph) the interpretation of events….
Quran[1]
……..science describes the kind of world that philosophy tells it to describe.
B. Register[2]
…..it is a magnificent feeling to recognize the unity of a complex of phenomena that to direct observation appear to be quite separate things. Einstein[3]
The Glorious Quran. Text and explanatory translation by Marmduck M. Pickthall. Iqra International Foundation. Chicago. (year n.m.)
Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall (1875-1936) translated the Quran in the heydays of Orientalism. But he was no Orientalist. He embraced the civilization to which he converted, and died in it. The son of an Anglican clergyman, who died when he was six, he was destined to become one of the chief English translators of the Quran. He was born in London and was educated at Harrow, the most prestigious private school in England, where he befriended Winston Churchill. Before he turned to the translation of the Quran in 1928, he had already earned a name as an accomplished novelist, journalist, political and religious leader and commentator.[4]
It is a pity that even the students of English literature know little of his literary achievements which were acknowledged by his great contemporaries such as H. G. Wells. According to one of his biographers, his novels “contain the circumstantiality of Sir Walter Scott, the exuberance of Charles Dickens, the moral strength of George Eliot, and compassionate tragedy of Thomas Hardy and the universality of E.M. Forster."[5] If his work has been to this day ignored to the point of having gone to virtual extinction, one wonders if this was the price he had to pay for his conversion! If that be the case, then it must be the task of the Islamic intelligentsia to rediscover his literary legacy.
He had a special talent for languages. He learnt Welsh and Gaelic (native language of Ireland) in his teens and developed a passion to travel in the East, especially the Islamic lands of Egypt, Syria and Palestine, where he would experience the traditional life and learn Arabic. Thanks to his mother who respected his youthful enthusiasm to see the world for himself, he was in his dream world even before he was twenty. Perhaps he was a born rebel who felt compressed and straitened in his state-oriented society that took great pride in its colonial possessions and the culture that it promoted. Later in his life he recalled those moments in his travelogue, Oriental Encounters: Palestine and Syria, 1894-6, which he opens in these words, worth quoting at length:
Early in the year 1894 I was a candidate for one of two vacancies inthe Consular Service for Turkey, Persia, and the Levant, but failed togain the necessary place in the competitive examination. I was indespair. All my hopes for months had been turned towards sunnycountries and old civilisations, away from the drab monotone of Londonfog, which seemed a nightmare when the prospect of escape eluded me. Iwas eighteen years old, and, having failed in one or two adventures, Ithought myself an all-round failure, and was much depressed. I dreamedof Eastern sunshine, palm trees, camels, desert sand, as of a Paradisewhich I had lost by my shortcomings. What was my rapture when mymother one fine day suggested that it might be good for me to travelin the East, because my longing for it seemed to indicate a naturalinstinct, with which she herself, possessing Eastern memories, was infull sympathy! I fancy there was some idea at the time that if I learnt the languagesand studied life upon the spot I might eventually find somebackstairs way into the service of the Foreign Office; but that idea,though cherished by my elders as some excuse for the expenses of myexpedition, had never, from the first, appealed to me; and from themoment when I got to Egypt, my first destination, it lost whateverlustre it had had at home. For then the European ceased to interestme, appearing somehow inappropriate and false in those surroundings.At first I tried to overcome this feeling or perception which, while Ilived with English people, seemed unlawful. All my education untilthen had tended to impose on me the cult of the thing done habituallyupon a certain plane of our society. To seek to mix on an equalitywith Orientals, of whatever breeding, was one of those things whichwere never done, nor even contemplated, by the kind of person who hadalways been my model.[6]
So he had not gone there as the English or most Europeans did, i.e., as representatives of a superior civilization, but with ‘a sneaking wish to fraternize with Orientals.’ Luckily, as he set foot in Jaffa, he met a native of Syria who helped him ‘to throw off the European and plunge into the native way of living.’ To acquaintance ourselves well with him it might be instructive to go through the following paragraph of the line just quoted:
With him I rode about the plain of Sharon, sojourning among the fellâhîn, and sitting in the coffee-shops of Ramleh, Lydda, Gaza, meeting all sorts of people, and acquiring the vernacular without an effort, in the manner of amusement. From dawn to sunset we were in the saddle. We went on pilgrimage to Nebi Rubîn, themosque upon the edge of marshes by the sea, half-way to Gaza; we rodeup northward to the foot of Carmel; explored the gorges of themountains of Judæa; frequented Turkish baths; ate native meals andslept in native houses--following the customs of the people of theland in all respects. And I was amazed at the immense relief I foundin such a life. In all my previous years I had not seen happy people.These were happy. Poor they might be, but they had no dream of wealth;the very thought of competition was unknown to them, and rivalry wasstill a matter of the horse and spear. Wages and rent were troublesthey had never heard of. Class distinctions, as we understand them,were not. Everybody talked to everybody. With inequality they had atrue fraternity. People complained that they were badly governed,which merely meant that they were left to their devices save on greatoccasions. A Government which touches every individual and interfereswith him to some extent in daily life, though much esteemed byEuropeans, seems intolerable to the Oriental. I had a vision of thetortured peoples of the earth impelled by their own misery to desolatethe happy peoples, a vision which grew clearer in the after years.But in that easy-going Eastern life there is a power of resistance,as everybody knows who tries to change it, which may yet defeat thehosts of joyless drudgery.[7]
He had ‘gone native’, so to speak, and when his mother came to know of it, he was called back home. Before his departure he wished to convert to Islam. The Muslim Shaikh in Damascus to whom he expressed thus would, however, not agree. What would be his mother’s reaction back home when she knew of it, he asked? She would be devastated, he replied. Then do not do so at this juncture, he advised, for it was a serious affair which required a prolonged reflection. This was indeed wise counsel, for it would take Pickthall another twenty one years after his return to England to become a Muslim. In the course of these years, during which he traveled again to his ‘beloved East’ and also visited Turkey for a few months, he produced fifteen novels and three collections of short stories. Said the Fisherman, his second one, published in 1903, received good reviews, becoming a bestseller in England. H. G. Wells wrote to him that ‘I wish that I could feel as certain about my own work as I do of yours, that it will be alive and interesting people fifty years from now.’[8] Little did Wells know of the turn waiting further on the course of his life.
In the coming years he wrote regularly for the New Age, a literary magazine, contributing alongside such luminaries as Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and G. K. Chesterton. As the First World War approached, he found himself on the side of the Ottoman Empire which entered into the War as an ally of the Central Powers. When he was conscripted, he announced that he would only serve his country where she was not directly engaged with the Ottoman forces. He was thus appointed at a hospital while he continued to write in the defence of Turkey. The War, and especially the Christian fanaticism displayed variously, became a catalyst for him. Being increasingly pulled towards Islam inwardly he underwent a crisis of faith, finally announcing his conversion in November 1917. ‘He took the name of Muhammed and almost immediately became a pillar of the British Islamic Community.’[9] He worked for a year at Islamic Information Bureau in London which issued The Muslim Outlook, a weekly paper.
He moved to India in 1920 accepting an invitation to edit Bombay Chronicle, a prestigious Indian newspaper, doubling its circulation in six months time. In India he would spend the next fifteen years of his life, returning to England in 1935 where he died a year after. Almost as soon as he set foot on Indian soil he became an associate of Gandhi whose ideas of non-violent resistance attracted him. This affiliation grew stronger when Gandhi joined Khilafat Movement.
So the Englishman became an Indian nationalist leader, fluent in Urdu, and attending dawn prayers in the mosque, dressed in Gandhian homespun adorned with the purple crescent of the Khilafatists. He wrote to a friend: ‘They expect me to be a sort of political leader as well as a newspaper editor. I have grown quite used to haranguing multitudes of anything from 5 to 30,000 people in the open air, although I hate it still as much as ever and inwardly am just as miserably shy.’ He also continued his Friday sermons, preaching at the great mosque of Bijapur and elsewhere.[10]
The letter that Gandhi wrote to his widow on his death says much about his character:
Your husband and I met often enough to grow to love each other and I found Mr. Pickthall a most amiable and deeply religious man. And although he was a convert he had nothing of the fanatic in him that most converts, no matter to what faith they are converted, betray in their speech and act. Mr. Pickthall seemed to me to live his faith unobtrusively.[11]
Pickthall disengaged from politics with the establishment of modern Turkey and with this, the Bombay Chronicle having been closed by the government, he moved to Hyderabad in 1925 where he accepted a post of school principle on the invitation of the Nizam. Two years later there he founded the scholarly journal Islamic Culture (that runs to this day) and in the same while delivered a series of lectures on the cultural aspects of Islam in Madras.[12] Since, as he himself put it, ‘All Muslim India seems to be possessed with the idea that I ought to translate the Qur’an into real English,’ in 1928 the Nizam agreed to let him go on sabbatical for two years to complete his work that would leave his mark in the cultural history of Islamic civilization. During his devout years of Christian faith he had drunk deep from the Christian scriptures which the Quran speaks of as its inalienable historical predecessors. Thus he became the living witness to the Quran’s chief claim made to the Jews and Christians, that if they let their self go for a while, they will inevitably reach to the Quran.
The need to translate the Quran into English arose foremost from the fact that it had been already rendered into this language by some English scholars who would now be termed as Orientalists. Missionaries from all over Europe had followed in the heel of their colonial armies and there was a widespread suspicion that the English translations of the Quran by Orientalist scholars were deeply imbued with their vested interests. Hence the whole Muslim India getting ‘possessed with the idea’ that Pickthall take up the challenge.
During his work he traveled to Cairo to seek support for his project from the leading scholars of Al-Azhar. Somewhat to his surprise he found little backing from them. In the Islamic world, as Kidwai has noted, ‘whereas the idea of interpreting the Quran has not been so controversial, the emotional motives behind rendering the Quranic text into languages other than Arabic have always been looked upon with suspicion,’[13] more so by an Englishman in the contemporary colonial setting. However, Pickthall’s sincerity and scholarship prevailed upon the Al-Azhar scholars, and his The Meaning of the Glorious Quran was published from London in 1930 where each surah or chapter is given a brief introduction. The present edition contains a short though very valuable biography of the Prophet. Four years after its publication Abdullah Yousaf Ali, a Britain based Muslim scholar, published his translation of the Book.[14] Though various other Muslim scholars have carried out their renderings, Pickthall’s provided a solid foundation for improvisation to all of them.
Pickthall was emphatic that his was a kind of interpretation as translation of the Quran was impossible. This goes well with the contemporary understanding that translation from one language into another is always an approximation. And this is especially so when it comes to revelation where a word in original language would normally require more than one words to convey the meaning of the original. It is thus always advisable to consult more than one translations of the Quran if one seeks to get somewhere near to the original meanings. Abudullah Yousaf Ali’s translation, then, is a good source to correlate with Pickthall’s. The way the latter absorbs the idiom and metaphors of the Quran, though, speaks for itself. The following two verses, taken from different suras, illustrate the point well:
Wa li-rab-bika fasbir (74:7)
Fasbir sabran-jamiilaa (70:5)
Pickthall: For the sake of thy Lord, be patient!
But be patient (O Muhammad) with a patience fair to see.
Ali: But for thy Lord’s (cause), Be patient and constant.
Therefore do thou hold patience, -- a patience of beautiful (contentment).
A small point of difference with Pickthall on my behalf is his rendering of al-kitaab as Scripture instead of Book. He might have availed the opportunity of having two words in English for where there is apparently one in Arabic. This seems to be an oversight thanks to his Christian legacy of which the separation between the sacred and profane does not go well with the Unitarian vision of the Quran. The inadequacy of translating kitaab as scripture should have been apparent to him when he was translating, for instance, the following verses:
‘In-nahuu la-qur-‘aanun-kariim,
fii kitaabim-mak-nunn,
laa yamas-suhuu ‘il-lal-mutah-haruun (56:77-9)
That (this) is indeed a noble Quran
In a Book kept hidden
Which none toucheth saveth the purified.
Perhaps the chief limitation that he himself set on his translation, as also Abdullah Yousaf Ali later on, was his failure to employ the English of everyday usage. Did these translators still harbour the prejudice that revelation was too sacred to be put in everyday speech? Whatever the answer but the constraint and artificiality that such usage imposes on the text becomes evident when we compare Pickthall and Ali with, for instance, N. J. Dawood, who chose to render the text in plain simple English.[15] The effect is apparent when we see, for instance, the following verses:
Pickthall: Seest thou not how Allah coineth a similitude: A goodly saying, as a goodly tree, its root set firm, its branches reaching into heaven,
Giving its fruit at every season by the permission of its Lord? Allah coineth the similitudes for mankind in order that they may reflect. (14:24-5)
Ali: Seest thou not how God sets a parable? - A goodly Word like a goodly tree,
Whose root is firmly fixed, And its branches reach to the heavens, --
It brings forth its fruit at all times, by the leave of its Lord.
So God sets forth parables for men, in order that they may receive admonition.
Dawood: Do you not see how God compares a good word to a good tree?
Its root is firm and its branches are in the sky;
It yields its fruit in every season by God’s leave.
God speaks in parables to men so that they may take heed.
Pickthall was not merely a translator of the Quran but also its scholar. He ‘warned against the danger of adoring the book rather than its content.’[16] In a separate note, he posed two inter-related questions to the contemporary Islamic civilization: how can we enter into the world of the Quran ‘as if Allah were speaking to us through it now and today?’ And secondly, how it can, once again, become relevant and power of transformation in today’s world.[17] Needless to say, both questions are as relevant today as in Pickthall’s day. Furthermore, the two questions are actually one, because once we enter into the world of the Quran by locating the necessary code, or, to be more precise, employing the requisite methodology, we enter into the world of power, the power to comprehend, control and transform the events that constitute our world. Only then, as he put it bravely, ‘instead of being a mere revered book, a sacred fossil, or a source of magic-like blessing, it will change into a mighty force, impinging, stirring, moving and guiding us deeper and higher achievements, just as it did before.’[18] To this end the rest of this article is devoted.
The hypothesi,s or the fact, the event to be interpreted
It is one thing to recite the Quran, which is an art in itself, but quite another to destructure it as a text. It is indeed the problem with all revelation, in which Plato’s dialogues occupy a special place. For the moment, though, we would focus on the Quran.
The Quran presents itself as a complex structure which makes its claim to be the greatest wonder, or miracle as the Islamic tradition knows it, of the pre-modern civilizations worth considering. It does not imply belittling of the other wonders, for it repeatedly claims to be the inheritor of all of them.
The hypothesis that I want to suggest in this regard may be stated thus.[19] The structure of the Quran is a mirror image of pre-modern civilizations, on the one hand, and of the nature of reality as perceived by these civilizations, on the other. Or, the structure of the one, that is, of the Quran is the same as that of pre-modern civilizations, more particularly of the Islamic civilization of pre-modern times, and of the nature of reality to which they adhered. The Quran, it needs to be emphasized, claims to be the final text or book of the revelation which began with the creation of Adam, or the appearance of the human in the universe. This means that while the revelation prior to the Quran, or the texts/books of it, such as those which it mentions (e.g. the Torah, the Psalms of David and the Gospels) and those which it does not, each created its own civilization or community, the Quran not only created its own civilization but, being the final chapter of the Book that began with Adam, it is the most succinct and clear statement of reality of which the pre-modern civilizations as a whole were the embodiment.
Now the immediate point that needs to be clarified here is the notion of pre-modern civilizations, or, let us say, pre-modern Islamic civilization.[20] For I am intending to make a clear distinction between the pre-modern and modern Islamic civilization (a distinction applicable to all non-Western civilizations), that is, the one prior to the rise of modernity and the other which was subjugated by modernity, a subjugation that continues to the present day. What I am suggesting, then, is that, to put it succinctly, the prevalent idea that the present day, or the modern Islamic world is a continuation of the pre-modern Islamic civilization is an illusion. What implies is that while the structure of the pre-modern Islamic civilization was the mirror image of the structure of the Quran, the modern Islamic world is not. I am not positing an absolute discontinuity between the pre-modern and modern Islamic world. But what I intend to argue presently is that the discontinuity between them is as important as the continuity between them and it is only by a full view of these opposite aspects of our history that we can make sense of it, or truly interpret the event that we call Islamic history. We would soon turn to the continuity between them, but presently we are emphasizing the discontinuity between them. What follows is that while it is not a mistake to say that the cotemporary Islamic world is a continuation of the pre-modern world, it is also equally important to see that there is a difference or discontinuity between them. The difference is so pronounced that, as just noted, while the structure of pre-modern Islamic world reflected the structure of the Quran, the contemporary world does not.
If the contemporary Islamic world is not the reflection of the Quranic conception of reality, what follows is that, as argued earlier in a paper just cited, the vision of pre-modern Islam as expounded by the modern or contemporary Islamic intelligentsia is seriously modern, that is, seriously flawed and therefore does not accord with or correspond to the pre-modern Islam and the Islamic world. Therefore their contention that they represent and are fighting for the original Islam is mistaken. Their vision of the structure of the Quran and of their ideal Islam and Islamic world of pre-modern times has been constructed under the influence of and the tools provided by modernity and the modern mind that originated in Europe in the 16th-17th centuries. Thus, in spite of their much proclaimed hostility to modernity, they (the modern or contemporary Islamic intelligentsia) tend to see the pre-modern world and the supreme knowledge of it as embodied in the revelation and the Quran, the last book of it, with essentially the same eyes as do the modern intelligentsia (both Western and non-Western).
What follows from this is that the conception of reality that the modern intelligentsia (MI) and the modern Islamic intelligentsia (MII) adhere to is essentially same and essentially different from the conception of reality of the Quran and the pre-modern world. The conception of the pre-modern world, of religion, of tradition, or of the pre-modern knowledge or conception of reality as embodied supremely in the revelation, as perceived by the modern mind, is a modern construction, that does not correspond with the fact or the event that it purports to be describing. And the modern Muslim mind has succumbed to it.
The whole difference between the pre-modern and modern conception of reality arises in response to the ultimate philosophical problem and which is: what is there? For modern mind it is matter alone, for nothing else exists, is real but matter and its varied variations or forms such as the plant, the animal, or the human mind. There are various philosophies of social science in vogue presently, from empiricism or positivism to (Marxist) materialism, realism, phenomenology and hermeneutics and so forth.[21] But all their differences fail to conceal their common, founding premise, that nothing exists beside the material. In order to account for their differences, let us say that for all of them only that is real which can be reduced to the human’s sensory experience. Any human experience that cannot be traced back to sensory impressions is false at the best and illusion at the worst. Thus the modern mind defines knowledge as the formulation of human experience furnished ultimately through the sensory organs, or that can be reduced to the activity of human senses. Since the natural sciences, so the argument goes, adhere to this principle most faithfully, they constitute the highest form of knowledge, to which the social sciences and philosophy must also aspire.
Since the experience underlying the revelation, the ultimate embodiment of pre-modern knowledge, cannot be reduced to the sensory experience, it is an illusory experience for the modern mind. Therefore the knowledge constructed on this experience must also be false knowledge. We will investigate this claim, for what is apparent is that the modern mind has only changed the definition of knowledge and by thus doing relegated the knowledge of the pre-modern civilizations to the dustbin of history.
The chief problem with this claim is that it is founded on a premise proclaimed as self-evident by the modern mind, but which is neither self-evident nor true. It is purely a construction of the modern mind. And this is that, as Marx and Engels famously put it, reality is either material or non-material, either matter or mind. So whereas the modern, or scientific mind adheres to the reality of the former, the pre-modern mind adhered to the reality of the latter. Common sense, it was argued, shows that mind, or the human came long after the appearance of the material world, so the reality must be accorded to the material sphere alone. The pre-modern perception of the reality of the non-material sphere was therefore an illusory perception.
It is apparent that the whole support of this argument is common sense. We will see that this is the same common sense which once supported the geo-centric world. Einstein too, who was called the new Copernicus by Max Planck, the founder of the quantum theory, when he came up with his theory of relativity, found this common sense in staunch opposition to his vision of reality. The mention of these two giants of what is known as the early 20th century scientific revolution has been made advisedly. For if Planck destroyed the absolute opposition or separation between the particle and wave natures of light (thus unifying the two contraries of light and particle natures of light), Einstein demolished the absolute world or standard of perception which could be visualized to exist independent of the human observer. With the further evolution in the quantum theory, with which Einstein himself became uneasy, the so-called common sense view, which continues to be the chief dogma of modern science and of the mind built on it, that there is an objective world existing independently of human experience of it was undermined.
The idea that the world is inseparable from human experience of it, let us remember, is the founding premise of the (knowledge of the) pre-modern civilizations. And if the knowledge revolution of the twentieth century, spearheaded by the early 20th century scientific revolution, reached to the same premise, so much the worse for the modern mind.
The human is the centre of the universe in the pre-modern world and so is it for the world as envisioned by the relativity and quantum. The latter perception thus unifies the two contraries: the geo-centric and helio-centric worlds in so far as the former implied the human as the centre of the world. One of the chief arguments furnished by the modern mind to debunk the pre-modern vision of the human-centered world is that it allegedly was based the geo-centric world view of the world. So, since the geo-centric world was discovered to be an illusion, so the human centered world, a world invariably tied with the human experience of it, must also be an illusion.
The point is that the pre-modern mind did not base its vision of the human-centered world on the physical fact of a geo-centric world. The 20th century knowledge revolution has demonstrated that the world is indeed inseparable form human experience even though it is a helio-centric world.
So now we come to the structure of reality as envisioned by the Quran.
It is not easy to enter into it. For, it has a very complex structure hidden behind a blinding simplicity. The simplicity is so perfect a ruse that the reader gets carried away by it. It is almost like the structure a palm-date stone in which the core seems to have been concealed with great care; as if demanding a struggle to enter into it. And for which the Quran frequently incites.
So one must be clear what one is looking for. We find what you seek for. As the Quran puts it, if you are asking for this world you would be given. If the higher, which is the realm of the inner structure, you would find it too. But it’s a struggle. What follows is that there are two perceptions, one for the exterior, the other for the interior or core structure whereby each generates its own knowledge, or each unfolding its own world. So the Quran operates on two modes or plains of being, one normal, the other higher. For instance if speed of light is finite in one perception, it’s infinite from the other. The Quran for instance speaks of stairways to heavens, on which the angels are ascending and they travel the distance of fifty thousand years in a single day.
From Allah, Lord of the Ascending Stairways, (whereby) the angels and the Spirit ascend unto Him in a Day whereof the span is fifty thousand years.[22]
Apparently it makes little sense. Or at best a legacy of mythology. But it is not nonsense though the heritage of mythology is underlying it. It’s just a different experience of light that the normal perception cannot generate. The idea is perennial, from the age of mythology or the rise of civilization, the age of the so-called archaic or primitive man. But it took very long for its final formulation which the Quran claims to be. It stretches the revelation, of which it is the final heir, back to the first human, or Adam, who received the names of things from Allah. It is the recasting of the biblical view in almost a new language.
Within normal behavior or given framework, in both its religious and modern representations, it is difficult to enter into the interior structure of the Quran. Both fail to enter into it. This failure takes the power of this work away. Instead of being cognizant of their failure, they think it’s simply not there. For each, unity is the exclusion of either this or other mode of being. So, they appear different or enemies of each other, yet they are same in their inability to see that unity without difference cannot be conceived.
All violence and war generates from this perception of unity in which difference and opposition are identical with violence and war. Once it is understood that opposition is inherent in unity and thus unite apparently contradictory entities, as Einstein meant when he unified mass and energy in his famous E=mc2 equation, war and violence would cease to be the inherent condition of opposition and difference.
This pluralist vision of the Quran, in which pluralism defines unity, the sectarian consciousness of the religious and the modern, which incites the exclusion of opposition from unity, is transcended. This thing is at the heart of a social change through violence, a belief in which the existing social theory, whether religious or modern, concur.
The Quran then opens up a huge and immense potential of peace and universal harmony on this planet once its internal structure is entered into.
The Quran helps us to comprehend and decode the structure of pre-modern civilization of which it claims to be one of the chief documents. The structure of pre-modern civilization is raised on the structure as conceived in the Quran. So, what is the Quran’s structure?
We have seen that it is made up of two spheres, internal and external like the structure of the atom. The structure of the pre-modern civilization, and of the Quran and the atom, concords with each other.
Now what follows from this is that if the velocity of light is absolute as Einstein suggested and built the subsequent scientific development on this premises, then this does not imply that it should be absolute in the subatomic world, in the entire of the cosmos. We already have plenty of evidence for it. For we know that the subatomic world phenomena behave almost as it was almost alive. We know that the phenomena behave differently under the human gaze than they would otherwise. As if the internal structure of man was same as that of the world, where the observer and the observed discover each other as the one and the other in one whole.
Neil Bohr drew attention of this remarkable fact that it is the apparatus that man employs that largely determines what he perceives in the subatomic world, for there is no such thing as world itself. Different perception creates different worlds.
This leads to the idea of the physical world as human construction.
The idea of the social world as being human creation may not surprise as much but that of natural world sounds against the common sense. But it is the same common sense that once supported the geo-centric view.
Incidentally once we comprehend that there are mainly two perceptions corresponding to the two plains of being, there would be little difficulty to see that the two natures of light, those of particle and wave, must have varied velocities too. For it is possible to suggest that the speed of light of 300000km per sec is only the velocity of particle motion of light, and that the wave motion of light is infinite. In other words there are two speeds, finite and infinite, corresponding to its particle and wave natures. Once we come to grip with this the eternal enigma that exhausted Einstein to death, the problem of the unification of the four forces, would be resolved.
The idea of the finite, the so-called absolute speed of light, let us remember, was Einstein’s creation. It was earlier presented by Leibniz if I am not mistaken. Newton, as we know adhered to infinite speed of light which he had inherited from his studies of the structure of pre modern civilizations. He was deeply involved in the science of the day which was alchemy. This science claimed to be the science of interior structure of the pre modern civilizations. The hypothesis of Newton, of infinite speed of light along with its particle nature of light was upheld by the modern science.
Newton failed to see the contradiction in it. If light was infinite, it meant that it did not belong to the world of matter, of particle nature, which was finite. So Newton begged down there, and Leibniz, on the other hand, was equally confused, who opposed Newton, on both counts. Newton was, it seems, all the way involved to resolve this contradiction but failed which probably caused his nervous breakdown in 1694.
The puzzle took a step towards its resolution when in the 19th century the wave nature of light, largely at the hands of Faraday, the discover of the electromagnetic fields, was discovered. Now the infinite speed of light looked sensible. But then came the bomb shell of the discovery of the interior structure of the atom at the hands of J. J. Thomson in 1898. This new phenomenon created problems. Instances were observed where it didn’t seem to conform to either wave or particle nature of light. The loss of ether at the hands of Michelson and this strange behavior of light were the two great challenges that physics as the queen sciences faced at the turn of the century.
Two giants appeared, one older and the other younger one who together resolved these crises by abandoning the world which the existing concepts of physics described. Common sense was going to face a challenge greater then it faced at the shift from geocentric to heliocentric world: the mental habit or the hypothesis that light must behave either as particle or wave had to be abandoned.
New concepts had to be created to describe the new experience of the world as Planck and Einstein both emphasized.
Planck wrestled with himself as he prepared to challenge the two greatest dogmas of physics. That light behaved only as wave and second that it could only do as particle or wave. The eternal law of logic of modern rationality of either /or, of being and not being, as two hostile opposites, had to be abandoned. Light as Planck discovered must be behaving both as light and wave in that particular epiphany of it which Plank was observing and studying at that time. To overcome this lasting absolute of science, Planck had to struggle hard. Of this he spoke to his son during a walk a short while before presenting this paper in October 1900. He thought it was a discovery equal to that of the great Newton’s. Einstein generalized this plural nature of light, thus asserting its two natures universally. While seeing the slipping of the earth from under its feet, he went on to create a dogma of his own. This was the new the absolute, the absolute velocity of light.
But did it occur to anyone even after the atomic explosion, that the energy released could be different than that of which the speed was fixed, 300,000. This figure was already too large. To think that light had also an infinite nature was impossible to conceive So the implication is obvious. Light must behave both finitely and infinitely, though not at the same time, just like particle and wave. The classic double slit experiment proves Bohr’s point that all phenomena behave differently under a different apparatus. The human is inseparable from nature, the cardinal belief of the pre modern civilizations.
Neil Bohr, in spite of his tremendous effort to lead quantum away from Einstein’s dogmatic slumber, could not get to question Einstein’s ultimate dogma and thus paid the price of his beloved theory of complimentarity getting little attention. Had he been able to take a step forward to see and insist on the dual velocity of light corresponding to the wave and particle natures of light which he did so much to establish in spite of all Einstein’s intellectual assaults especially at the Solvoy Congress of 1927, he would have broken through. But the breakthrough they had made was exhausted.
In order, then then, to resurrect the discarded hypothesis of Newton of the infinite velocity of light we need to turn to the roots from where Newton derived it. Planck had resurrected his particle hypothesis in a new setting. We need only to extend a little and affirm that it is both particle and wave, finite and infinite.
(III)
The roots go back, as already stated, go back to the age of mythology, of which the Quranic revelation is the ultimate continuum. Mythology is an essential component of human psyche. The human must make myths which in its essence, is the human construction of entities which are invisible but which provide the necessary connections between the phenomena of the material world. Since both correspond to different perceptions, both are unlike each other. The world of invisible events cannot be reduced to the world of visible entities or events. But the images and symbols employed to describe each undergo change. So the suggestion by the modern mind that it has freed human mind from mythological psyche is false.
Ether was the greatest god that physics created in the 19th century, although its earlier forms had a long history. On its death, though, another one was soon to be created by ironically the great iconoclast Einstein himself. If we can decode the duality of Einstein rightly we can get the heart of the Quran. The new god was the absolute speed of light. The Quran demolished this god ages ago, in its longing for unity. Light is the ultimate image of Allah, the chief concept created and employed to expound the nature of reality, which the Quran calls Allah. Although Allah as ‘the light of the heavens and the earth’ is an often repeated simile in the Quran, perhaps the most beautiful is the following one:
Noor an ‘ala noor Light upon light
Allah sounds strange but not Ether; why? Allah sounds strange but not the absolute speed of light; why?
What is the nature of light in the Quran? Simple! Relative and absolute character of light, with the difference that what we know as absolute velocity of Einstein, turns into relative and the infinitude of light becomes the absolute. This means that it is possible for light to be at two celestial bodies at the same time, without any time interval, just like the electron emerging in two orbits at the same time. So to hypothesis that there is an absolute divide between the micro and macro nature, subatomic and atomic world, is false. A leap of imagination that Einstein dared not take. They are opposites of each other and yet one is unthinkable without the other. It is the harmony of opposites that defines its unity. Their inner unity is that mass and energy in that great equation of E=mc2.
What this equation suggests in that the energy that manifests itself or is created after the interaction of mc2 is not the same that interacted with mass. After all the energy created by mc2 is not part of our ordinary experience, it does not fall within the view of our ordinary, given perception. That which is beyond our sensual experience must be the reflection of the infinite; that must be the realm of infinite.
(IV)
The revelation describes itself as inimitable. This was the point of contention between the exterior or inner tradition, the rationalist scholars and the Sufis within the Islamic tradition.
The scholars and the Sufis understand inimitability of the Quran differently. The Sufis did not deny that experience of revelation can be shared; that it is almost universal to mankind or it could never be understood, because this is invisible and beyond our sensory experience, of outer and inward perception, against all the false accusation of the modern mind is never denied. The seed structure of reality is never denied.
If the modern mind denies the inner experience, it assumes that the traditional, pre-modern mind denies the sensory experience. What is difficult for it, though, is its self-imposed difficulty that one of the two perceptions or the experiences is false. This so called logical law might be the law of sensory experience, but it does not hold in the subatomic world. The logic or the rationality of the mind, which it considers to be absolute, then is the law of the constitution or structure of the external and sensory experience. Its limitation is evident is so far as in the realm of finitude alone. Revelation is inimitable in the sense that it cannot be copied, which is the realm of the finitude. That is, you cannot parallel it with anything in physical plain.
Reference:
The religious intelligence did not realize that if we restrict revelation to exceptional events in natural, as violation of the law, then the sensory realm emerges as partner to Allah. It becomes in between the human and the world beyond, the realm of infinite. It simply disappears behind the veil of sensory experience. An experience, that at times is common to the religious and modern intelligentsia.
The Quran insists that it is the most common form of shirk, the unconscious association of Allah and the sensory world as partners. You reckon this world, or the life in it……… as the ultimate and you have made it God’s associate.
Revelation is the chief source or testimony of the world beyond, so it is never-ending. If there is a world of infinity that it must continually manifest. That is, what the Quran calls revelation.
A.R. Kidwai. ‘Translating the Untranslatable: A Survey of English Translations of the Quran’ http://www.soundvision.com/Info/quran/english.asp ((Originally printed in The Muslim World Book Review, Vol. 7, No. 4 Summer 1987)
‘Marmaduke Pickthalla brief biography,’ http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/bmh/BMM-AHM-pickthall_bio.htm
[1] 12:26
[2] http://enlightenment.supersaturated.com/essays/text/bryanregister/ bohr_compliementarity.html)
[3] Holten. G. 1996. Einstein, History, and Other Passions: The Rebellion Against Science at the End of the Twentieth Century. Perseus Books. 1996:114)
[4] For a brief biography of Pickthall see Abdul Hakim Murad, http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/bmh/BMM-AHM-pickthall_bio.htm
[5] Cited by Rentfrow, D. http://islam.thetruecall.com/
[6] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19378/19378-8.txt; pp. 3-4.
[7] Ibid., p. 5.
[8] http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/bmh/BMM-AHM-pickthall_bio.htm; p. 9.
[9] Rentfrow, D. http://islam.thetruecall.com/; p. 3.
[10] http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/bmh/BMM-AHM-pickthall_bio.htm; p. 17.
[11] Ibid., p. 18.
[12] It was later published under the title The Cultural Side of Islam (1984). Lahore: Qadiria Book Traders.
[13] Kidwai, A. R. ‘Translating the Untranslatable: A Survey of English Translations of the Quran,’ http://www.soundvision.com/Info/quran/english.asp; p. 1.
[14] The Glorious Quran, 1991, translation by Abdullah Yousaf Ali, transliteration by M. S. Tajar, Maktabah ar-Rasul al ‘Ammah, Kuwait.
[15] N. J. Dawood…
[16] Hadhrami, A.A. ‘Marmaduke Pickthall: A Servant of Islam,’ http://www.witness-pioneer.org/vil/Articles/scholars/marmaduke_pickthall_a_servant_of_islam.htm
[17] The New World that Awaits You
[18] Ibid.
[19] The hypothesis presented here originates in my study of the Quran initiated nearly two decades ago while I was working on my Ph. D. thesis, which was incorporated in the work subsequently published as A Forgotten Vision: A study of human spirituality in the light of Islamic tradition, 1996, Vanguard Books: Lahore.
[20] It would be instructive to see my article ‘Islam and Modernity: Towards a new paradigm,’ appearing in this issue especially for the clarification of the terms such as modernity.
[21] Outhwaite, W. 1987. New Philosophies of Social Science: Realism,
[22] 70:3-4.
A special contribution to the structure of pre-modern civilizations
Book review
Thus thy Lord will…teach thee (Joseph) the interpretation of events….
Quran[1]
……..science describes the kind of world that philosophy tells it to describe.
B. Register[2]
…..it is a magnificent feeling to recognize the unity of a complex of phenomena that to direct observation appear to be quite separate things. Einstein[3]
The Glorious Quran. Text and explanatory translation by Marmduck M. Pickthall. Iqra International Foundation. Chicago. (year n.m.)
Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall (1875-1936) translated the Quran in the heydays of Orientalism. But he was no Orientalist. He embraced the civilization to which he converted, and died in it. The son of an Anglican clergyman, who died when he was six, he was destined to become one of the chief English translators of the Quran. He was born in London and was educated at Harrow, the most prestigious private school in England, where he befriended Winston Churchill. Before he turned to the translation of the Quran in 1928, he had already earned a name as an accomplished novelist, journalist, political and religious leader and commentator.[4]
It is a pity that even the students of English literature know little of his literary achievements which were acknowledged by his great contemporaries such as H. G. Wells. According to one of his biographers, his novels “contain the circumstantiality of Sir Walter Scott, the exuberance of Charles Dickens, the moral strength of George Eliot, and compassionate tragedy of Thomas Hardy and the universality of E.M. Forster."[5] If his work has been to this day ignored to the point of having gone to virtual extinction, one wonders if this was the price he had to pay for his conversion! If that be the case, then it must be the task of the Islamic intelligentsia to rediscover his literary legacy.
He had a special talent for languages. He learnt Welsh and Gaelic (native language of Ireland) in his teens and developed a passion to travel in the East, especially the Islamic lands of Egypt, Syria and Palestine, where he would experience the traditional life and learn Arabic. Thanks to his mother who respected his youthful enthusiasm to see the world for himself, he was in his dream world even before he was twenty. Perhaps he was a born rebel who felt compressed and straitened in his state-oriented society that took great pride in its colonial possessions and the culture that it promoted. Later in his life he recalled those moments in his travelogue, Oriental Encounters: Palestine and Syria, 1894-6, which he opens in these words, worth quoting at length:
Early in the year 1894 I was a candidate for one of two vacancies inthe Consular Service for Turkey, Persia, and the Levant, but failed togain the necessary place in the competitive examination. I was indespair. All my hopes for months had been turned towards sunnycountries and old civilisations, away from the drab monotone of Londonfog, which seemed a nightmare when the prospect of escape eluded me. Iwas eighteen years old, and, having failed in one or two adventures, Ithought myself an all-round failure, and was much depressed. I dreamedof Eastern sunshine, palm trees, camels, desert sand, as of a Paradisewhich I had lost by my shortcomings. What was my rapture when mymother one fine day suggested that it might be good for me to travelin the East, because my longing for it seemed to indicate a naturalinstinct, with which she herself, possessing Eastern memories, was infull sympathy! I fancy there was some idea at the time that if I learnt the languagesand studied life upon the spot I might eventually find somebackstairs way into the service of the Foreign Office; but that idea,though cherished by my elders as some excuse for the expenses of myexpedition, had never, from the first, appealed to me; and from themoment when I got to Egypt, my first destination, it lost whateverlustre it had had at home. For then the European ceased to interestme, appearing somehow inappropriate and false in those surroundings.At first I tried to overcome this feeling or perception which, while Ilived with English people, seemed unlawful. All my education untilthen had tended to impose on me the cult of the thing done habituallyupon a certain plane of our society. To seek to mix on an equalitywith Orientals, of whatever breeding, was one of those things whichwere never done, nor even contemplated, by the kind of person who hadalways been my model.[6]
So he had not gone there as the English or most Europeans did, i.e., as representatives of a superior civilization, but with ‘a sneaking wish to fraternize with Orientals.’ Luckily, as he set foot in Jaffa, he met a native of Syria who helped him ‘to throw off the European and plunge into the native way of living.’ To acquaintance ourselves well with him it might be instructive to go through the following paragraph of the line just quoted:
With him I rode about the plain of Sharon, sojourning among the fellâhîn, and sitting in the coffee-shops of Ramleh, Lydda, Gaza, meeting all sorts of people, and acquiring the vernacular without an effort, in the manner of amusement. From dawn to sunset we were in the saddle. We went on pilgrimage to Nebi Rubîn, themosque upon the edge of marshes by the sea, half-way to Gaza; we rodeup northward to the foot of Carmel; explored the gorges of themountains of Judæa; frequented Turkish baths; ate native meals andslept in native houses--following the customs of the people of theland in all respects. And I was amazed at the immense relief I foundin such a life. In all my previous years I had not seen happy people.These were happy. Poor they might be, but they had no dream of wealth;the very thought of competition was unknown to them, and rivalry wasstill a matter of the horse and spear. Wages and rent were troublesthey had never heard of. Class distinctions, as we understand them,were not. Everybody talked to everybody. With inequality they had atrue fraternity. People complained that they were badly governed,which merely meant that they were left to their devices save on greatoccasions. A Government which touches every individual and interfereswith him to some extent in daily life, though much esteemed byEuropeans, seems intolerable to the Oriental. I had a vision of thetortured peoples of the earth impelled by their own misery to desolatethe happy peoples, a vision which grew clearer in the after years.But in that easy-going Eastern life there is a power of resistance,as everybody knows who tries to change it, which may yet defeat thehosts of joyless drudgery.[7]
He had ‘gone native’, so to speak, and when his mother came to know of it, he was called back home. Before his departure he wished to convert to Islam. The Muslim Shaikh in Damascus to whom he expressed thus would, however, not agree. What would be his mother’s reaction back home when she knew of it, he asked? She would be devastated, he replied. Then do not do so at this juncture, he advised, for it was a serious affair which required a prolonged reflection. This was indeed wise counsel, for it would take Pickthall another twenty one years after his return to England to become a Muslim. In the course of these years, during which he traveled again to his ‘beloved East’ and also visited Turkey for a few months, he produced fifteen novels and three collections of short stories. Said the Fisherman, his second one, published in 1903, received good reviews, becoming a bestseller in England. H. G. Wells wrote to him that ‘I wish that I could feel as certain about my own work as I do of yours, that it will be alive and interesting people fifty years from now.’[8] Little did Wells know of the turn waiting further on the course of his life.
In the coming years he wrote regularly for the New Age, a literary magazine, contributing alongside such luminaries as Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and G. K. Chesterton. As the First World War approached, he found himself on the side of the Ottoman Empire which entered into the War as an ally of the Central Powers. When he was conscripted, he announced that he would only serve his country where she was not directly engaged with the Ottoman forces. He was thus appointed at a hospital while he continued to write in the defence of Turkey. The War, and especially the Christian fanaticism displayed variously, became a catalyst for him. Being increasingly pulled towards Islam inwardly he underwent a crisis of faith, finally announcing his conversion in November 1917. ‘He took the name of Muhammed and almost immediately became a pillar of the British Islamic Community.’[9] He worked for a year at Islamic Information Bureau in London which issued The Muslim Outlook, a weekly paper.
He moved to India in 1920 accepting an invitation to edit Bombay Chronicle, a prestigious Indian newspaper, doubling its circulation in six months time. In India he would spend the next fifteen years of his life, returning to England in 1935 where he died a year after. Almost as soon as he set foot on Indian soil he became an associate of Gandhi whose ideas of non-violent resistance attracted him. This affiliation grew stronger when Gandhi joined Khilafat Movement.
So the Englishman became an Indian nationalist leader, fluent in Urdu, and attending dawn prayers in the mosque, dressed in Gandhian homespun adorned with the purple crescent of the Khilafatists. He wrote to a friend: ‘They expect me to be a sort of political leader as well as a newspaper editor. I have grown quite used to haranguing multitudes of anything from 5 to 30,000 people in the open air, although I hate it still as much as ever and inwardly am just as miserably shy.’ He also continued his Friday sermons, preaching at the great mosque of Bijapur and elsewhere.[10]
The letter that Gandhi wrote to his widow on his death says much about his character:
Your husband and I met often enough to grow to love each other and I found Mr. Pickthall a most amiable and deeply religious man. And although he was a convert he had nothing of the fanatic in him that most converts, no matter to what faith they are converted, betray in their speech and act. Mr. Pickthall seemed to me to live his faith unobtrusively.[11]
Pickthall disengaged from politics with the establishment of modern Turkey and with this, the Bombay Chronicle having been closed by the government, he moved to Hyderabad in 1925 where he accepted a post of school principle on the invitation of the Nizam. Two years later there he founded the scholarly journal Islamic Culture (that runs to this day) and in the same while delivered a series of lectures on the cultural aspects of Islam in Madras.[12] Since, as he himself put it, ‘All Muslim India seems to be possessed with the idea that I ought to translate the Qur’an into real English,’ in 1928 the Nizam agreed to let him go on sabbatical for two years to complete his work that would leave his mark in the cultural history of Islamic civilization. During his devout years of Christian faith he had drunk deep from the Christian scriptures which the Quran speaks of as its inalienable historical predecessors. Thus he became the living witness to the Quran’s chief claim made to the Jews and Christians, that if they let their self go for a while, they will inevitably reach to the Quran.
The need to translate the Quran into English arose foremost from the fact that it had been already rendered into this language by some English scholars who would now be termed as Orientalists. Missionaries from all over Europe had followed in the heel of their colonial armies and there was a widespread suspicion that the English translations of the Quran by Orientalist scholars were deeply imbued with their vested interests. Hence the whole Muslim India getting ‘possessed with the idea’ that Pickthall take up the challenge.
During his work he traveled to Cairo to seek support for his project from the leading scholars of Al-Azhar. Somewhat to his surprise he found little backing from them. In the Islamic world, as Kidwai has noted, ‘whereas the idea of interpreting the Quran has not been so controversial, the emotional motives behind rendering the Quranic text into languages other than Arabic have always been looked upon with suspicion,’[13] more so by an Englishman in the contemporary colonial setting. However, Pickthall’s sincerity and scholarship prevailed upon the Al-Azhar scholars, and his The Meaning of the Glorious Quran was published from London in 1930 where each surah or chapter is given a brief introduction. The present edition contains a short though very valuable biography of the Prophet. Four years after its publication Abdullah Yousaf Ali, a Britain based Muslim scholar, published his translation of the Book.[14] Though various other Muslim scholars have carried out their renderings, Pickthall’s provided a solid foundation for improvisation to all of them.
Pickthall was emphatic that his was a kind of interpretation as translation of the Quran was impossible. This goes well with the contemporary understanding that translation from one language into another is always an approximation. And this is especially so when it comes to revelation where a word in original language would normally require more than one words to convey the meaning of the original. It is thus always advisable to consult more than one translations of the Quran if one seeks to get somewhere near to the original meanings. Abudullah Yousaf Ali’s translation, then, is a good source to correlate with Pickthall’s. The way the latter absorbs the idiom and metaphors of the Quran, though, speaks for itself. The following two verses, taken from different suras, illustrate the point well:
Wa li-rab-bika fasbir (74:7)
Fasbir sabran-jamiilaa (70:5)
Pickthall: For the sake of thy Lord, be patient!
But be patient (O Muhammad) with a patience fair to see.
Ali: But for thy Lord’s (cause), Be patient and constant.
Therefore do thou hold patience, -- a patience of beautiful (contentment).
A small point of difference with Pickthall on my behalf is his rendering of al-kitaab as Scripture instead of Book. He might have availed the opportunity of having two words in English for where there is apparently one in Arabic. This seems to be an oversight thanks to his Christian legacy of which the separation between the sacred and profane does not go well with the Unitarian vision of the Quran. The inadequacy of translating kitaab as scripture should have been apparent to him when he was translating, for instance, the following verses:
‘In-nahuu la-qur-‘aanun-kariim,
fii kitaabim-mak-nunn,
laa yamas-suhuu ‘il-lal-mutah-haruun (56:77-9)
That (this) is indeed a noble Quran
In a Book kept hidden
Which none toucheth saveth the purified.
Perhaps the chief limitation that he himself set on his translation, as also Abdullah Yousaf Ali later on, was his failure to employ the English of everyday usage. Did these translators still harbour the prejudice that revelation was too sacred to be put in everyday speech? Whatever the answer but the constraint and artificiality that such usage imposes on the text becomes evident when we compare Pickthall and Ali with, for instance, N. J. Dawood, who chose to render the text in plain simple English.[15] The effect is apparent when we see, for instance, the following verses:
Pickthall: Seest thou not how Allah coineth a similitude: A goodly saying, as a goodly tree, its root set firm, its branches reaching into heaven,
Giving its fruit at every season by the permission of its Lord? Allah coineth the similitudes for mankind in order that they may reflect. (14:24-5)
Ali: Seest thou not how God sets a parable? - A goodly Word like a goodly tree,
Whose root is firmly fixed, And its branches reach to the heavens, --
It brings forth its fruit at all times, by the leave of its Lord.
So God sets forth parables for men, in order that they may receive admonition.
Dawood: Do you not see how God compares a good word to a good tree?
Its root is firm and its branches are in the sky;
It yields its fruit in every season by God’s leave.
God speaks in parables to men so that they may take heed.
Pickthall was not merely a translator of the Quran but also its scholar. He ‘warned against the danger of adoring the book rather than its content.’[16] In a separate note, he posed two inter-related questions to the contemporary Islamic civilization: how can we enter into the world of the Quran ‘as if Allah were speaking to us through it now and today?’ And secondly, how it can, once again, become relevant and power of transformation in today’s world.[17] Needless to say, both questions are as relevant today as in Pickthall’s day. Furthermore, the two questions are actually one, because once we enter into the world of the Quran by locating the necessary code, or, to be more precise, employing the requisite methodology, we enter into the world of power, the power to comprehend, control and transform the events that constitute our world. Only then, as he put it bravely, ‘instead of being a mere revered book, a sacred fossil, or a source of magic-like blessing, it will change into a mighty force, impinging, stirring, moving and guiding us deeper and higher achievements, just as it did before.’[18] To this end the rest of this article is devoted.
The hypothesi,s or the fact, the event to be interpreted
It is one thing to recite the Quran, which is an art in itself, but quite another to destructure it as a text. It is indeed the problem with all revelation, in which Plato’s dialogues occupy a special place. For the moment, though, we would focus on the Quran.
The Quran presents itself as a complex structure which makes its claim to be the greatest wonder, or miracle as the Islamic tradition knows it, of the pre-modern civilizations worth considering. It does not imply belittling of the other wonders, for it repeatedly claims to be the inheritor of all of them.
The hypothesis that I want to suggest in this regard may be stated thus.[19] The structure of the Quran is a mirror image of pre-modern civilizations, on the one hand, and of the nature of reality as perceived by these civilizations, on the other. Or, the structure of the one, that is, of the Quran is the same as that of pre-modern civilizations, more particularly of the Islamic civilization of pre-modern times, and of the nature of reality to which they adhered. The Quran, it needs to be emphasized, claims to be the final text or book of the revelation which began with the creation of Adam, or the appearance of the human in the universe. This means that while the revelation prior to the Quran, or the texts/books of it, such as those which it mentions (e.g. the Torah, the Psalms of David and the Gospels) and those which it does not, each created its own civilization or community, the Quran not only created its own civilization but, being the final chapter of the Book that began with Adam, it is the most succinct and clear statement of reality of which the pre-modern civilizations as a whole were the embodiment.
Now the immediate point that needs to be clarified here is the notion of pre-modern civilizations, or, let us say, pre-modern Islamic civilization.[20] For I am intending to make a clear distinction between the pre-modern and modern Islamic civilization (a distinction applicable to all non-Western civilizations), that is, the one prior to the rise of modernity and the other which was subjugated by modernity, a subjugation that continues to the present day. What I am suggesting, then, is that, to put it succinctly, the prevalent idea that the present day, or the modern Islamic world is a continuation of the pre-modern Islamic civilization is an illusion. What implies is that while the structure of the pre-modern Islamic civilization was the mirror image of the structure of the Quran, the modern Islamic world is not. I am not positing an absolute discontinuity between the pre-modern and modern Islamic world. But what I intend to argue presently is that the discontinuity between them is as important as the continuity between them and it is only by a full view of these opposite aspects of our history that we can make sense of it, or truly interpret the event that we call Islamic history. We would soon turn to the continuity between them, but presently we are emphasizing the discontinuity between them. What follows is that while it is not a mistake to say that the cotemporary Islamic world is a continuation of the pre-modern world, it is also equally important to see that there is a difference or discontinuity between them. The difference is so pronounced that, as just noted, while the structure of pre-modern Islamic world reflected the structure of the Quran, the contemporary world does not.
If the contemporary Islamic world is not the reflection of the Quranic conception of reality, what follows is that, as argued earlier in a paper just cited, the vision of pre-modern Islam as expounded by the modern or contemporary Islamic intelligentsia is seriously modern, that is, seriously flawed and therefore does not accord with or correspond to the pre-modern Islam and the Islamic world. Therefore their contention that they represent and are fighting for the original Islam is mistaken. Their vision of the structure of the Quran and of their ideal Islam and Islamic world of pre-modern times has been constructed under the influence of and the tools provided by modernity and the modern mind that originated in Europe in the 16th-17th centuries. Thus, in spite of their much proclaimed hostility to modernity, they (the modern or contemporary Islamic intelligentsia) tend to see the pre-modern world and the supreme knowledge of it as embodied in the revelation and the Quran, the last book of it, with essentially the same eyes as do the modern intelligentsia (both Western and non-Western).
What follows from this is that the conception of reality that the modern intelligentsia (MI) and the modern Islamic intelligentsia (MII) adhere to is essentially same and essentially different from the conception of reality of the Quran and the pre-modern world. The conception of the pre-modern world, of religion, of tradition, or of the pre-modern knowledge or conception of reality as embodied supremely in the revelation, as perceived by the modern mind, is a modern construction, that does not correspond with the fact or the event that it purports to be describing. And the modern Muslim mind has succumbed to it.
The whole difference between the pre-modern and modern conception of reality arises in response to the ultimate philosophical problem and which is: what is there? For modern mind it is matter alone, for nothing else exists, is real but matter and its varied variations or forms such as the plant, the animal, or the human mind. There are various philosophies of social science in vogue presently, from empiricism or positivism to (Marxist) materialism, realism, phenomenology and hermeneutics and so forth.[21] But all their differences fail to conceal their common, founding premise, that nothing exists beside the material. In order to account for their differences, let us say that for all of them only that is real which can be reduced to the human’s sensory experience. Any human experience that cannot be traced back to sensory impressions is false at the best and illusion at the worst. Thus the modern mind defines knowledge as the formulation of human experience furnished ultimately through the sensory organs, or that can be reduced to the activity of human senses. Since the natural sciences, so the argument goes, adhere to this principle most faithfully, they constitute the highest form of knowledge, to which the social sciences and philosophy must also aspire.
Since the experience underlying the revelation, the ultimate embodiment of pre-modern knowledge, cannot be reduced to the sensory experience, it is an illusory experience for the modern mind. Therefore the knowledge constructed on this experience must also be false knowledge. We will investigate this claim, for what is apparent is that the modern mind has only changed the definition of knowledge and by thus doing relegated the knowledge of the pre-modern civilizations to the dustbin of history.
The chief problem with this claim is that it is founded on a premise proclaimed as self-evident by the modern mind, but which is neither self-evident nor true. It is purely a construction of the modern mind. And this is that, as Marx and Engels famously put it, reality is either material or non-material, either matter or mind. So whereas the modern, or scientific mind adheres to the reality of the former, the pre-modern mind adhered to the reality of the latter. Common sense, it was argued, shows that mind, or the human came long after the appearance of the material world, so the reality must be accorded to the material sphere alone. The pre-modern perception of the reality of the non-material sphere was therefore an illusory perception.
It is apparent that the whole support of this argument is common sense. We will see that this is the same common sense which once supported the geo-centric world. Einstein too, who was called the new Copernicus by Max Planck, the founder of the quantum theory, when he came up with his theory of relativity, found this common sense in staunch opposition to his vision of reality. The mention of these two giants of what is known as the early 20th century scientific revolution has been made advisedly. For if Planck destroyed the absolute opposition or separation between the particle and wave natures of light (thus unifying the two contraries of light and particle natures of light), Einstein demolished the absolute world or standard of perception which could be visualized to exist independent of the human observer. With the further evolution in the quantum theory, with which Einstein himself became uneasy, the so-called common sense view, which continues to be the chief dogma of modern science and of the mind built on it, that there is an objective world existing independently of human experience of it was undermined.
The idea that the world is inseparable from human experience of it, let us remember, is the founding premise of the (knowledge of the) pre-modern civilizations. And if the knowledge revolution of the twentieth century, spearheaded by the early 20th century scientific revolution, reached to the same premise, so much the worse for the modern mind.
The human is the centre of the universe in the pre-modern world and so is it for the world as envisioned by the relativity and quantum. The latter perception thus unifies the two contraries: the geo-centric and helio-centric worlds in so far as the former implied the human as the centre of the world. One of the chief arguments furnished by the modern mind to debunk the pre-modern vision of the human-centered world is that it allegedly was based the geo-centric world view of the world. So, since the geo-centric world was discovered to be an illusion, so the human centered world, a world invariably tied with the human experience of it, must also be an illusion.
The point is that the pre-modern mind did not base its vision of the human-centered world on the physical fact of a geo-centric world. The 20th century knowledge revolution has demonstrated that the world is indeed inseparable form human experience even though it is a helio-centric world.
So now we come to the structure of reality as envisioned by the Quran.
It is not easy to enter into it. For, it has a very complex structure hidden behind a blinding simplicity. The simplicity is so perfect a ruse that the reader gets carried away by it. It is almost like the structure a palm-date stone in which the core seems to have been concealed with great care; as if demanding a struggle to enter into it. And for which the Quran frequently incites.
So one must be clear what one is looking for. We find what you seek for. As the Quran puts it, if you are asking for this world you would be given. If the higher, which is the realm of the inner structure, you would find it too. But it’s a struggle. What follows is that there are two perceptions, one for the exterior, the other for the interior or core structure whereby each generates its own knowledge, or each unfolding its own world. So the Quran operates on two modes or plains of being, one normal, the other higher. For instance if speed of light is finite in one perception, it’s infinite from the other. The Quran for instance speaks of stairways to heavens, on which the angels are ascending and they travel the distance of fifty thousand years in a single day.
From Allah, Lord of the Ascending Stairways, (whereby) the angels and the Spirit ascend unto Him in a Day whereof the span is fifty thousand years.[22]
Apparently it makes little sense. Or at best a legacy of mythology. But it is not nonsense though the heritage of mythology is underlying it. It’s just a different experience of light that the normal perception cannot generate. The idea is perennial, from the age of mythology or the rise of civilization, the age of the so-called archaic or primitive man. But it took very long for its final formulation which the Quran claims to be. It stretches the revelation, of which it is the final heir, back to the first human, or Adam, who received the names of things from Allah. It is the recasting of the biblical view in almost a new language.
Within normal behavior or given framework, in both its religious and modern representations, it is difficult to enter into the interior structure of the Quran. Both fail to enter into it. This failure takes the power of this work away. Instead of being cognizant of their failure, they think it’s simply not there. For each, unity is the exclusion of either this or other mode of being. So, they appear different or enemies of each other, yet they are same in their inability to see that unity without difference cannot be conceived.
All violence and war generates from this perception of unity in which difference and opposition are identical with violence and war. Once it is understood that opposition is inherent in unity and thus unite apparently contradictory entities, as Einstein meant when he unified mass and energy in his famous E=mc2 equation, war and violence would cease to be the inherent condition of opposition and difference.
This pluralist vision of the Quran, in which pluralism defines unity, the sectarian consciousness of the religious and the modern, which incites the exclusion of opposition from unity, is transcended. This thing is at the heart of a social change through violence, a belief in which the existing social theory, whether religious or modern, concur.
The Quran then opens up a huge and immense potential of peace and universal harmony on this planet once its internal structure is entered into.
The Quran helps us to comprehend and decode the structure of pre-modern civilization of which it claims to be one of the chief documents. The structure of pre-modern civilization is raised on the structure as conceived in the Quran. So, what is the Quran’s structure?
We have seen that it is made up of two spheres, internal and external like the structure of the atom. The structure of the pre-modern civilization, and of the Quran and the atom, concords with each other.
Now what follows from this is that if the velocity of light is absolute as Einstein suggested and built the subsequent scientific development on this premises, then this does not imply that it should be absolute in the subatomic world, in the entire of the cosmos. We already have plenty of evidence for it. For we know that the subatomic world phenomena behave almost as it was almost alive. We know that the phenomena behave differently under the human gaze than they would otherwise. As if the internal structure of man was same as that of the world, where the observer and the observed discover each other as the one and the other in one whole.
Neil Bohr drew attention of this remarkable fact that it is the apparatus that man employs that largely determines what he perceives in the subatomic world, for there is no such thing as world itself. Different perception creates different worlds.
This leads to the idea of the physical world as human construction.
The idea of the social world as being human creation may not surprise as much but that of natural world sounds against the common sense. But it is the same common sense that once supported the geo-centric view.
Incidentally once we comprehend that there are mainly two perceptions corresponding to the two plains of being, there would be little difficulty to see that the two natures of light, those of particle and wave, must have varied velocities too. For it is possible to suggest that the speed of light of 300000km per sec is only the velocity of particle motion of light, and that the wave motion of light is infinite. In other words there are two speeds, finite and infinite, corresponding to its particle and wave natures. Once we come to grip with this the eternal enigma that exhausted Einstein to death, the problem of the unification of the four forces, would be resolved.
The idea of the finite, the so-called absolute speed of light, let us remember, was Einstein’s creation. It was earlier presented by Leibniz if I am not mistaken. Newton, as we know adhered to infinite speed of light which he had inherited from his studies of the structure of pre modern civilizations. He was deeply involved in the science of the day which was alchemy. This science claimed to be the science of interior structure of the pre modern civilizations. The hypothesis of Newton, of infinite speed of light along with its particle nature of light was upheld by the modern science.
Newton failed to see the contradiction in it. If light was infinite, it meant that it did not belong to the world of matter, of particle nature, which was finite. So Newton begged down there, and Leibniz, on the other hand, was equally confused, who opposed Newton, on both counts. Newton was, it seems, all the way involved to resolve this contradiction but failed which probably caused his nervous breakdown in 1694.
The puzzle took a step towards its resolution when in the 19th century the wave nature of light, largely at the hands of Faraday, the discover of the electromagnetic fields, was discovered. Now the infinite speed of light looked sensible. But then came the bomb shell of the discovery of the interior structure of the atom at the hands of J. J. Thomson in 1898. This new phenomenon created problems. Instances were observed where it didn’t seem to conform to either wave or particle nature of light. The loss of ether at the hands of Michelson and this strange behavior of light were the two great challenges that physics as the queen sciences faced at the turn of the century.
Two giants appeared, one older and the other younger one who together resolved these crises by abandoning the world which the existing concepts of physics described. Common sense was going to face a challenge greater then it faced at the shift from geocentric to heliocentric world: the mental habit or the hypothesis that light must behave either as particle or wave had to be abandoned.
New concepts had to be created to describe the new experience of the world as Planck and Einstein both emphasized.
Planck wrestled with himself as he prepared to challenge the two greatest dogmas of physics. That light behaved only as wave and second that it could only do as particle or wave. The eternal law of logic of modern rationality of either /or, of being and not being, as two hostile opposites, had to be abandoned. Light as Planck discovered must be behaving both as light and wave in that particular epiphany of it which Plank was observing and studying at that time. To overcome this lasting absolute of science, Planck had to struggle hard. Of this he spoke to his son during a walk a short while before presenting this paper in October 1900. He thought it was a discovery equal to that of the great Newton’s. Einstein generalized this plural nature of light, thus asserting its two natures universally. While seeing the slipping of the earth from under its feet, he went on to create a dogma of his own. This was the new the absolute, the absolute velocity of light.
But did it occur to anyone even after the atomic explosion, that the energy released could be different than that of which the speed was fixed, 300,000. This figure was already too large. To think that light had also an infinite nature was impossible to conceive So the implication is obvious. Light must behave both finitely and infinitely, though not at the same time, just like particle and wave. The classic double slit experiment proves Bohr’s point that all phenomena behave differently under a different apparatus. The human is inseparable from nature, the cardinal belief of the pre modern civilizations.
Neil Bohr, in spite of his tremendous effort to lead quantum away from Einstein’s dogmatic slumber, could not get to question Einstein’s ultimate dogma and thus paid the price of his beloved theory of complimentarity getting little attention. Had he been able to take a step forward to see and insist on the dual velocity of light corresponding to the wave and particle natures of light which he did so much to establish in spite of all Einstein’s intellectual assaults especially at the Solvoy Congress of 1927, he would have broken through. But the breakthrough they had made was exhausted.
In order, then then, to resurrect the discarded hypothesis of Newton of the infinite velocity of light we need to turn to the roots from where Newton derived it. Planck had resurrected his particle hypothesis in a new setting. We need only to extend a little and affirm that it is both particle and wave, finite and infinite.
(III)
The roots go back, as already stated, go back to the age of mythology, of which the Quranic revelation is the ultimate continuum. Mythology is an essential component of human psyche. The human must make myths which in its essence, is the human construction of entities which are invisible but which provide the necessary connections between the phenomena of the material world. Since both correspond to different perceptions, both are unlike each other. The world of invisible events cannot be reduced to the world of visible entities or events. But the images and symbols employed to describe each undergo change. So the suggestion by the modern mind that it has freed human mind from mythological psyche is false.
Ether was the greatest god that physics created in the 19th century, although its earlier forms had a long history. On its death, though, another one was soon to be created by ironically the great iconoclast Einstein himself. If we can decode the duality of Einstein rightly we can get the heart of the Quran. The new god was the absolute speed of light. The Quran demolished this god ages ago, in its longing for unity. Light is the ultimate image of Allah, the chief concept created and employed to expound the nature of reality, which the Quran calls Allah. Although Allah as ‘the light of the heavens and the earth’ is an often repeated simile in the Quran, perhaps the most beautiful is the following one:
Noor an ‘ala noor Light upon light
Allah sounds strange but not Ether; why? Allah sounds strange but not the absolute speed of light; why?
What is the nature of light in the Quran? Simple! Relative and absolute character of light, with the difference that what we know as absolute velocity of Einstein, turns into relative and the infinitude of light becomes the absolute. This means that it is possible for light to be at two celestial bodies at the same time, without any time interval, just like the electron emerging in two orbits at the same time. So to hypothesis that there is an absolute divide between the micro and macro nature, subatomic and atomic world, is false. A leap of imagination that Einstein dared not take. They are opposites of each other and yet one is unthinkable without the other. It is the harmony of opposites that defines its unity. Their inner unity is that mass and energy in that great equation of E=mc2.
What this equation suggests in that the energy that manifests itself or is created after the interaction of mc2 is not the same that interacted with mass. After all the energy created by mc2 is not part of our ordinary experience, it does not fall within the view of our ordinary, given perception. That which is beyond our sensual experience must be the reflection of the infinite; that must be the realm of infinite.
(IV)
The revelation describes itself as inimitable. This was the point of contention between the exterior or inner tradition, the rationalist scholars and the Sufis within the Islamic tradition.
The scholars and the Sufis understand inimitability of the Quran differently. The Sufis did not deny that experience of revelation can be shared; that it is almost universal to mankind or it could never be understood, because this is invisible and beyond our sensory experience, of outer and inward perception, against all the false accusation of the modern mind is never denied. The seed structure of reality is never denied.
If the modern mind denies the inner experience, it assumes that the traditional, pre-modern mind denies the sensory experience. What is difficult for it, though, is its self-imposed difficulty that one of the two perceptions or the experiences is false. This so called logical law might be the law of sensory experience, but it does not hold in the subatomic world. The logic or the rationality of the mind, which it considers to be absolute, then is the law of the constitution or structure of the external and sensory experience. Its limitation is evident is so far as in the realm of finitude alone. Revelation is inimitable in the sense that it cannot be copied, which is the realm of the finitude. That is, you cannot parallel it with anything in physical plain.
Reference:
The religious intelligence did not realize that if we restrict revelation to exceptional events in natural, as violation of the law, then the sensory realm emerges as partner to Allah. It becomes in between the human and the world beyond, the realm of infinite. It simply disappears behind the veil of sensory experience. An experience, that at times is common to the religious and modern intelligentsia.
The Quran insists that it is the most common form of shirk, the unconscious association of Allah and the sensory world as partners. You reckon this world, or the life in it……… as the ultimate and you have made it God’s associate.
Revelation is the chief source or testimony of the world beyond, so it is never-ending. If there is a world of infinity that it must continually manifest. That is, what the Quran calls revelation.
A.R. Kidwai. ‘Translating the Untranslatable: A Survey of English Translations of the Quran’ http://www.soundvision.com/Info/quran/english.asp ((Originally printed in The Muslim World Book Review, Vol. 7, No. 4 Summer 1987)
‘Marmaduke Pickthalla brief biography,’ http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/bmh/BMM-AHM-pickthall_bio.htm
[1] 12:26
[2] http://enlightenment.supersaturated.com/essays/text/bryanregister/ bohr_compliementarity.html)
[3] Holten. G. 1996. Einstein, History, and Other Passions: The Rebellion Against Science at the End of the Twentieth Century. Perseus Books. 1996:114)
[4] For a brief biography of Pickthall see Abdul Hakim Murad, http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/bmh/BMM-AHM-pickthall_bio.htm
[5] Cited by Rentfrow, D. http://islam.thetruecall.com/
[6] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19378/19378-8.txt; pp. 3-4.
[7] Ibid., p. 5.
[8] http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/bmh/BMM-AHM-pickthall_bio.htm; p. 9.
[9] Rentfrow, D. http://islam.thetruecall.com/; p. 3.
[10] http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/bmh/BMM-AHM-pickthall_bio.htm; p. 17.
[11] Ibid., p. 18.
[12] It was later published under the title The Cultural Side of Islam (1984). Lahore: Qadiria Book Traders.
[13] Kidwai, A. R. ‘Translating the Untranslatable: A Survey of English Translations of the Quran,’ http://www.soundvision.com/Info/quran/english.asp; p. 1.
[14] The Glorious Quran, 1991, translation by Abdullah Yousaf Ali, transliteration by M. S. Tajar, Maktabah ar-Rasul al ‘Ammah, Kuwait.
[15] N. J. Dawood…
[16] Hadhrami, A.A. ‘Marmaduke Pickthall: A Servant of Islam,’ http://www.witness-pioneer.org/vil/Articles/scholars/marmaduke_pickthall_a_servant_of_islam.htm
[17] The New World that Awaits You
[18] Ibid.
[19] The hypothesis presented here originates in my study of the Quran initiated nearly two decades ago while I was working on my Ph. D. thesis, which was incorporated in the work subsequently published as A Forgotten Vision: A study of human spirituality in the light of Islamic tradition, 1996, Vanguard Books: Lahore.
[20] It would be instructive to see my article ‘Islam and Modernity: Towards a new paradigm,’ appearing in this issue especially for the clarification of the terms such as modernity.
[21] Outhwaite, W. 1987. New Philosophies of Social Science: Realism,
[22] 70:3-4.
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