By Babatunde Jose
The understanding of Islam as a religion and as the dominating principle of a major world civilization is of great significance because it makes for a better appreciation of the worldview of more than 1.9 billion people of different nationalities and races.
Today Islam constitutes the second largest religious community in Europe and has a population almost the size of Judaism’s in America. The largest Muslim population in a country is in Indonesia, a country home to 12.7% of the world’s Muslims, followed by Pakistan (11.1%), India (10.9%) and Bangladesh (9.2%). About 20% of Muslims live in the Arab world. But most of all, the study of Islam is significant because it concerns a message from God revealed within that very Abrahamic world from which Judaism and Christianity originated.
These days, the reality of Islam penetrates the consciousness of contemporary Westerners from nearly every direction. Whether it is consequences of the decades-old Middle Eastern conflict between Arabs and Jews, the aftershocks of the upheavals of the Iranian Revolution, the civil war in Yugoslavia, where Muslim Bosnians were caught between feuding Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the sudden appearance of a number of Muslim republics, and the tragic events of September 11, 2001, it seems that the reality of Islam have come to constitute an important dimension of the life of humanity today.
And yet there is no major religion whose study is more distorted in the West than Islam.
It is significant because Islam and its civilization have played a far greater role than is usually admitted in the genesis and development of European (and American) civilization.
The Quran is the third and final revelation of the Abrahamic monotheistic cycle and is, therefore, a religion without whose study the knowledge of the whole religious family to which Jews and Christians belong would be incomplete.
Contrary to misconception, fallacy and misunderstanding in Western quarters, Islam is both a religion and a civilization, a historical truth that spans over fourteen centuries of human history and a geographical presence in vast areas stretching over the Asian and African continents and even parts of Europe.
It is also a spiritual and metahistorical reality that has transformed the inner and outer life of numerous human beings in very different temporal and spatial circumstances.
The study of Islam in the West which began in the tenth and eleventh centuries, has been one-sided, distorted and contaminated by errors and deviations, some deliberate and some out of ignorance. Much that is presented today as the study of Islam by so-called experts is strongly influenced by various biases and ideological prejudices. Because this was a time in Europe when Islam was seen as a Christian heresy, and its founder as an apostate.
The initial expansion of Islam into uncharted territories of old Palestine and Byzantium provoked imminent threat to Christendom and led many to call the Prophet of Islam the Antichrist, and the Quran itself translated by order of Peter the Venerable in order to be refuted and rejected as sacred scripture.
Islam was born in the 7th Century; the Middle Ages or Medieval period were marked by strong religious opposition to Islam. The Muslim conquest of Persia in the late 7th century led to the downfall of the Sasanian Empire. Also conquered during this period were Syria, Palestine, Armenia, Egypt, and North Africa. This rapid expansion was to lead to a confrontation with Christendom and eventually the Crusades between 1095 to 1291.
The Renaissance perpetuated religious opposition to Islam, with disdain for Islamic learning, although there were some exceptions. Furthermore, the emphasis on Eurocentrism during the Renaissance caused many European thinkers of that time to consider people of other civilizations and ethnic groups, including Muslims, inferior.
Islamic studies were distorted by a sense of Western superiority and even hubris, characteristics that were to continue into the modern period.
The Enlightenment (1685 to 1815) developed the idea that there was only one civilization, the Western one. Obviously in such a situation Islam and its civilization could only play an inferior and secondary role.
During the nineteenth century, historicism in its absolutist sense took the center of the philosophical stage and Islamic civilization had no place in the scheme.
And yet this was the period when many of the greatest spiritual masterpieces of Islamic literature, especially many of the Sufi classics, were translated into European languages and seriously attracted major Western writers.
This was also the period when the exotic image of the Islamic East developed, as reflected in nineteenth-century European art associated with “orientalism.”
Moreover, this period marked the beginning of official oriental studies and Islamic studies, in various Western universities, often supported by colonial governments.
Oriental studies, in fact, developed as an instrument for furthering the policy of colonial powers, whether they were carried out in Central Asia for use by the Russian colonial office or in India for the British government.
But there were among the orientalists in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century also a number of noble scholars who studied Islam both objectively and with sympathy.
But the main product of the orientalist manner of studying Islam remained heavily biased not only as a result of the interests of those powers it was serving, but also through the absolutization of current Western concepts and methodologies that were applied to Islam with the sense of superiority and hubris going back to the Renaissance period.
The last half of the twentieth century witnessed a major transformation in Islamic studies in the West, at least in certain circles. First of all, spiritually aware Westerners who realized the spiritual poverty of modernism began to seek wisdom in other worlds. Some turned to the objective and unbiased study of the deepest teachings of Islam.
Furthermore, during this same period authentic representatives of the Islamic tradition, began to study Western thought and languages and gradually to produce works in European languages on Islam that were not simply apologetic but explained clearly and without compromise the teachings of Islam in a manner comprehensible to Westerners.
Finally, a younger generation of scholars have appeared on the scene during the past few years who are both Muslim and Western in orientation.
Despite the presence of such groups, however, the anti-Islamic approach to Islamic studies continues in many circles.
And then there are the political ideologues, who often have little knowledge of Islam yet are presented as experts on the subject; from them one hears the most egregious anti-Islamic statements touted in the media and in popular books as authentic knowledge of Islam.
They are joined in this chorus by a number of Christian voices from extremist groups who speak as if they were living in twelfth-century France at the time of the Crusades, but who are at the same time completely devoid of knowledge of traditional Christian theology, not to mention Christian humility and charity.
There is, in fact, no religion in the world about which Western authors have written so much and at the same time in such a pejorative way as Islam.
Islam is not only a religion; it is also the creator and living spirit of a major world civilization with a long history stretching over fourteen centuries. Islamic history concerns the historic existence of the peoples of many lands, from North Africa to Malaysia, over vast spans of time.
It has witnessed the creation of some of the greatest empires and the integration into a single social order of many diverse ethnic and linguistic groups. Islamic history has, moreover, directly affected the history of Europe for over a millennium and has been in turn deeply affected by the West since the advent of the colonial period.
Islamic civilization produced a very rich tradition in the aural arts of poetry and music. Islamic civilization created many musical instruments, such as the tār (from Persian: ‘string’) a long-necked, waisted lute family instrument, used by many cultures and countries including Iran, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Georgia, Tajikistan (Iranian Plateau), Turkey, and others near the Caucasus and Central Asia regions; and the ‘ūd (a pear-shaped stringed instrument.), which were to find their counterparts in the guitar and the lute in the West.
The contributions of Islamic science are so great and complex that they cannot even be summarized in a proper and meaningful way in a short essay like this. Suffice it to say, for some seven centuries Islamic science was, from the point of view of creativity, at the forefront of science globally.
Not only did Muslims synthesize Greco-Alexandrian, ancient Mesopotamian, Iranian, Indian, and to some extent Chinese science, but they created many new sciences or added new chapters to the ancient sciences. For example, in mathematics they expanded the study of the geometry of the Greeks and created the new disciplines of trigonometry and algebra.
Likewise, in medicine they furthered the studies of Hippocratic and Galenic medicine while diagnosing and distinguishing new diseases, discovering new remedies, and proposing new theories. The same can be said for numerous other sciences, from alchemy to astronomy, from physics to geology.
The global history of science has as one of its central chapter’s Islamic science, without which there would have been no Western science.
Finally, let it be said that Islam is not only a religion; it is also the creator and living spirit of a major world civilization with a long history stretching over fourteen centuries.
Today, Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world. According to the Pew Research projections, by 2050 there will be near parity between Muslims (2.8 billion, or 30% of the population) and Christians (2.9 billion, or 31%), possibly for the first time in history. Allahu Akbar!
Next, we shall examine Islam as the final revelation in the Abrahamic trilogy.
Barka Juma’at and happy weekend.
