Muslim world’s missed opportunity: Agony continues – Part I

From the time of the decline of the Ottoman Caliphate in the 18th century until its total eclipse in 1924 and to the present day, 

Muslim intellectuals of both secular and spiritual orientation have been grappling with the question “what went wrong?”

A longing to recapture the glorious past of Islam is universal in the Muslim world. An accurate diagnosis of failed experiments in the past and a sound methodology to exploit any emerging opportunities in the future are prerequisites to achieve this objective. Such an opportunity arose during the last quarter of the 20th century that could have been fruitfully utilised in this venture. How and why did the Muslim world squander that opportunity and what are the consequences? A return to the past glory calls for a paradigmatic mental shift from a ‘mytho-historical mindset’ to a ‘techno-scientific mindset’. A freedom for heresy is the need of the day in the Muslim world.

In the classical Islamic binary of Dharul Islam (abode of peace) and Dharul Harb (abode of war) – apart from the later categories of Dharul Sulh (abode of truce), Dharul Hudna (abode of calm) and Dharul Amn (abode of safety) – the Muslim majority countries of today are the ones who ironically seem to represent Dharul Harb. Except perhaps the tiny sultanate of Brunei Darussalam, which is unique for its infamous world record of governing under emergency laws for over one-half of a century since 1962, practically every Muslim country in the world is embroiled in some form of political and civil unrest, war and violence. Apart from the disastrous impact that such situation imposes on economic development, it is also denying the Muslim world the opportunity to explore collectively the real reasons why it is so far behind the rest of the world in terms of scientific achievement, modernity and progress. 

While not disputing the significance of specific causes and circumstances for the problems facing each of the Muslim countries this article focuses on one macro issue that appears fundamental to the current malaise. It refers to a particular thought paradigm or mindset that has continued for over a millennium to slow down progress in the Muslim quarter in comparison to the rest of the world. This mindset has kept the Muslim world in a chequered state of techno-scientific backwardness in spite of the enormous wealth that this world has enjoyed over recent decades.

Contested diagnoses

“There will be a time when your religion will be like a hot piece of coal in the palm of your hand; you will not be able to hold it,” said the Prophet when he was talking to his followers in 7th century Arabia. “Would this mean there would be very few Muslims?” someone asked later. “No,” replied the Prophet, “They will be large in numbers, more than ever before, but powerless like the foam on the ocean waves.” (Tirmidhi)

From the time of the decline of the Ottoman Caliphate in the 18th century until its total eclipse in 1924 and to the present day, Muslim intellectuals of both secular and spiritual orientation have been grappling with the question “what went wrong?” a question that even captured the title of a book by Bernard Lewis, published in 2002. How was it that the world Muslim community or ‘umma’, which remained so strong, vibrant, progressive and productive since it established a caliphate in the 7th century and which produced a civilisation that lasted for nearly a millennium, progressively became weak, stagnant, backward and unproductive? Erudite Muslims wonder how the umma eventually lost not only its political power and military might but also economic vibrancy and cultural vitality. How did it become politically subjugate, economically exploited and culturally overpowered by a Christendom, which, was in deep slumber until the 16th century? This fundamental and intellectually vexing question provoked a process of self-interrogation and at times heated debates and partisan controversies. However, the diagnostic answers that they stimulated within the umma fall under three categories: Religious dogmatism, secular scientism and religious-scientism.

Religious dogmatism, advanced primarily by Islamic spiritual activists and theologians of reputable institutions and religious establishments reduced the answer simply to the umma’s neglect of Islam and its doctrinaire teachings. Back to the Islam of the Prophet and his companions, the ‘salaf’, was their proposed solution to check and reverse the decline. This argument originated with Ahmed ibn Hanbal, the father of Hanbalism, one of the four eponymous Sunni schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and eloquently expressed later by the 13th-century Damascene theologian and public intellectual Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyyah. Religious dogmatism took practical shape under Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism, in coalition with the Saudi ruling regime since late 18th century. Thus, Wahhabi Salafism represents at present the most influential, resourceful and state sponsored transnational Muslim ideology that advocates religious dogmatism as the ultimate solution to the Muslim world’s malaise. In fact, this argument at least in theory unites all Islamist groups, both moderates and extremists, in spite of their methodological differences. The ideology that drives radical movements like the Al-Qaeda, Jamaa Islamiyya, Boko Haram, the Taliban and ISIS/L (Islamic State of Iraq and Shams/the Levant) aptly reflects this religious dogmatism. 

The secular scientific argument found its practical and radical embodiment in the reforms of the ‘father’ of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who identified the main cause for the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and backwardness of Muslims solely in the religion of Islam and its traditions; hence, his avid determination to secularise Turkey on the model of Western Europe and particularly of France. His radical and unique reforms, which aimed to create a “culturally unitary, Westernised, secular society in which state institutions and the military play a tutelary role as guarantors of … democracy” have gained the moniker, Kemalism. In its more sanitised or diluted version, Kemalsim also found its way into Egypt under Gamal Abdal Nasser and into other authoritarian regimes in Algeria, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Tunisia. Kemalism, in essence, is the antithesis of Wahhabi Salafism. They represent the two extremes of the reformation spectrum in the Muslim world. 

In between religious dogmatism and secular scientism falls the third category, religious-scientism. The arguments under this somewhat oxymoronic category approach Islam in a new light. It identifies the cause of the decline not in Islam per se but in the rigidified and corrupt “Mullah Islam”, a derogatory epithet coined and popularised by Muhammad Iqbal, the philosopher poet of Pakistan. Iqbal wanted to separate and castigate the obscurantist Islam preached by the ‘imams’ from the authentic and scientific Islam enshrined in the Quran. This argument, propagated by a variety of “balanced reformers”, such as the peripatetic preacher Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, the controversial modernist Rashid Rida, the neo-Mu’tazilite Muhammad Abduh, the Islamist theorist Sayyid Qutib and several others, finds no contradiction between the Quranic Islam and natural science based on rationalism. Historically speaking this argument actually receives its originality from the writings of a group of Islamic philosophers, theologians and scientists known as the Mu’tazilites, meaning “those who keep themselves apart” and who blossomed during the first half of the Abbasid Caliphate. They were the pioneers of Islamic rationalism, whose philosophy in turn owed its origins to the Aristotelian and Platonic thoughts of ancient Greece. Coincidentally, it was also during the period of the Mu’tazilites that the grandeur of Islamic civilisation reached its pinnacle.

Indisputable fact

Irrespective of the relative validity or otherwise of these arguments and counter arguments the indisputable fact is that the world of Islam, which remained so strong, vibrant and progressive when Europe was retrogressing intellectually and in terms of civilisation, lost all of it when the latter awoke and commenced its forward march. Unshackled and liberated from centuries of a Church imposed orthodoxy, the West, an 18th or 19th century coinage referring to “a socially exclusive cultural heritage as well as a broad territorial community”, embraced with open arms the power and utility of critical thinking and rationalism, which ultimately pushed the West into a culture of scientific progress and modernity. 

Joel Mokyr, a renowned macroeconomic historian, calls this phenomenon, “A Culture of Growth”. While the West never turned its back on the idea of progress once it broke away from the prism of the past the Muslims on the other hand, who pioneered progressive thinking, endeared with a vengeance, since the 12th century, a culture of orthodoxy in which they are still deeply immersed and are staunchly refusing to come out. The malaise of the Muslims is a self-inflicted wound, which because of prolonged neglect now requires according to some intellectuals an almost radical but mental surgery.

Idea of progress

The idea of progress is a future-oriented mental project that is not heavenly ordained but develops from human endeavour to apply reason to understand the present and to explore ways and means of changing it for a better future. The progress of any society therefore depends on its accumulated stock and growth of “propositional” or scientific and “prescriptive” or technological knowledge, “conducted as a collaborative project within a competitive system”. The existence of a “competitive system”, which implies the freedom to think and express, is ‘sine qua non’ to the growth of the knowledge stock. 

That system creates a market for ideas in which the qualitatively superior ones will have greater demand and longevity of survival while the mediocre will lose appeal and disappear from the market. What inhibit the culture of growth in the Muslim countries are the hurdles that prevent the growth of such a competitive market for ideas. Moreover, progress is not a phenomenon that refers to economic development alone, as generally understood in the Muslim world, but it covers the entire spectrum of political, social and cultural dimensions of human life.

From the experience of the West, since the 17th century, Mokyr signifies two developments that provided incentives for the growth of knowledge. One, a “polycentric political environment” in which the scholars and the literati were able to move across national borders, when their words and works went against received wisdom, and consequently, angered the rulers and their establishment. Two, “a transnational Republic of Letters”, an invisible academy that facilitated intellectual entrepreneurs and “culture producers” to generate knowledge either through individual effort or in collaboration with others. From this academy, intellectual “superstars” were born in Europe whose innovative ideas and experiments set the tone for the future industrial revolution, political transformation and economic advancement. The polycentric political environment was the product of the system of nation states that resulted from the Treaty of Westphalia at the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648; and the Republic of Letters was a cosmopolitan elite phenomenon, which created, shared, debated and preserved knowledge, which ultimately heralded the European Enlightenment and paved the way towards progress.

In the case of Islam and Muslims there were, especially during the first two and a half centuries from 750 CE of the Abbasid Caliphate, signs of an emerging competitive market for ideas and the existence of a rudimentary Republic of Letters. It was these signs that made the Abbasid Caliphate glorious and uniquely memorable in the history of Islam. 

Frederick Starr, in the opening chapter of his fascinating book, ‘Lost Enlightenment’, describes a correspondence in the year 999 between two young men, who together would later become “the greatest scientific minds between antiquity and Renaissance”. One, a 28 years old Abu Rayhan al-Biruni born in today’s Turkmenistan, and the other, the 18 years old Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina from Uzbekistan. Separated by a distance of over 250 miles these two budding savants were engaged in a series of debate over matters relating to philosophy and science, which, in the context of the then Islamic intellectual environment, was bordering heresy. 

These two intellectuals were emblematic of the group of philosophers and scientists from the theological school of Mu’tazilism. This school of theology started by Wasil ibn ‘Ata in the Umayyad era and flourished during the Abbasid era championed the primacy of reason over revelation, which was condemned as heresy by the ruling religious orthodoxy. Yet, it was from this school that Islam produced some of its most brilliant minds in science, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, literature, philosophy and several other fields. 

It was also the product of those minds that later became the sources of reference and research for many of Europe’s own scholars, who took off from where the Muslims left and made their own respective contribution to the world stock of knowledge.  

Apart from the material wealth and cultural glory that the Abbasid caliphate was able to achieve and which has received legendary coverage in the writings of Muslim and non-Muslim historians, it was the knowledge revolution spearheaded by the Mu’tazilite philosophers and rationalists that made that glory everlasting. This has not received sufficient attention in those writings. The Mu’tazilites initiated a movement to secularise knowledge by critically examining the religiously inspired knowledge stock. Initiated by Caliph Al-Mamun and facilitated by his ‘Bayt al-Hikma’ (House of Wisdom), the translation movement that flourished in the 8th century and the debates and writings of the rationalists at that time, transformed Baghdad into a magnet for scholars and an epicentre for free thinking and critical research. 

The Muslim world underwent an era of intellectual Hellenization. It was this intellectual dimension of the early Abbasid regime more than its economic wealth that became the envy of outsiders, particularly of Christendom. Later, when Europe began to tread along the Mu’tazilite path and embarked on its own struggle to secularise knowledge and liberate from the shackles of the Church, it entered its era of Enlightenment and progress from which it has not stepped back until now. While many Western writers and scholars try to belittle the Islamic link to European Renaissance and Enlightenment in order to stamp the European phenomenon with a seal totally spontaneous and indigenous to Europe, the majority of Muslim scholars on the other hand, constrained by the fear of adverse reprisal from Islamic orthodoxy, have made Mu’tazilism an “unthinkable” subject.

Mu’tazilism eventually faced its challenge under the reign of Caliph al-Mutawakkil. Orthodoxy regained supremacy thereafter culminating in al-Ghazzali’s relentless attack on philosophy and the philosophers even though he himself started his intellectual career as a rationalist before abandoning it to become a mystic, which he again gave up and eventually ended up as a champion of religious orthodoxy. 

Free thinkers in Islam were condemned as ‘zanadiqa’ or heretics. This ascendancy of orthodoxy and orthopraxy backed by political power has constricted if not completely crippled freedom of thought and growth of a competitive market for ideas in the Muslim world. In spite of several intermittent reform movements, a fundamental fear of critical thinking and a hardened opposition against secular rationalism has kept the world of Islam on the margin of progress. 

After surveying a wave of late Islamic enlightenment that ushered in the 19th century Istanbul, Cairo and Tehran, which led to “great movements of thought, modes of living, and political organisation”, Christopher De Bellaigue concludes that in the end they amounted to no more than “a weight of tradition and conservatism (which) they were supposed to overturn”.

A new opportunity

However, an opportunity arose in the 1980s which could have stimulated a situation reversal had the rulers of the Muslim world and their intellectual advisers been prepared to take up the challenge and unburden themselves from the weight of history. The financial wealth that poured into the oil-rich Arab nations from the end of the 1970s and the worldwide recognition that these nations received simply because of their virtual monopoly over a crucial source of industrial energy promised a bonanza of abundant opportunities. While the majority of developing countries at that time were capital-starved and were forced to depend on foreign donors and investors for their development needs, which continued their state of economic, financial and even political dependency, the hydrocarbon-blessed Muslim nations were turned overnight into capital-surplus countries, which automatically granted them a hitherto undreamt economic freedom and opportunity. It was an opportunity for them to design their own path towards scientific progress and modernity. Unfortunately, as will be elaborated in the rest of this article, the rulers and their supporters in petro-dollar Muslim nations squandered that opportunity, because of their unwillingness or inability to unshackle their minds from the crippling fetters of religious orthodoxy and social conservatism.

An arrogant refusal to learn critical lessons from history appears to be one of the fundamental reasons why this disappointment occurred which kept the Muslim world at the periphery of a fast growing techno-scientific world. This refusal to learn is in essence the unavoidable consequence of a religiously designed and politically nurtured “mytho-historical mind” as coined by Mohammed Arkoun to describe the “collective ‘psyche’ which has not yet been emancipated from a mytho-historical mode”. This mytho-historical mode of thought and behaviour became even more obdurate after the financial boom. The so called Islamic resurgence and the several Islamisation projects which ensued from that resurgence in different quarters of the Muslim world after the 1970s, although was an immediate and direct outcome of the newly found wealth, yet, it lamentably deprived the Muslims of a golden opportunity to take at least the critical steps to reclaim their lost world leadership. Apart from the development of an Islamic banking and finance industry, the Islamicness of which has come under critical scrutiny, and the establishment of international Islamic universities, none of which has secured a place in the top 100 in the world, the Islamisation project has failed to achieve the desired situation reversal. 

(The writer is a lecturer at the School of Business and Governance, Murdoch University, Western Australia.)

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