21st Century Islamic State - Two Opposing Sides

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Purity, Piety and Dedication without Talibanism. Education, Technology & Industry without Secularism.

There are broadly two kinds of people that will stand in the way of an Islamic state and in Islam as not merely a religion. There will be what we can describe as Conservatives and Secularists/Progressives/Modernists. Conservatives are those that would want to pull Muslims back to the past while Secularists would want to move Muslims to a secularized future, with Islam relegated to the mosque. They may regard each other as opponents, but they share an important idea - that Islam is a religion.

Islam is not merely a religion. It is a complete way of life, centered on the belief in One God. Islam is the only belief system that does not enjoin blind faith; it combines faith with knowledge. Truth and evidence go together, as they should. Islam melds the spiritual and the natural worlds, in harmony and balance.

The Conservative banner is held high by a class of people, that strange as it may sound, are not supposed to exist in Islam: the clergy. Mullahs, Muftis, Sheikhs, etc are not sanctioned by any verse of the Quran or by any authentic hadith. Yet, they exist today, and have convoluted Islam to define themselves as the middlemen between Muslims and the Quran. On any question of Islam, Muslims are now told to get a nod from the local Imam, Sheikh, Mullah, Mufti, etc. These career theologians make their living out of Islam and yet stand by socially and politically silent to our disintegration. Beyond empty slogans and sooth-saying, this class has shown itself to be completely incompetent at addressing any of the issues that the Muslim body-politic faces today.

Perhaps one of the central problems arise because the clergy, and all those who seek education from them never develop critical thinking. They are taught to read, recite and memorize and the finest of them can reproduce the Quran, hadiths and even works of eminent scholars from memory, like a tape recorder or a computer program. But throughout their education, they are not taught to understand the Quran, to ponder over its meanings, to apply. They are shunned from questioning and inquiring. This leads to a deterioration in their mental capacities to think, reason, classify and analyze issues. It leads to them not knowing how to argue constructively or the ettiquettes of argument. This is one of the central problems and why billions of Muslims today produce such few scholars and thinkers.

It is not that there is anything wrong with memorizing and recitation, it is that everything has its place and proportion. Reason, argument and critical thinking cannot be shunned, and is as important today as it was during the Prophet’s (peace be upon him’s) time, when people actually accepted Islam on the basis of the same.

Islam is not a religion of theologians and we must stop them at all costs if we want to revive Islam. Islam is universal as it reaches out to all, able to do so because its concepts are easy to understand for those who seek Allah. One does not need to read obtuse works of scholars. The Egyptian Ulema asked Marmaduke Pickthall to translate Tabari instead of the Quran; yet you do not need to read Tabari to know Islam, let alone memorize it.

The Progressive-Secularist approach, on the other hand, is an extreme reaction to the Conservative paradigm and to the dazzle of the Western civilization. Their approach is built on the ascendancy of the latter and in seeing all solutions to our problems in reflection to the West. Replication over reinvention is their sine qua non. They see before them, the greatness of the West and in America and see solutions in transplanting these values over a culture that to them is backward, one that they do not understand or appreciate. They believe that the root cause of the backwardness is Islam and they seek to remedy this with the panacea of the Western culture.

Neither of the above mentalities offer an adequate solution to the challenges of the Islamic world. The aim of this book is to focus on innovative approaches to the emerging challenges we face, outside the paradigms of these two ideological groups. We seek to bring a third paradigm that broadly lies between these two positions, yet is not a compromise of the two, nor placed in a two dimensional plane between them, but rather a synthesis of thought and ideas built on an independent foundation.

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