Abdal-Hakim Murad: Bi-Focal Ability

We do indeed need a bi-focal ability. It is, after all, a quality of the Antichrist that he sees with only one eye. An age of decadence, whether or not framed by an Enlightenment, is an age of extremes, and the twentieth century was, in Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase, precisely that. Islam has been Westernised enough, it sometimes appears, to have joined that logic. We are either neutralised by a supposedly benign Islamic liberalism that in practice allows nothing distinctively Islamic to leave the home or the mosque - an Enlightenment-style privatisation of religion that abandons the world to the morality of the market leaders and the demagogues. Or we fall back into the sensual embrace of extremism, justifying our refusal to deal with the real world by dismissing it as absolute evil, as kufr, unworthy of serious attention, which will disappear if we curse it enough.

-Abdal Hakim Murad: "Faith in the future: Islam after the Enlightenment"

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Abdal-Hakim Murad - The Poverty of Fanaticism

'Blood is no argument', as Shakespeare observed. Sadly, Muslim ranks are today swollen with those who disagree. The World Trade Centre, yesterday's symbol of global finance, has today become a monument to the failure of global Islam to control those who believe that the West can be bullied into changing its wayward ways towards the East. There is no real excuse to hand. It is simply not enough to clamour, as many have done, about 'chickens coming home to roost', and to protest that Washington's acquiescence in Israeli policies of ethnic cleansing is the inevitable generator of such hate. It is of course true - as Shabbir Akhtar has noted - that powerlessness can corrupt as insistently as does power. But to comprehend is not to sanction or even to empathize. To take innocent life to achieve a goal is the hallmark of the most extreme secular utilitarian ethic, and stands at the opposite pole of the absolute moral constraints required by religion.

-Abdal-Hakim Murad in "The Poverty of Fanaticism"

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Abdal Hakim Murad: "One Humanity"

Koshul notes Islam's historic tolerance and even sponsorship of cultural diversity. Yet this is no proof of Islam's compatibility with mainstream Enlightenment notions. Perhaps because of their sympathy with the "body-subject" principle, the Semitisms have shown themselves capable of an internal cultural differentiation which, to the extent that they value it, in fact challenges one of the most visible consequences of the Enlightenment: the annihilation of cultural specificity at the hands of universal Reason. In an intensification of ancient disdain for the barbaroi, Renaissance humanism had generally been reluctant to contemplate the humanity of non-Europeans, and the Enlightenment in many ways took this further. In the first instance, an accelerating secular messianism, apparently vindicated by science, enabled a kind of military expansion whose narcissism was unlike any that preceded it. As Guenon complained during the heyday of empire:

If they merely took pleasure in affirming their imagined superiority, the illusion would only do harm to themselves; but their most terrible offense is their proselytising fury: in them the spirit of conquest goes under the disguise of "moralist" pretexts, and it is in the name of "liberty" that they would force the world to imitate them.

[Guenon, East and West, p. 25]

This new militancy in the name of Freedom typically affirms the possibility of diversity in the context of Enlightenment rights discourse; yet in practice it subjects difference to rapid atrophy. The consequences of this even for the West may prove severe. Much of the energy of internal critics of the Enlightenment came from a deep knowledge of other civilizations (for Rousseau and Nietzsche it was classical antiquity; for many German romantics it was India).

[J. J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter between Asian and Western Thought (London: Routledge, 1998).]

Today, however, "we do not have such an alternative because in contrast to the historical civilizations, authentic culture cannot co-exists and survive under the hegemonic character of modern Western civilization."

[Ahmet Davutoglu, Civilizational Transformation and the Muslim World (Kuala Lumpur: Mahir, 1994), pp. 26-27.]

For Davutoglu, the Enlightenment's liquidation of non-Western cultures trap us forever in the monoculture, since the option of borrowing and syncretism open at earlier times of civilizational crisis has now been confiscated. The "peoples and tribes" which are created "to know each other" (Qur'an 49:13), are abolished by globalizing processes. Even the multiplicity of languages, regarded as a sign of God in the Qur'an (30:22), and a source of quasi-religious amazement to Bakhtin,

[Bakhtin, "The Problem of Speech Genres," in Speech Genres and other Late chapters, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 60-102.]

is eroded by the extinction of small language groups and the progressive intrusion of English into larger ones. Here, again, the Semitic will resist: Western reason is a single thing; but the body-subject is going to be radically disparate across the globe; for it is scripture, not reason, which insists that:

Unto every one of you have We appointed a [different] law and way of life. And if God has so willed, He could surely have made you all one single community: but [He willed it otherwise] in order to test you by means of what He has vouchsafed unto you. Vie, then, with one another in doing good works.

[Qur'an 5:48; the translation is Muhammad Asad's.]

From Abdal Hakim Murad's "Ishmael and the Enlightenment’s crise de coeur" pp. 166-167

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Abdal Hakim Murad: Faith in the future: Islam after the Enlightenment

Must read this article!

As Muslims, of course, we believe that every culture, including the culture of modern consumer liberalism, stands accountable before the claims of revelation. There must, therefore, be a mode of behaviour that modernity can adopt that can be meaningfully termed Islamic, without entailing its transformation into a monochrome Arabness. This is a consequence of our universalist assumptions, but it is also an extension of our triumphalism, and our belief that the divine purposes can be read in history. Wa-kalimatu’Llahi hiya’l-‘ulya - God’s word is uppermost. (9:40) The current agreement between zealots on both sides - Islamic and unbelieving - that Islam and Western modernity can have no conversation, and cannot inhabit each other, seems difficult given traditional Islamic assurances about the universal potential of revelation.

One of Altaf Gauhar’s intellectual associates, Allahbakhsh Brohi, used the following metaphor:

We need a bi-focal vision: we must have an eye on the eternal principles sanctioned by the Qur’anic view of man’s place in the scheme of things, and also have the eye firmly fixed on the ever-changing concourse of economic-political situation which confronts man from time to time. [15]

We do indeed need a bi-focal ability. It is, after all, a quality of the Antichrist that he sees with only one eye. An age of decadence, whether or not framed by an Enlightenment, is an age of extremes, and the twentieth century was, in Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase, precisely that. Islam has been Westernised enough, it sometimes appears, to have joined that logic. We are either neutralised by a supposedly benign Islamic liberalism that in practice allows nothing distinctively Islamic to leave the home or the mosque - an Enlightenment-style privatisation of religion that abandons the world to the morality of the market leaders and the demagogues. Or we fall back into the sensual embrace of extremism, justifying our refusal to deal with the real world by dismissing it as absolute evil, as kufr, unworthy of serious attention, which will disappear if we curse it enough.

Revelation, as always, requires the middle way. Extremism, in any case, never succeeds even on its own terms. It usually repels more people from religion than it holds within it. Attempts to reject all of global modernity simply cannot succeed, and have not succeeded anywhere. A more sane policy, albeit a more courageous, complex and nuanced one, has to be the introduction of Islam as a prophetic, dissenting witness within the reality of the modern world.

It should not be hard to see where we naturally fit. The gaping hole in the Enlightenment, pointed out by the postmodern theologians and by more sceptical but still anxious minds, was the Enlightenment’s inability to form a stable and persuasive ground for virtue and hence for what it has called ‘citizenship’.

Because it has been the instrument whereby Islam has been embedded in the divergent cultures of the rainbow that is the traditional Islamic world, we may suppose that it represents the best instrument available for attempting a ‘dissenting’ Muslim embedding within today’s inexorable global reality.

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Abdal-Hakim Murad on the Rihla program with Shaykh Hamza

Thanks to http://sheikhynotes.blogspot.com/2009/11/sheikh-hamza-yusuf-and-sheikh-abdul.html

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Abdal Hakim Murad on traditional studies and the modern world context

A number of relevant quotes from an interview with Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad on the Cambridge Muslim College initative:

"There are plenty of young British Muslims studying all over the Muslim world and what they don’t learn in those places is how to relate their traditional wisdom to the reality on the streets in the city of Britain,” Sheikh Abdal Hakim Murad, also known as Timothy J. Winter, told AlArabiya.net.

“What Muslims acknowledge, whether traditionalists or modernists, is that most of ulemaa (scholars) in the west really need to know what the modern world is,” he added.

“We are giving them the cultural ability to apply what they know to the modern western context in which they live,” explained Murad.

“If there is going to be a real tajdeed (renewal) in Islamic thought in this age, then you need to have leaders with a wide range of fields who can really speak with confidence. They need to have traditional Islamic knowledge and a good grasp of how it can be applied to deal with daily issues relevant to Muslim communities,” said Murad.

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Abdal Hakim Murad on the cultivation of an informed and relevant leadership

There are a number of issues here. Perhaps the most important is the cultivation of an informed leadership. I mentioned earlier that most Muslim leaders cannot provide the intellectual guidance needed to help intelligent young people deal with the challenges of today...Our heads are buried in the ground...They seem wholly oblivious to the problem.

All this has to change. In my travels in the Islamic world, I found tremendous enthusiasm for Islam among young people, and a no less tremendous disappointment with the leadership. The traditional ulema have the courtesy and moderation which we need, but lack a certain dynamism; the radical faction leaders have fallen into the egotistic trap of exclusivism and takfir; while the mainstream revivalist leaders, frankly, are often irrelevant. Both ponderous and slightly insecure, trapped by an 'ideological' vision of Islam, they do not understand the complexity of today's world - and our brighter young people see this soon enough.

Institutions, therefore, urgently need to be established, to train young men and women both in traditional Shari'a disciplines, and in the cultural and intellectual language of today's world. Something like this has been done in the past: one thinks of the Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad where Ghazali taught, which encouraged knowledge not only of fiqh, but of philosophical theology in the Greek tradition. We need a new Ghazali today [or Ghazalis as in numerous capable scholars]: a moderate, spiritually minded genius who can understand secular thought and refute it, not merely rant and rave about it.

The creation of a relevant leadership is thus the first priority.

Islam and the New Millennium