Muslims, the thinking goes, have no choice but to adopt it themselves. However some scholars have increasingly challenged the notion of a single model of modernity.
In 16th-century Europe, the priesthood had achieved considerable wealth and political power by often allying themselves with local kings and rulers. The Protestant reformers, therefore, regarded the Church as an impediment to political empowerment. But Muslims, due to their unique religious history, continue to view their religion as an ally in their attempts to come to terms with the changed circumstances of the modern world. Muslim religious scholars ulama never enjoyed the kind of centralized and institutionalized authority that the medieval European church and its elders did.
Such an oppositional role to government prevented the emergence of a general popular animosity directed at them, and by extension, toward Islam.
On the contrary, they are plumbing it to find resources therein to not only adapt to the modern world, but also to shape it. Yet 21st-century Muslim religious scholars have a challenging task. How can they exhume and popularize principles and practices that allowed Muslims in the past to coexist with others, in peace and on equal terms, regardless of religious affiliation?
Such a project is made more urgent by the fact that extremists in Muslim-majority societies ISIS leaders currently foremost among them vociferously reject this as impossible. Islam, they declare, posits the superiority of Muslims over everyone else. Muslims must convert non-Muslims or politically subjugate them. As a result, many have accused these extremists of trying to return Muslim-majority societies to the seventh century.
In other cases, where people are trying to help their communities they often encounter problems from unlikely sources. The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh has been lending small sums of money, mostly to rural women so that they can engage in small enterprises, but also to collective groups.
The sums are small and the interest is fixed, with the principal being repaid first and the interest calculated on the diminishing principal. Twenty per cent interest per year still seems high, but it is tiny when compared with the twenty per cent per month or ten per cent per day demanded by the traditional money-lenders, or the compound interest at Bangladesh's commercial banks.
The Grameen Bank lends money to people who would not be eligible in the normal commercial sense. People are helped to determine the best way to satisfy their needs and are helped by the bank's officers in the villages. The Grameen Bank goes out to its clients and it permits the good sense and honesty of its clients to prevail: it has a recovery rate of some ninety eight per cent. The bank faces conflict from the traditional money-lenders, the commercial banks which claim that the scheme is too small to create the economic growth necessary in Bangladesh, and from the Muslims who see the scheme emancipating women in the villages.
The bank fulfils the ideals of Islamic thinking, but is attacked by established interest groups defending their interpretation of Islamic practice. Economic frustration and unequal opportunities are fertile breeding grounds for dissent and protest. Equally important is the failure of most Muslim governments to confront the demands of general education.
It is the necessary context for every tolerably well-informed life-journey undertaken in the contemporary world. Dr Mahathir bin Mohamed has made the point that there can be no separation between secular and religious knowledge because all knowledge, all life, is encompassed by Islam. It is interesting that so prominent and successful a Muslim leader as Dr Mahathir had to tread a fine line: advocating on the one hand an independent and progressive Muslim attitude to acquiring the widest possible knowledge, while placating the traditional sensibilities by insisting on the moral rectitude of learning as the only way to protect the faith.
There are Muslim intellectuals working to understand what it means to be a Muslim in the modern world, but they do not receive the prominence given to the extremists in Western reports. Western media are more interested in the violent and emotional than they are in quiet, but deeply significant, debates about the eternal values that remain, despite the anarchic individualism of Western communities, the essence of being human. Not only are Muslim intellectuals under pressure from the conservative elements of their own societies, they are not receiving the recognition and support they deserve from the West.
Yet it is at this level of ideas and reassessments that Muslim leaders will have to convert the de facto modernisation of their societies into general acceptance. The renaissance of ijtihad will be needed to reinterpret the principles of Islam, to retain the critical moral core while jettisoning the dubious accretions of traditional and worldly Muslim authorities.
The whole panoply of modern knowledge and technology is acceptable, but its Western manifestations are to be avoided if all they achieve is the perpetuation of the Muslim world's dependence on Western developments. A fundamental problem here is that which bedevils Western societies: can the use of and reliance upon new technologies alter perceptions, change desires, force social changes?
Do the people who create and maintain the new technologies become the new high-priests. All knowledge and technology entail more than the physical and objective characteristics; they also contain the moral questions about how the new technologies should be used, what controls should be placed on them and who should be responsible for the implementation of the regulations. These are moral questions the simply secular authorities cannot answer, if only because utilitarian arguments lead us only to numerical quantities not qualitative priorities.
There is a very real danger involved if Muslims are not critical enough of Western world perceptions and if they take things for granted. There needs to be an increase in criticism in the light of Islam criteria. Without a heightened critical faculty Muslims are in danger of considering. He who understands the structure of Islam in its totality knows that it can never allow itself to become reduced to a mere modifier or contingency vis-a-vis a system of thought which remains independent of it or even hostile to it.
The main danger arises if Muslims accept the more extreme view of the difference of Islam and the insistence on establishing 'the third way'. If everything Western is to be discarded, then the creative and productive dynamism inherent in Islamic traditions will be suppressed yet again. Is Islamic resurgence giving enough attention to the challenges of poverty and hunger, disease and illiteracy?
Have Islamic resurgents gone past, or are they still stuck on, their rhetoric regarding education and knowledge, science and technology, politics and administration, economics and management in their preferred Islamic order? To what extent have Islamists become pre-occupied with forms and symbols, rituals and practices? Do they regard laws and regulations in a static rather than a dynamic manner? Is there a tension between the extremists' positions and the principles of the Quran and sunnah about the roles of women in society and the place of minorities in Muslim societies?
Is the main problem a betrayal of the spirit of the Quran in the extremists' exclusiveness in a variety of matters ranging from charity to politics? Are the activities of extremists encouraging sectarianism in the umma through their insistence on their interpretations being the only correct ones? Have extremist views contributed to the factionalism and fragmentation of the ummah.
Fazlur Rahman stated the position precisely. Islam needs: "some first-class minds who can interpret the old in terms of the new as regards substance and turn the new into the service of the old as regards ideals". There is evidence enough in Western society that modernisation, with all its technological developments, has radically changed values by putting traditional attitudes under pressure and then instituting a new ethic.
Untrammelled economic growth and development has resulted in consumerism, institutionalised selfishness, ill-gotten wealth, rising expectations, laxity in sexual behaviours, the dissolution of the family, essentially independent electronic media, the influx of foreigners and foreign values, the materialism of modern science and technology and greater amounts of secularism.
Western secular politics is based on the notion that sovereignty belongs to individuals who select their governors through political consensus arrived at during free and regular elections. Islam believes, in theory at least, that sovereignty belongs only to God and that a legitimate temporal government is so only for as long as it implements God's will and the Sacred Laws.
Whatever the theory asserts, the reality is that governments have to find the equilibrium that produces social prosperity and harmony under the guiding impulses of a strong moral code. The problem is made more complex when the moral code is itself subject to sectarian divisions: between orthodox and heterodox claims to revelation and legitimacy.
But the teacher of religion is usually not also a teacher of the secular studies. The two fields are becoming entirely independent of each other.
Thus Egypt, for example, has alongside of and separate from its ancient Azhar—the world's' oldest university—three modern, secular universities which are largely Western in organization and spirit. The central problem facing Arab Muslims, and indeed all Muslims, today is how to find a new way of life—Islamic in character—which will be halfway between the East and the West and which will provide the internal stability necessary to enable Muslims to face their problems independently.
The Arab World can borrow technology from the West but it must find the answers to its deeper problems within itself. One need only observe book-buying habits to see the strong interest in Islam still alive today.
In Cairo any book discussing Islam is sure of a big sale. This shows that people are not drifting away from religion. It is a fact also that the world struggle between democracy and communism has led Muslims to make a fresh evaluation of their religion to see where it stands in relation to these two conflicting movements. How far does Islam really penetrate into the hearts of Muslims today? What tangible effects does it have in their lives? There is no simple answer and much depends on exactly what is meant by Muslims.
Those who have a good understanding of Islam—unfortunately, the minority—are inspired by their religion with pride and self-respect, and a desire for freedom. The Muslim Brotherhood is the extreme expression of this side of Islam. Hasan el-Banna, the founder of the movement, called on Muslims to be "leaders in their countries and masters in their homelands.
This spirit underlay this century's continuous revolts against foreign rule, and we see it at work now in North-Africa. Islam inspires its followers to cleave to the Islamic community and be absorbed by it. I indicated above that Islam emphasizes the freedom of the community at the expense of the freedom of the individual.
The truth is that the individual enjoys vast freedom, so long as he remains inside the Muslim community. But if he goes against it, he loses his liberty, or to put it more precisely, he loses his standing in Muslim society.
Sheikh Mohammed Abdu—the great reformer, who died in —once wrote, "If someone says something implying unbelief in a hundred ways and implying belief in one single way, his words should be taken as belief rather than unbelief. Islam inspires its followers to sanctify the mind, reject the miraculous, and meditate on God's creation to confirm belief. Mohammed did not prove the validity of his message by miracles.
The Koran is full of verses which call us to the knowledge of God through reason alone. Abdu maintained that Islam demands faith in God and His unity through rational inference, and that the belief in God should come before the belief in the prophecies.
Islam instructs its followers to believe in this world and the world to come in such a way as not to have one overpower the other. The Muslim has the right to enjoy the pleasures of this world, because it was created for him. And there is a well-known proverb widely spread among Muslims: "Work for this world as though you will live forever, and work for the next world as though you will die tomorrow.
Different Muslims have reacted to the incursion of Western ideas diversely. The Egyptian writer, Ahmad Ameen, said frankly: "The reform of Islam will come about in two ways: one, by separating science from religion, and advancing in science as extensively as possible; the other, through the practice of absolute Ijtihad. Another contemporary Muslim writer has advocated implicitly that free interpretation should be applied to matters pertaining to Islamic doctrine and not to matters of jurisprudence alone.
But the conditions of Muslims today do not yet permit this absolute freedom of interpretation, though they are moving toward it. A third position, which calls for the separation of religion from the state, but not from society, has been advocated by Sheikh Ali Abdel-Razik in his book Islam and Principles of Rule and by a powerful writer of the younger generation, Khalid Mohammed Khalid, whose From Here We Start has been widely read.
While, to be sure, the Muslim Brotherhood disagrees with this line of thought, the majority of cultured Muslims tend to endorse it. In fact , almost all the Muslim world now uses secular civic law, with some slight Islamic modifications rather than the old religious code. Only the laws covering "personal status"—marriage, divorce, inheritance, and the like—have remained unchanged. And even the old Muslim code is civil to some extent, particularly in marriage, which is carried out by a written contract, the conditions of which are dictated by both parties.
There are also certain traditional concepts which facilitate the modification of Muslim law; the idea of "free interpretation" applies in this field as does that of "consensus of opinion. The Muslim Brotherhood's call to return to religious legislation is clearly one of its program's weakest points, and has caused continuous disputes with the various Egyptian governments to this day. The jurist el-Banna expressed the liberal view when he wrote: "We should know that the glorious Koran is not based upon the laws It contains six thousand verses, and the total number of verses concerned with laws does not exceed five hundred.
The Koran is concerned rather with the training of character and the cleansing and purification of the spirit.
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