Diversity and Unity in Islamic Civilization: A Religious, Political, Cultural, and Historical Analysis

By Mirza Iqbal Ashraf

An, erudite, and invaluable contribution to the philosophical, religious, political, cultural, and historical dynamism of the Islamic civilization. ZARREEN AKBAR, Scholar of Islamic Literature.

In this exceptionally impressive and brilliant book, Mirza Ashraf, rationally discusses and analyses the diversity and unity in Islamic civilization. Addressing many contemporary issues of concern, including terrorism, he proves philosophically that Islam united different tribes, races, and nations within its civilization, while keeping their socio-cultural diversity intact. In this process of cultural amalgamation, Islam, no more remained exclusively an Arab phenomenon. It became a multi-cultural, transnational socio-political and economic civilization. The author of this illuminating book has shown an intrinsic picture of Islam which I believe, could not be more timely. Dr. MOJAHID MIRZA; author of, Quagmire of Being, and an Independent Journalist and Broadcaster stationed at Moscow.

Beginning with its founder Prophet Muhammad, Islamic civilization as a world religious, cultural, and political force, with rich, varied, and abundant literature, Mirza Ashraf has presented an insightful analysis of this civilization. It progressed because of its universal human values, with efforts to initiate progress in all fields of learning. This book, is a timely contribution to the present tension between Western and Islamic civilization. It explicates that the strain of recent cataclysm is focused on Islam as a religion, while its political and cultural aspects, which are the core of its civilization, are being ignored. Dr. MUHAMMAD HAFEEZ; author of: Human Character and Behavior, The Mission and Destiny of Humankind, and Who are the Believers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781532019241

Mirza Iqbal Ashraf

MIRZA IQBAL ASHRAF—author of, Introduction to World Philosophies, Islamic Philosophy of War and Peace, Rumi’s Holistic Humanism, Diversity and Unity in Islamic Civilization, Human Existence and Identity in Modern Age, and An Anthology of Essays by Ashraf—IS AN INDEPENDENT RESEARCH SCHOLAR OF PHILOSOPHICAL, HUMANTIES, AND MULTI-CULTURAL SUBJECTS. HE HOLDS BACHELOR’S DEGREE IN PERSIAN LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, AND ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY, AND MASTER’S DEGREE IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE, LITERATURE. AND PHILOSOPHY. HE LIVES IN NEW YORK (USA).

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CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Part One

Islam As A Way Of Life

Chapter 1 Islam: A Faith Of Peace

Chapter 2 The Islamic Philosophy Of Jihad

Chapter 3 Jihad As Justified War

Chapter 4 Islamic Political Philosophy

Chapter 5 The Philosophical Tradition Of Muslim Thinkers

Chapter 6 The Role Of Muslim Thinkers In European Renaissance

Part Two

Islamic Civilization

Chapter 7 Diversity And Unity In Islamic Civilization

Chapter 8 Democracy And Islam

Chapter 9 The Myth Of Arab Spring And Undefined Liberal Democracy

Chapter 10 The Muslim Tide In Europe And America

Chapter 11 Western Muslims And Conflicts In The Muslim World

Part Three

The Future Of Islamic Civilization

Chapter 12 What Made Muslims Violent, Terrorists, When They Believe Islam Is A Faith Of Peace?

Chapter 13 What Went Wrong With Islam, And What Is Wrong Now?

Chapter 14 In Search Of A Modern Ummah

Chapter 15 Globalization And Islamic Civilization

Chapter 16 The Middle Path Of Moderation And Islamic Civilization

Bibliography

Islamic Civilization

is neither a revival nor an imitation of

previous cultures, but a new creation.

(Barnard Lewis)

Dedicated to All Those

Who Believe and Understand:

The precept of Prophet Muhammad (pbh) that:

"Every child born is a muslim [has a square attitude or a Tabula rasa],

but it is his parents who make him a Jew, a Christian, or a Magi."

It is as humans, their birthright for taking and asking

to adopt the way of al-Islam by submitting to the

will of God; the Will which is educative

to be carried out by the teachers in

their learning and teachings

and the devotees in

their worship.

(Ashraf)

PREFACE

Islamic civilization, from its origin in the seventh century to the present day, is recognized by its rich, varied, abundant literature, and unique culture, based on a vast variety of traditions from diverse regions of the world. As an independent research scholar of philosophy, in this work I have tried to present Islam not only as a world religion, but as an impulse that obtained its remarkable hold over the conscience and intellectual development of billions of its believers. My endeavor in the presentation of Islamic civilization, which is today a subject of great concern for the whole world, is based on the analysis of its religious, political, and cultural aspects. Researching and preparing articles and lectures on Islam has been an intellectual odyssey, as new events happening every day in the Islamic regions and their impact all over the world, are revealing many intriguing aspects of this civilization.

Generally, a civilization is an area of cultural space in which a vast collection of cultural characteristics, phenomena, and creativity makes up the work of a particular people. For the sociopolitical scientists, it is a kind of moral milieu encompassing a certain number of nations, each national culture being only a particular form of the whole that appears as a civilization after getting organized through the passage of time. But regarding Islam, Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy argues that the Mohammedans developed an important civilization of their own. Mohammedan civilization in its great days was admirable in the arts and many technical ways, but it showed no capacity for independent speculation in theoretical matters. However, today, in spite of its lack of the kind of independent speculation, that is the characteristic of a modern civilization, all major scholars in sociopolitical sciences recognize the existence of a distinct Islamic civilization comprised of a unity within a vast diversity of traditions, cultures, and races. Samuel Huntington, in his work The Clash of Civilization, argues, we identify a civilization as a highest cultural grouping of people defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, custom, and institutions; and by subjective self-identification of people. Overall, rather than independent speculation culture is the common theme in virtually every definition of civilization, but to a very large degree, the major civilizations in human history have been closely identified with the world’s great religions.

Modern concept of civilization founded on independent speculation was developed for the first time in Europe in eighteenth century by the French thinkers to provide a standard representing the opposite of barbarism. But Islamic civilization, emerging in the seventh century, had established a civilized society during its glorious period from the eighth to the thirteenth century. Thus, almost a millennium after the Islamic civilization, the Europeans in the seventeenth century, spreading to nearly every corner of the world, laid the foundation of a Western civilization promoting humanism and independent speculation. It provided a standard by which societies were to be judged during their colonial rule. Today, whatever the Western world interprets and implements its cultural values, norms, faiths, institutions, and modern scientific modes, means Western civilization. However, the West did not win the world by the superiority of its idea of a civilization or moral and religious values, but rather on the basis of its superiority in applying organized violence: a fact Westerners often try to ignore, whereas the non-Westerners never forget.

The message of Islam, revealed to Prophet Muhammad as a religion, enshrined in the Qur’an and supplemented by his tradition, developed into a political discipline, that evolved into a state instituted by the successors of the Prophet known as caliphs. Originating in the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century, it rapidly spread across North Africa and Spain in the west and eastward into Central Asia, the subcontinent of India, Southwest China, and Southeast Asia, developing into the concept of a borderless dar-al-Islam or the abode of peace. As a result, many distinct cultures or subcivilizations, including the Arabian, Greek, European, Persian, Turkic, Indian, Chinese, and Malay, corresponded to exist within the dynamic of Islam that still exist within the unity of its civilization. Later on Islamic world broke up into empires, but was seen as one civilizational unity. During the expansion of the West, the Islamic world became colonies of the Europeans that ended after World War I. Islamic civilization which had remained dormant, surviving political, social, economic, ideological, and even colonization upheavals, resurfaced. Today, it is being seen posing a challenge to other civilizations, particularly to the Western.

Islamic civilization, which is now distinguished by its roots of synthetic cultures with varied Semitic, Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian, Greco-Roman, Indian, and many other elements, is interpreted through the interconnection of the Qur’an, its Arabic language, and common faith. From the very beginning Muslim societies have been pluralist, open to diversity as well as capable of culturally embracing it. For the past fourteen centuries, in spite of many sectarian differences in religious interpretation, and differences in domestic socio-political matters, the Way of Islam is still a powerful notion within its friendly as well as conflicting nations, self-assertive ethnic groups, and religious factions, holding them together in the common bonds of a shared tradition and an Islamic way of life. Since there is no single world of Islam, how does its civilization act in today’s world, and in regard to its combination of diversity and unity, what challenges does it face, Islamic civilization needs to be understood and argued within its religious, political, and cultural aspects. In Diversity and Unity in Islamic Civilization: A Religious, Political, Cultural, and Historical Analysis, I have collected articles published, and lectures delivered by me on different occasions and at many institutions. As the reader goes through this book, it will become clear that now, as in the past, due to the strain of cataclysmic events, attention is focused on Islam as a religion, while its political, cultural, and historical aspects, which are uniquely the core of its civilizational speculum, are being ignored. This book argues that Islamic civilization is much more than just a religion.

Mirza Iqbal Ashraf, February 10, 2017

INTRODUCTION

What is meant by the term Islamic civilization, and what lies at the root of present-day crisis of the clash of civilizations? How does Islamic civilization stand in the contemporary battle of faiths, ideologies, and globalization? But, first of all it is most important to know, how Islam, generally considered a religion, spreading from its concept of Muslim ummah’s dar-al-Islam developed into an Islamic civilization? Above all, after the fall of the Soviet empire, viewing the vigor of Islamic ideology, observers of world affairs are surprised by the power of the religious, political, and cultural aspects of Islamic civilization which, despite conflicting sectarian and political differences, still holds Muslims together in a common bond of a shared tradition of the way of lslam. They gather in millions from every corner of the world at Mecca, clad in white and circling the black-robed Ka’ba, taking pride in a common inheritance of their religious and cultural tradition. In view of all this, the basic idea of Islamic civilization and present-day crisis, need to be explained by analyzing the religious, political, cultural, and historical aspects of Islam.

The Religious Aspect

The philosophy of the set of doctrines that came to be known deen-e-Islam or the way of life in Islam, is interwoven in a complicated process of spiritual, sociopolitical, cultural, communal, and religious organization. Its function is grounded in the elaboration of practical life amid the spiritual maze, establishing that the essence of Islam is a combined disposition of intuition and deliberation. To put it simply, the religion of Islam is based on a system of belief revealed in its scripture, the Qur’an, and its practices supplemented by the traditions of its Prophet Muhammad. Of the Qur’an’s 6,235 verses, about 350, or for some 500, contain discussion of direct legal relevance. However, of these verses, at least 140 also deal with devotional issues like prayer, religious alms, charity, and fasting. The second and third most common subjects are marriage and trade, each the focus of an additional seventy verses. Crime and punishment earn just thirty verses, and only five of the infractions mentioned have a punishment prescribed.¹ The term Shari’ah appears only once in the Qur’an, where God states, "We have set you on a Shari’ah of command, so follow it."² In Islam, the Qur’an and Sunnah (the precepts and traditions of the Prophet) are the basis of a uniform and codified version of Shari’ah, or Islamic law.

The Shari’ah is a complex ethico-legal religious tradition, whose meanings and application, given today’s demand for liberal democracy and the separation of religion and state, have emerged as a hot subject of discussion. Though the word Shari’ah is generally defined as Islamic law, and it indeed contains law, it also embraces elements and aspects that are not, strictly speaking, limited to law. Shari’ah is a total discourse, one in which all kinds of institutions—religious, legal, moral, political, and economic—find simultaneous directives for all those who are the citizens of an Islamic state. It offers prescriptions on everything from prayers, diet, and dress to commerce, taxation, and warfare. Rather than definitive law, Shari’ah is best understood as God’s commanding guidance for an Islamic way of life. Muslim scholars from the early period concluded that the Shari’ah lies at the heart of God’s revelation and that it is, in some sense, all-encompassing.

Muhammad was born in c. 570 in a noble family of Banu Hashim, a clan of Quraish, a very influential tribe in Mecca. In the year 610, at the age of forty, Muhammad received his first revelation as a Messenger of Allah. Confiding only in his wife Khadija, and her Christian cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal, who saw clear signs of prophethood in him, Muhammad kept quiet, for a time period of two years, about his revelation. For him the big question was who would believe and authenticate that the authority of prophethood had been granted to an ordinary, illiterate (the one who can neither read nor write) person like himself. The traditions of Jewish and Christian religions well known to his family of traders, showed him that the legitimacy of a prophet emanates not only from the Divine but—in an important way—from a chain of past prophets descending from Adam as the first Prophet on earth. Finally, in the year 612, he felt encouraged to declare himself a Prophet and Messenger of God by identifying his generational legacy of prophethood, descending from Prophet Abraham’s first son Isma’il, whom Abraham had left in the barren valley of Mecca along with his mother named Hagar. The Torah testifies that Hagar bore a son to Abraham whom he named Isma’il, and about whom God had promised Abraham, I will make a nation of him, too, for he is your seed.³ Muhammad was thus assured that his prophethood was authenticated, both through Divine revelation and genealogical legacy testified by the Biblically-acknowledged Abrahamic chain of prophets.

Prophet Muhammad appeared as the first Messenger of God amongst the Meccan Arabs, and according to Islamic tradition, the final prophet for the whole of humanity. He started preaching Islam initially not to alter the pre-Islamic tribal rules, but to warn people against idolatry and to preach the oneness of God. As a Messenger of Allah, his opponents would argue with him that he was violating the Meccan religious traditions and the tribal rules, because in pre-Islamic ways law and religion were so closely interwoven that an attack on religion would constitute a violation of tribal law. He taught no new doctrine about one God. His message was a continuum of the messages of Jewish prophets descending from Abraham, the Prophet-Patriarch of three revealed religions. The Arab elders of Mecca did not understand that revelation was not a thing that happened only to the prophets in the past, but was as an endless continuous creative progress of human creative consciousness. In the beginning they failed to understand Prophet Muhammad’s message of revealed truth, which was symbolic and could not be understood literally. They were shocked by the fresh insight of a way of life revealed to the Prophet verse by verse and surah (chapter) by surah within a span of twenty-one years. In response to his sermons and call for moral renewal, the Meccans, who feared that a new religion would bring the downfall of the shrine of Ka’ba, the socio-economic hub and source of prosperity of the city, created fierce resistance to his preaching.

For the first ten years, Prophet Muhammad’s teachings, embodied in the term Islam, were to constitute the final and definitive religion for the whole of humanity. The surahs revealed during the Meccan period addressed social injustice, ethical and moral values, principles of mannerism, and rules for worshipping Allah the One Transcendent God of Prophet Abraham instead of hundreds of statues placed inside and outside the building of Ka’ba. Five pillars of Islam were introduced: profession of faith (shahada), prayers five times daily (salat), fasting during the month of Ramadan (sawm), alms tax (zakat), and pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj). These pillars referred in technical language to the basic articles of the religious practice and worship, and were regarded as a believer’s individual obligations. These obligations are not to be enforced by the state; they must be observed by individual believers regardless of any authority’s sanction. The first adherents of the Prophet were limited to his family members and close friends who were later on joined by the oppressed, poor, and desperate people.

Though the influential and wealthy Meccans did not foresee any political threat from the Prophet’s new religion during his twelve years of preaching in Mecca, they strongly antagonized him and his followers. For the safety of the new believers, the Prophet dispatched a group of his followers to Abyssinia, while he himself started spreading the message of Islam to the people of Ta’if, a city southeast of Mecca, as well as to the pilgrims visiting from different tribes, most importantly from Yathrib, what is today’s Medina. He succeeded in converting some people of Yathrib to Islam, which proved a turning point in the establishment of the faith. The people of Yathrib needed an arbitrator to settle disputes that had broken out in the city between different tribes and groups. Both the newly converted Muslims and all the non-Muslim groups believed in the honesty, truthfulness, and wisdom of Prophet Muhammad, and they were keen to see him in Yathrib. In Mecca, the Meccans were alerted to the growing number of Muslims posing a danger to their shrine of Ka’ba and a clear blow to their businesses. They decided to finish Prophet Muhammad, who, seeing forewarning signs of danger to his life, left his native city of Mecca in the summer of 622 to settle in Yathrib.

The Political Aspect

Prophet Muhammad’s migration to Yathrib, called the Hijra, or emigration, was later on declared the beginning of a new Islamic calendar marking a new stage of development for the Islamic community. It changed the life of the Prophet and his followers from a persecuted minority into a fear-free peacefully settled community. Most importantly, settling in Yathrib—renamed Medina or the city of the Prophet—helped the Prophet change from a mere preacher to a justice, an administrator, a politician, a statesman, a soldier, and a field marshal. Growing from his role as a spiritual guide, he was now a political and military leader ready to lay the foundation of a state that later on grew into an empire. The first step he took to end the internal chaos and lawlessness in Medina was to frame the so-called Charter of Medina—also known as the Constitution of Medina—the first ever written constitution in the history of the world. This helped him to govern by uniting the polytheistic tribes, Jewish communities, and Muslims of local tribes as Ansar or helpers and the Muhajirun or immigrants into a community called the "Muslim ummah as citizens of the city-state of Medina, to be administered without any discrimination under a kind of secular rule. The details of the Charter are still disputed among scholars on the basis that its authority was both spiritual and secular with reference to the term, Whenever you differ about a matter, it must be referred to God and Muhammad," and also invoking God’s name in some places. However, its rules and legal terms were generally secular, based on the traditional tribal laws of the Arabian Peninsula.

The Charter of Medina addressed the rights and duties of every group within the community regarding the rule of law and the issue of war. It recognized the Jewish community of Medina, and agreed on reciprocal obligations with them. Among its edicts, it obliged all the believers of any faith, as well as polytheist tribes, to fight as citizens of one community if the city-state of Medina came under threat of an attack. A large and powerful Jewish community, organized into several tribes, had been living in Medina—probably from the time of the Roman occupation of Palestine—and three large Jewish tribes played an important role in signing the Charter of Medina. In spite of the agreed terms of the Charter, they sparked conflicts that ended with the expulsion of some of the Jews from Medina. Some converted to Islam, while a Jewish tribe was massacred.

Though the Qur’an reveals more detail on religious and moral duties than political matters, Islam is described as a peace-loving deen but not a pacifist faith. The Prophet repeatedly stressed that Islam should be defended from the attacks of unbelievers which may in some cases mean taking preemptive actions. The Qur’an instructs believers, "Fighting has been enjoined upon you while it is hateful to you." This means that although the believers in Islam abhor war and violence, it can be a necessary evil for the protection and advancement of Islam. Thus, a year and half after having settled in Medina, Muslims started preemptive raids on caravans carrying merchandise to Mecca, to fracture the economy of the Meccans as well as to provide for themselves goods for sustenance. At the same time, these raids served as training missions and provided a confidence in their ability to face any attack on their city.

In the Qur’anic revelations of the Medina period the word jihad, meaning exertion or struggle, appears in many forms, but where jihad is a form of struggle with an external