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The
Principle of Movement in the Structure of Islam (continued)
If the aim of religion
is the spiritualization of the heart, then it must penetrate the soul of man,
and it can best penetrate the inner man, according to the poet, only if its
spiritualizing ideas are clothed in his mother tongue. Most people in India
will condemn this displacement of Arabic by Turkish. For reasons which will
appear later the poet’s Ijtih«d is open to grave objections, but
it must be admitted that the reform suggested by him is not without a parallel
in the past history of Islam. We find that when Muhammad Ibn Tëmart - the Mahdi
of Muslim Spain - who was Berber by nationality, came to power, and established
the pontifical rule of the MuwaÁÁidën, he ordered for the sake of the illiterate
Berbers, that the Qur’«n should be translated and read in the Berber language;
that the call to prayer should be given in Berber;29 and that all
the functionaries of the Church must know the Berber language.
In another passage the
poet gives his ideal of womanhood. In his zeal for the equality of man and woman
he wishes to see radical changes in the family law of Islam as it is understood
and practised today:
‘There is the woman,
my mother, my sister, or my daughter; it is she who calls up the most sacred
emotions from the depths of my life! There is my beloved, my sun, my moon and
my star; it is she who makes me understand the poetry of life! How could the
Holy Law of God regard these beautiful creatures as despicable beings? Surely
there is an error in the interpretation of the Qur’«n by the learned?30
‘The foundation
of the nation and the state is the family!’
‘As long as the full worth of the woman is not realized, national life
remains incomplete.’
‘The upbringing of the family must correspond with justice;’
‘Therefore equality is necessary in three things - in divorce, in separation,
and in inheritance.’
‘As long as the woman is counted half the man as regards inheritance
and one-fourth of man in matrimony, neither the family nor the country will
be elevated. For other rights we have opened national courts of justice;’
‘he family, on the other hand, we have left in the hands of schools.’
I do not know why we have left the woman in the lurch?
Does she not work for the land? Or, will she turn her needle into a sharp
bayonet to tear off her rights from our hands through a revolution?31
The truth is that among
the Muslim nations of today, Turkey alone has shaken off its dogmatic slumber,
and attained to self-consciousness. She alone has claimed her right of intellectual
freedom; she alone has passed from the ideal to the real - a transition which
entails keen intellectual and moral struggle. To her the growing complexities
of a mobile and broadening life are sure to bring new situations suggesting
new points of view, and necessitating fresh interpretations of principles which
are only of an academic interest to a people who have never experienced the
joy of spiritual expansion. It is, I think, the English thinker Hobbes who makes
this acute observation that to have a succession of identical thoughts and feelings
is to have no thoughts and feelings at all. Such is the lot of most Muslim countries
today. They are mechanically repeating old values, whereas the Turk is on the
way to creating new values. He has passed through great experiences which have
revealed his deeper self to him. In him life has begun to move, change, and
amplify, giving birth to new desires, bringing new difficulties and suggesting
new interpretations. The question which confronts him today, and which is likely
to confront other Muslim countries in the near future is whether the Law of
Islam is capable of evolution - a question which will require great intellectual
effort, and is sure to be answered in the affirmative, provided the world of
Islam approaches it in the spirit of ‘Umar - the first critical and independent
mind in Islam who, at the last moments of the Prophet, had the moral courage
to utter these remarkable words: ‘The Book of God is sufficient for us.’32
We heartily welcome the
liberal movement in modern Islam, but it must also be admitted that the appearance
of liberal ideas in Islam constitutes also the most critical moment in the history
of Islam. Liberalism has a tendency to act as a force of disintegration, and
the race-idea which appears to be working in modern Islam with greater force
than ever may ultimately wipe off the broad human outlook which Muslim people
have imbibed from their religion. Further, our religious and political reformers
in their zeal for liberalism may overstep the proper limits of reform in the
absence of check on their youthful fervour. We are today passing through a period
similar to that of the Protestant revolution in Europe, and the lesson which
the rise and outcome of Luther’s movement teaches should not be lost on
us. A careful reading of history shows that the Reformation was essentially
a political movement, and the net result of it in Europe was a gradual displacement
of the universal ethics of Christianity by systems of national ethics.33
The result of this tendency we have seen with our own eyes in the Great European
War which, far from bringing any workable synthesis of the two opposing systems
of ethics, has made the European situation still more intolerable. It is the
duty of the leaders of the world of Islam today to understand the real meaning
of what has happened in Europe, and then to move forward with self-control and
a clear insight into the ultimate aims of Islam as a social polity.
I have given you some idea
of the history and working of Ijtih«d in modern Islam. I now proceed
to see whether the history and structure of the Law of Islam indicate the possibility
of any fresh interpretation of its principles. In other words, the question
that I want to raise is - Is the Law of Islam capable of evolution? Horten,
Professor of Semitic Philology at the University of Bonn, raises the same question
in connexion with the Philosophy and Theology of Islam. Reviewing the work of
Muslim thinkers in the sphere of purely religious thought he points out that
the history of Islam may aptly be described as a gradual interaction, harmony,
and mutual deepening of two distinct forces, i.e. the element of Aryan culture
and knowledge on the one hand, and a Semitic religion on the other. The Muslim
has always adjusted his religious outlook to the elements of culture which he
assimilated from the peoples that surrounded him. From 800 to 1100, says Horten,
not less than one hundred systems of theology appeared in Islam, a fact which
bears ample testimony to the elasticity of Islamic thought as well as to the
ceaseless activity of our early thinkers. Thus, in view of the revelations of
a deeper study of Muslim literature and thought, this living European Orientalist
has been driven to the following conclusion:
The spirit of Islam is
so broad that it is practically boundless. With the exception of atheistic ideas
alone it has assimilated all the attainable ideas of surrounding peoples, and
given them its own peculiar direction of development.’
The assimilative spirit
of Islam is even more manifest in the sphere of law. Says Professor Hurgronje
- the Dutch critic of Islam:
When we read the history
of the development of Mohammadan Law we find that, on the one hand, the doctors
of every age, on the slightest stimulus, condemn one another to the point of
mutual accusations of heresy; and, on the other hand, the very same people,
with greater and greater unity of purpose, try to reconcile the similar quarrels
of their predecessors.’
These views of modern European
critics of Islam make it perfectly clear that, with the return of new life,
the inner catholicity of the spirit of Islam is bound to work itself out in
spite of the rigorous conservatism of our doctors. And I have no doubt that
a deeper study of the enormous legal literature of Islam is sure to rid the
modern critic of the superficial opinion that the Law of Islam is stationary
and incapable of development. Unfortunately, the conservative Muslim public
of this country is not yet quite ready for a critical discussion of Fiqh,
which, if undertaken, is likely to displease most people, and raise sectarian
controversies; yet I venture to offer a few remarks on the point before us.
1. In the first place,
we should bear in mind that from the earliest times practically up to the rise
of the Abbasids, there was no written law of Islam apart from the Qur’«n.
2. Secondly, it is worthy
of note that from about the middle of the first century up to the beginning
of the fourth not less than nineteen schools of law and legal opinion appeared
in Islam.34 This fact alone is sufficient to show how incessantly
our early doctors of law worked in order to meet the necessities of a growing
civilization. With the expansion of conquest and the consequent widening of
the outlook of Islam these early legists had to take a wider view of things,
and to study local conditions of life and habits of new peoples that came within
the fold of Islam. A careful study of the various schools of legal opinion,
in the light of contemporary social and political history, reveals that they
gradually passed from the deductive to the inductive attitude in their efforts
at interpretation.35
3. Thirdly, when we study
the four accepted sources of Muhammadan Law and the controversies which they
invoked, the supposed rigidity of our recognized schools evaporates and the
possibility of a further evolution becomes perfectly clear. Let us briefly discuss
these sources.
(a) The Qur’«n. The
primary source of the Law of Islam is the Qur’«n. The Qur’«n, however,
is not a legal code. Its main purpose, as I have said before, is to awaken in
man the higher consciousness of his relation with God and the universe.36
No doubt, the Qur’«n does lay down a few general principles and rules of
a legal nature, especially relating to the family37 - the ultimate
basis of social life. But why are these rules made part of a revelation the
ultimate aim of which is man’s higher life? The answer to this question
is furnished by the history of Christianity which appeared as a powerful reaction
against the spirit of legality manifested in Judaism. By setting up an ideal
of otherworldliness it no doubt did succeed in spiritualizing life, but its
individualism could see no spiritual value in the complexity of human social
relations. ‘Primitive Christianity’, says Naumann in his Briefe
Ü ber Religion, ‘attached no value to the preservation of the State,
law, organization, production. It simply does not reflect on the conditions
of human society.’ And Naumann concludes: ‘Hence we either dare to
aim at being without a state, and thus throwing ourselves deliberately into
the arms of anarchy, or we decide to possess, alongside of our religious creed,
a political creed as well.’38 Thus the Qur’«n considers
it necessary to unite religion and state, ethics and politics in a single revelation
much in the same way as Plato does in his Republic.
The important point to
note in this connexion, however, is the dynamic outlook of the Qur’«n.
I have fully discussed its origin and history. It is obvious that with such
an outlook the Holy Book of Islam cannot be inimical to the idea of evolution.
Only we should not forget that life is not change, pure and simple. It has within
it elements of conservation also. While enjoying his creative activity, and
always focusing his energies of the discovery of new vistas of life, man has
a feeling of uneasiness in the presence of his own unfoldment. In his forward
movement he cannot help looking back to his past, and faces his own inward expansion
with a certain amount of fear. The spirit of man in its forward movement is
restrained by forces which seem to be working in the opposite direction. This
is only another way of saying that life moves with the weight of its own past
on its back, and that in any view of social change the value and function of
the forces of conservatism cannot be lost sight of. It is with this organic
insight into the essential teaching of the Qur’«n that to approach our
existing institutions. No people can afford to reject their past entirely, for
it is their past that has made their personal identity. And in a society like
Islam the problem of a revision of old institutions becomes still more delicate,
and the responsibility of the reformer assumes a far more serious aspect. Islam
is non-territorial in its character, and its aim is to furnish a model for the
final combination of humanity by drawing its adherents from a variety of mutually
repellent races, and then transforming this atomic aggregate into a people possessing
a self-consciousness of their own. This was not an easy task to accomplish.
Yet Islam, by means of its well-conceived institutions, has succeeded to a very
great extent in creating something like a collective will and conscience in
this heterogeneous mass. In the evolution of such a society even the immutability
of socially harmless rules relating to eating and drinking, purity or impurity,
has a life-value of its own, inasmuch as it tends to give such society a specific
inwardness, and further secures that external and internal uniformity which
counteracts the forces of heterogeneity always latent in a society of a composite
character. The critic of these institutions must, therefore, try to secure,
before he undertakes to handle them, a clear insight into the ultimate significance
of the social experiment embodied in Islam. He must look at their structure,
not from the standpoint of social advantage or disadvantage to this or that
country, but from the point of view of the larger purpose which is being gradually
worked out in the life of mankind as a whole.
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Date/Time Last Modified: 6/18/2002 8:03:43 AM
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