Islams Forsaken Renaissance
Mahathir bin Mohamad
Children often play a game where they sit in a circle. One whispers something
to his neighbor, who then whispers that information to the next child, and so
on, around the circle. By the time the last child whispers the information to
the first, it is totally different from what was originally said.
Something like that seems to have happened within Islam. The Prophet of
Islam, Muhammad, brought one and only one religion. Yet today we have
perhaps a thousand religions that all claim to be Islam.
Divided by their different interpretations, Muslims do not play the role they
once did in the world; instead, they are weakened and victimized. The
Shia/Sunni schism is so deep that each side condemns followers of the other as
apostates, kafir. The belief that the others religion is not Islam, and its
followers not Muslim, has underpinned internecine wars in which millions have
died and continue to die.
Even among the Sunnis and Shias there are further divisions. The Sunnis have
four imams and the Shias have twelve; their teachings all differ. Then there
are other divisions, including the Druze, the Alawites, and the Wahabis.
We are also taught by our ulamas (religious instructors) that their teachings
must not be questioned. Islam is a faith. It must be believed. Logic and reason
play no part in it. But what is it that we must believe when each branch of
Islam thinks the other one is wrong? The Koran, after all, is one book, not two
or three, or a thousand.
According to the Koran, a Muslim is anyone who bears witness that there is
no God (Allah) but Allah, and that Muhammad is his Rasul (Messenger). If no
other qualification is added, then all those who subscribe to these precepts
must be regarded as Muslims. But because we Muslims like to add qualifications
that often derive from sources other than the Koran, our religions unity has
been broken.
But perhaps the greatest problem is the progressive isolation of Islamic
scholarship and much of Islamic life from the rest of the modern world. We
live in an age of science in which people can see around corners, hear and see
things happening in outer space, and clone animals. And all of these things
seem to contradict our belief in the Koran.
This is so because those who interpret the Koran are learned only in
religion, in its laws and practices, and thus are usually unable to understand
todays scientific miracles. The fatwas (legal opinions concerning Islamic law)
that they issue appear unreasonable and cannot be accepted by those with
scientific knowledge.
One learned religious teacher, for example, refused to believe that a man had
landed on the moon. Others assert that the world was created 2,000 years ago.
The age of the universe and its size measured in light years these are things
that the purely religiously trained ulamas cannot comprehend.
This failure is largely responsible for the sad plight of so many Muslims.
Todays oppression, the killings and the humiliations of Muslims, occurs
because we are weak, unlike the Muslims of the past. We can feel victimized and
criticize the oppressors, but to stop them we need to look at ourselves. We
must change for our own good. We cannot ask our detractors to change, so that
Muslims benefit.
So what do we need to do? In the past, Muslims were strong because they were
learned. Muhammads injunction was to read, but the Koran does not say what to
read. Indeed, there was no Muslim scholarship at the time, so to read meant
to read whatever was available. The early Muslims read the works of the great
Greek scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers. They also studied the works
of the Persians, the Indians, and the Chinese.
The result was a flowering of science and mathematics. Muslim scholars added
to the body of knowledge and developed new disciplines, such as astronomy,
geography, and new branches of mathematics. They introduced numerals, enabling
simple and limitless calculations.
But around the fifteenth century, the learned in Islam began to curb
scientific study. They began to study religion alone, insisting that only those
who study religion particularly Islamic jurisprudence gain merit in the
afterlife. The result was intellectual regression at the very moment that
Europe began embracing scientific and mathematical knowledge.
And so, as Muslims were intellectually regressing, Europeans began their
renaissance, developing improved ways of meeting their needs, including the
manufacture of weapons that eventually allowed them to dominate the world.
By contrast, Muslims fatally weakened their ability to defend themselves by
neglecting, even rejecting, the study of allegedly secular science and
mathematics, and this myopia remains a fundamental source of the oppression
suffered by Muslims today. Many Muslims still condemn the founder of modern
Turkey, Mustafa Kamal, because he tried to modernize his country. But would
Turkey be Muslim today without Ataturk? Mustafa Kamals clear-sightedness saved
Islam in Turkey and saved Turkey for Islam.
Failure to understand and interpret the true and fundamental message of the
Koran has brought only misfortune to Muslims. By limiting our reading to
religious works and neglecting modern science, we destroyed Islamic
civilization and lost our way in the world.
The Koran says that Allah will not change our unfortunate situation unless
we make the effort to change it. Many Muslims continue to ignore this and,
instead, merely pray to Allah to save us, to bring back our lost glory. But the
Koran is not a talisman to be hung around the neck for protection against evil.
Allah helps those who improve their minds.
** Mahathir bin Mohamad was Prime Minister of Malaysia from 1981-2003.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2005.
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