10 February 2003 - Where are the Muslim masses?

With protests happening by the hundreds of thousands in Europe and Australia against the US pursuing a new global openly imperialist war, where are the protests in the Muslim world that stands to be the first if not the main target of this new imperialism? The main perception in many Western capitals of the Arabs in particular is that they are all talk and no action. Why is this?

Unfortunately politics in the Muslim world is rarely an edifying sight. At the heart of the problem lies Islam. That is not to say that Islam is the problem, but it is the vehicle of all change in the Muslim world. If Muslims cannot be persuaded that the change is Islamic, they will drag their feet, to put it mildly. Those who are most keen on changes that are disliked by sincere Muslims, distance themselves from such people and as a result end up more corrupt. The result is polarization of Muslim society into, on the one side pious people, who seem set against any change in their thinking and behaviour, and on the other side corrupt people willing to try bring about any kind of change. Islam is therefore stuck in a reactionary opposition role, often identified as the problem and as the reason for the failure of politics in the Muslim world. Islam is seen by many as essentially regressive; opposed to progress. Indeed many Muslims fall into this attitude seeing the world on an inevitable path of ever greater corruption. From this perspective such Muslims will easily see the changes happening in society as nothing but further steps away from "traditional societies" and hence away from the ideals of Islam. For such people, progress is to return to the past; to return to the traditional ways.

In much of the Muslim world, therefore Islamic opposition is nothing but a drag force, opposing any change. Few people can identify what are the goals of Islamic movements other than "rule by Islam". What does this mean? How would you change things if you were in charge? Would you just try and turn the clocks back, Taliban style? Would you destroy everything you don't like and build nothing new except mosques? What is your vision?

Unless there is a bold new Islamic vision for the Muslim world, we will continue to see this political stagnation. We won't see the masses of Muslims in the street asking for change other than just undoing that latest change. Perhaps we might see another protest against an otherwise ignored book containing a silly blasphemous comment.

Institutionalised Islam has become the problem. To be an institution of Islamic learning in most of the Muslim world today means reaching agreement with whatever government you operate under. Inevitably this means compromise. One of those compromises that has caused the biggest problems is the ruling that Muslims should obey a ruler unless they do something terribly wrong. Demands for political change could only be justified by the need to remove a complete tyrant or apostate. Not only did this set a very low standard of what could be accepted but it also left no space for Islamic scholars to take a lead in giving a vision for positive political change. At the end of the day, such a vision would never be backed up by threat of real action if changes don't happen.

This ruling is based on a justified fear of civil war and internal chaos. As a result of this ruling, the stability of the state has been set as the main political aim within the Islamic academic establishment. However, stability has its own problems. Like the frog slowly heated in the Chinese parable, it thinks that the situation is stable and so never jumps out. Eventually the frog dies from the heat. Similarly, your state may be nice and stable but in a relative decline over a long time. The revolutionary changes necessary to halt and reverse the decline never seem justified until it is too late. When will the Muslims jump out of their slowly heating water? How many frogs have to die before one of them notices and learns to jump out of the slowly heating water? Maybe we are wiser, and like the Americans that threw off the yoke of British oppression, at a certain point the Muslims will say "enough is enough!".

Nature is full of processes which embody cycles of gradual decay and sudden birth. Politics is no different. Traditionalists are right to say that 99% of the time we are dealing with gradual decay. But the 1% of birth is vitally important.

Recently we have seen this decay has reached a new limit now in the latest rulings of al-Azhar which try to make usury halal. Thus, the most strongly asserted prohibition of Islam is now freely ignored by those who follow those who claim the mantle of scholarship. However, this is not merely a prohibition. Let us be clear here, this is war. Allah declares war against the believers who deal in usury (2:279). If anyone was still in doubt, Al-Azhar's reputation is still strong only outside the Muslim world. This collapse of reputation is massively reinforced by such rulings. It is quite hard to see how it can recover.

Now that the most recognized authority of institutionalised Islam (as we are told repeatedly on the BBC) is so obviously suffering from being in the hot water, there is no longer any excuse for hiding behind the judgments of such bodies. Each Muslim must engage in reforming themselves based on their own knowledge and then organizing to reform the political situation, because if they are misled they cannot blame their "scholars" or their leaders. Only when we have leaders that truly reflect the interest and the knowledge of the Muslim people, can decisions be made well. Only then can the rules that govern the lives of Muslims be made consistent with the evidence of God's guidance through His final prophet. Only then can scholarship be truly free and independent.

Islam is above all a public religion. It is not a religion where a group of people can meet in secret and change the laws. It is not about secrets. Its rulings derive their certainty because the evidence for them is well known and well established. This is something that few people understand in the west. Islam survives because individual Muslims can easily know its teachings and be certain of them. All Muslims can and do read the whole of the Qur'an. Many memorize it. For Christians, reading the bible does not form the basis of much of their beliefs or practices, which instead come from what their churches teach. Corrupting Islam should be harder because it should not simply be a matter of corrupting a few leaders and then the masses will follow. The reality however, is that institutionalised Islam has functioned like a church and has probably done as much as could have been hoped for by the enemies of Islam, to restrain the Muslim masses from taking part in shaping their political life.

Unless Muslim people start waking up and taking their affairs into their own hands, and away from the established institutions of state and state authorized "scholars", the rest of the world will continue to wait in vain for real moral leadership.