Islam
Today?
By: Sayyid Mujtaba Musavi Lari
What has happened to us, the heirs of so brilliant and magnificent a civilisation? What
has reduced us to our present living conditions? Why have we ceded the hegemony of our
world to others? What has caused the decline in our culture, in our science and our
political power? What stopped our progress in its tracks? Why have we yielded our
leadership in manufactures and science to Westerners so that we now need them where they
once needed us? Why must Muslims, with all their splendid past in East and West, hang
their heads in the modern world?
It was not blowing our own
trumpet or banging our own drum that raised Islam to world pre-eminence in its time. It
was our culture, our remarkable spiritual and social revolution. Shame that we should
waste our strength in conflicts amongst ourselves and in internecine tugs-of-war which
have reduced the glory of Unity to an empty phoneme.
A strong nation can only be built
on firm principles of manners, morals, order - sole sources of progress. Islam never owed
its power to cannons and tanks and weapons but to the pre-eminence in thought amongst its
Ulema, in character amongst its peoples and in following the guidance of God on the good
road (for which we pray in the Fatihe 17 times a day), the road of justice,
fellowship, brotherhood.
History demonstrates unmistakably
that whenever the Muslims have constructed their philosophy of life in the spirit of the
teachings revealed to them by Heaven, they have prospered : and whenever they have
deserted those teachings, adversity and misfortune have been visited upon them. The
Muslims who founded the brilliant culture and social wellbeing of the past followed those
teachings more closely than we do, individual, society and nation alike.
The sun of culture shone while
just measure and proportion was given to science, thought, matter and spirit. When we
deserted those, the banner of endeavour, diligence and combat for right fell from our
hands, only to be grabbed by the West in self- aggrandisement.
Where is the old Muslim
sincerity: integrity, honesty and truthfulness? These were once the fences on either side
of our path. When we transgressed across them we were lost in a trackless desert, and
abandoned the holy calling, announced as God's purpose for us, of leading mankind to live
as God wills. Abandoning that destiny, we sank in the quicksands of corruption, ignorance
and wretchedness which engulf us today. Yet a truly united Islam could return to that
heavenly vocation and lead mankind's feet on to the spiritual road. This would be a
blessing for all.
Napoleon's companion in exile on
the island of St. Helena wrote: "In Egypt Napoleon constantly repeated his amazement
at the blessings which the Prophet of Islam and her other great men in history had brought
to the foreign lands they took under their sway. He looked with hope to Islam as the force
which might again confer such blessings on the world, even saying: "I think I will
take up Islam as my religion'."
A true Islamic society would be
very different from that which obtains anywhere in the world. Its thinking and its living
must once again incarnate those heavenly principles of its inception. As the poet said:
"Islam's pure truth's from
spot or blemish free:
Our Muslims blame for any fault you see."
To take its full share in that
moral and spiritual revolution which must come to the entire world, Islam must orient
itself in today's global realities. It must then undertake those internal reforms which
will be its restitution for past backwardness. It must balance spiritual and material
conditions in the right proportion in accordance with those principles of perfection which
shaped the glories of its past and which are dictated by the Lord of both worlds - this
one and the next. In these it will find, not merely its own internal stability, but also
the secret of stability for the world and the way to mediate it to all mankind.
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