Where Do Muslims Stand Today?

This question has probably never been so well and masterly summarised than in Muhammad Asad’s words. In his book ‘The Road to Mecca’, the late Asad writes the following:

“Never before, have the words of Islam and the West come so close to one another as today. This closeness is a struggle, visible and invisible. Under the impact of Western cultural influences, the souls of many Muslims men and women are slowly shriveling. They are letting themselves be led away from their erstwhile belief that an improvement of living standards should be but a means to improving man’s spiritual perceptions; they are falling into the same idolatry of ‘progress’ into which the Western world fell after it reduced religion to a mere melodious tinkling somewhere in the background of happening; and are thereby growing smaller in stature, not greater: for all cultural imitation, opposed as it is to creativeness, is bound to make a people small.

Not that Muslims could not learn much from the West, especially in the fields of science and technology. But, then, acquisition of scientific notions and methods is not really ‘imitation’: and certainly not in the case of a people whose faith commands them to search for knowledge wherever it is to be found. Science is neither Western nor Eastern, for all scientific discoveries are only links in an unending chain of intellectual endeavour which embraces mankind as a whole. Every scientist builds on the foundations supplied by his predecessors, be they of his own nation or of another; and this process of building, correcting and improving goes on and on, from man to man, from age to age, from civilization to civilization: so that the scientific achievements of a particular age or civilisation can never be said to ‘belong’ to that age of civilisation. At various times one nation, more vigorous than others, is able to contribute more to the general fund of knowledge; but in the long run the process is shared, and legitimately so, by all. There was a time when the civilization of the Muslims was more vigorous than the civilization of Europe. It transmitted to Europe many technological inventions of revolutionary nature, and more than that: the very principles of that ‘scientific method’ on which modern science and civilisation are built.”

In these extremely difficult times for Muslims around the world in general and in Europe in particular, the followers of the Prophet Mohamed (PBUH) ought to meditate upon Asad’s writings. And neither be intimidated nor complexed by the technological supremacy of the West. Neither arrogant. But assertive and bear in mind that they too can write History. As the late Aimé Césaire once wrote, “there is room for all at the rendez-vous of victory”.

Kel Tamashek
15 June 2010