ISLAM
AND
REVOLUTION
To proclaim "Allahu akbar" (
God is the greatest )
is to relativise all POWER, all POSSESSION and all
KNOWLEDGE.
Before this cry of belief, we have
seen in history the arms of the most insolent armies lowered
and blunted.
1.
Islam is the fundamental religion since God "has
breathed into him of His spirit"
(Qur'an,XV:29) - i.e. from the time
of Adam until today.
There is no "fodamentaliste", "moderate", occidental
Islam any more than there is no Black African Islam or Arab
Islam or Indian Islam or Indonesian Islam.
There is only one Islam.
This is the one that the Qur'an calls the "The
Sunnah of God", the continuation of the prophetic
revelations and the last message, --
that of Muhammad.
Our first task is to attest our Islamic belief by living
it in its universality, and not to defend a particular
folklore or any traditions.
2.
The Prophet Muhammad has
never pretended to create a new religion.
- "Say: I am no bringer of a new-fangled doctrine
among the Apostles..."
(Qur'an,XLVI:9, XLI:43, etc)
He came to remind all people of the primordial
Religion:
- "So set thou thy face steadily and truly to the
faith: (Establish) God's handiwork to the pattern on
which He has made mankind - No change (let there be) in
the work (wrought) by God; that is the standard Religion;
But most among mankind understand not."
(Qur'an,XXX,30)
Say ye:"We believe in God, and the revelation given
to us, and to Abraham, Ismael, Isaac, Jacob, and the
Tribes, and that given to Moses and Jesus, and that given
to (all) Prophets from their Lord: We make no
difference between one and another of them: and we bow to
God (in Islam)." (Qur'an,II:136, also
III:84)
The Prophet Muhammad was sent by God to confirm the
previous messages, to purify them from historical
alterations to which they were subjected and to complete
them.
Our belief will be impoverished if we proclaim our
religion as the best simply because we ignore all the
others.
Seclusion, self-confinement, pretension and
"selfsufficiency" are at present the major obstacles
preventing the enlightenment of Islam to reach the non-
Muslim world.
3.
The essential and universal
message of Islam is the following:
-
- The certitude that God is
unique
- The Community of Humans
- The Responsibility of Man
- God is unique
(Tawheed):
- "If there were, in the heavens and the earth,
other gods besides God, there would have been
confusion in both"
(Qur'an,XXI:22).
- God is the Creator of
everything, and
consequently we cannot suffice by ourselves.
- "How many are the creatures that carry not
their own sustenance? It is God who feeds (both) them
and you..."
(Qur'an,XXIX:60)
- From the principle of
Oneness and that of awareness of our "dependence"
vis-a vis God - The Creator -- (secular self-sufficiency
contradicts the reality of Transcendence) arises the
third aspect of the belief in Transcendence: the
acknowledgement of absolute values to be held above the
egoistic interests of individuals, groups and
nations.
The principle of
community is the opposite of
individualism which implies that man (as an individual) is
the center and measure of everything. In the Islamic
perspective of Community, everybody has an awareness of
being personally responsible for all others.
Humanity is ONE, because God, its Creator, is ONE. All
men have the same origin and are created for the same
end.
- "It is He who created you from a single person
..." (Qur'an,VII:189, also IV:1 and
XXXIX:6)
The
Responsibility. Islam is the
opposite of fatalism and resignation.
It is the constant appeal for resisting all oppression
because it excludes any submission other than to the will of
God and holds man responsible for the accomplishment of the
divine order on earth.
Everything on earth is subjected to the Law of God;(the
word Muslim means submitting to God) the stone in its fall,
the treee in its growth, the animal in its instincts, all
submit to the Law of God.
- "Glorify the name of thy Guardian-Lord most high,
Who hath created and further, given order and proportion;
Who hath ordained laws and granted
guidance." (Qur'an,LXXXVII:1-3)
Man alone has the tremendous privilege of the power of
disobediance.
- "We did indeed offer the trust to the heavens and
the earth and the mountains; but they refused to
undertake it, being afraid thereof: But man undertook it;
He was indeed unjust and foolish."
(Qur'an,XXXIII:72)
If one becomes a "Muslim'', i.e. if one unconditionally
responds to the call of God by one's supreme sacrifice, then
one becomes a Muslim by virtue of a voluntary, free and
responsible act.
When God says in the Qur'an :
"Let there be no compulsion in religion : Truth stands
out clear from error : whoever rejects evil and believes in
God hath grasped the most trustworthy hand hold, that never
breaks. And God Heareth and knowth all things.
'' (Qur'an,II,256)
it is not only a matter of excluding physical or military or
police compulsion, but any compulsion, even of the self or
the spiritual : the Qur'an underscores :
" Say, `The truth is from your Lord ' : let him who will,
believe, and let him who will, reject (it) ...
''(Qur'an,XVIII,29).
The Qur'an tells us that God has made of man His successor,
"Khalif'', on earth. ( A "Khalif'' is not a subordinate and
passive executive; he is a responsible manager, charged with
making decisions. This function is not confined to some
individuals : it is the mission of every Muslim.
"Then fight in God's cause - Thou art held responsible
only for thyself''
(IQur'an,V,84).
"Every soul will be (held) in pledge for its
deeds''(Qur'an,LXXIV,38).
To proclaim "ALLAHU
AKBAR'' ( God is the greatest ) is to relativise
all POWER, all POSSESSION and all KNOWLEDGE.
Before this cry of belief, we have seen in history the
arms of the most insolent armies lowered and blunted.
4.
The need for this
message has been made more
evident by the spiritual failure of the West.
Thousands of men and women in the world, whatever their
belief may be, if loving the future, are becoming aware that
the Western civilisation has declared its bankruptcy, and
that if we give in to its drive, it leads us to a global
suicide.
In 1985 , 700 billion
dollars have been spent on armaments. The great
powers have actually stocked the equivalent of more than one
million bombs of the Hiroshima type.
That bomb of Hiroshima killed 70,000 persons in one
instant.
This means that as of today, it is technically possible to
annihilate 70 billion human beings, which is more than 10
times the total human species !
For the first time, since the three million years of
human cavalcade, it has become technically possible to
destroy every trace of life on earth.
This technical possibility is strangely enough called :
"progress'' !
Still more strangely it is called : "peace''; this is
an " equilibrium of terror '' between the "great" powers
.
The relations between the
North and the South are equally established on a
demeaning basis.
The sequences of colonialism and the persistent unequal
exchange have lead to the following scandal :
The United States is limiting its wheat production, and
the European cold storages cannot accomodate any more the
surplus of meat and butter, while in the rest of the world,
in 1985, 80 million human beings have died from starvation
and malnutrition.
The indebtedness of the so-called "third world''
is aggravating year after year, and the burden does not stop
increasing : the North is becoming more and more rich and
the South more and more poor.
The profound cause of
this Western policy since what is called the
"Renaissance'', i.e. since the simultaneous birth in
Europe in the 16th century of capitalism and colonialism, is
the abandonment of belief in the absolute values.
Once a community stops recognising absolute values as its
guide in action, nothing remains but the confrontations of
desires for material growth.
It is the war of all against all, and the West is given
over to it. Its real religion is the blind belief in a
hidden god : growth, i.e. the desire to produce more and
more - at an accelerated speed, anything which is the most
profitable of industries. This hidden god is a cruel god :
it exacts human sacrifices.
What characterises this false god is that it exalts the
sufficiency of man against the Transcendence of God, and
individualism as against community.
"Sufficiency'' has been proclaimed since the
"Renaissance" in "Faust" by Marlowe: "Man, by
means of your powerful brains, become a god, the master and
the lord of all elements''.
Individualism, since the so-called Renaissance, is the
return to the sophist maxim of ancient Greece:"Man is the
center and the measure of everything''.
This failure of
civilisation has engendered a culture of despair.
The false prophets of the nil and the absurd, reflecting
this chaos as if it were ineluctable and eternal, and
instead of trying to overcome it, teach our youth that life
has no sense.
If life has no sense, then everything, even crime,
becomes permissible and we are dealt with all sorts of
savage violence that flares among individuals, groups and
nations. "The equilibrium of terror'' becomes the law
of these savage relations among men on all levels of social
life.
The negation of the sense of life and the existence of
absolute values has led to making of science and technique -
which are admirable MEANS in the service of man - ENDS in
themselves, trying to make us believe that science and
technique can solve all our problems, and that problems
which do not relate to them, such as love, beauty and the
meaning of life, do not exist.
This "religion of means" - forging MEANS into ENDS
- i.e. creating false gods : science, technique, nation,
money, sexuality and growth, has created a new polytheism
and new superstitions, transforming science into scientism,
technique into technocracy and politics into
Machiavellism.
The fundamental problem is thus to restore to man his
proper dimensions: the belief in the Transcendence of God,
in human community and the awareness of our personal
responsibility.
5.
By saying that Islam
can bring about the answer to the problems posed by
the bankrupcy of the Western hegemony, does not mean:
- That Islam can accomplish everything alone;
- That it has complete ready-made solutions to the
problems of our time.
On the contrary, the two endemic principal obstacles
against the present time spread of Islamic enlightenment
are:
The "sufficiency" and
ignorance of others. Early Islam had spread in less
than one century from the Indus to the Pyrenees not by means
of military conquest, but because it knew how to integrate
all other great previous cultures, to draw from them an
unprecedented creative synthesis, and because the millions
of believers of all religions have identified themselves
with it. Today, Islam cannot resume its course unless it is
open to all wisdoms and all creeds that it can contain.
The
"triumphalism" :
meaning the mortal pretence of having complete ready-made
answers, formulated one thousand years ago by its jurists
and their traditions.
Saying that the Qur'an has ``omitted nothing'', means
that it has given us eternal ``guidance'', that it has
designated the ultimate and absolute ENDS of our actions.
This does not exonerate in the least man's respon- sibility
to discover, in each era, the MEANS to realise these
ends.
To pretend that the Qur'an comprehends a complete
ready-made economic system or political constitution or an
encyclopedia, would be demeaningly reducing the eternal
message to institutions or to passing theories.
The revealed message does bring infinetely much more :
the ends, the eternal immutable orienting principles that
guide our inner life and all our activities, public and
private, in order to elaborate in every era the answers to
the economic, political and cultural problems of our time by
means of new insights into these eternal principles.
These principles are simple ones :
-
- in the economic field
:
God alone
possesses;
- in the political field
:
God alone
commands;
- in the cultural field
:
God alone
knows.
GOD ALONE
POSSESSES:
" ... all that is in heavens and on earth belongs to God
...'' (II,116 also II,284 and III,109
etc.).
Man is God's khalif on earth; he is comissioned to manage
this property in the way of God and according to His
directives.
This concept is contrary to that of the Roman law which
defines owner- ship as the "right to use and
abuse''.
Man, the responsible manager of the property of God,
cannot dispose of it according to his own desires : he
cannot destroy it according to his whims and caprices, he
cannot squander it or neglect it. Without ob- taining its
usufruct trough his work, he cannot accumulate it.
"...And there are those who bury gold and silver and
spend it not in the way of God : announce unto them a most
grievous penalty '' (IX,34).
One of the worst condemnations in the Qur'an is that
addressed to Abu- Lahab and to his wealth:
"Perish the hands of Abu-Lahab ! Perish he ! Neither his
wealth, nor his gains are of any avail to him!''
(Qur'an,CXI,1-2).
All Qur'anic prescriptions, especially Zakat, being a
social transfer of wealth as a religious requirement, and
the prohibition if Riba and un- earned incomes, i.e. the
prohibition of all increase of wealth without work in
service of God, - all such prescriptions tend to prevent the
accumulation of wealth in one sector of the society leaving
another in misery.
God, in the Qur'an, radically excludes every social
regime in which money establishes a political hierarchy.
God, on the contrary says without equivocation:
"When We decide to destroy a people, We (first) send a
definite order to those among them who are given the good
things of this life and yet transgress
...'' (Qur'an,XVII,16).
GOD ALONE
COMMANDS:
The Prophet had created at Medina a radically new type of
community. It was not founded on blood or race, nor on
ownership of land, nor on market relations, nor even on
common culture or history; in one word, on nothing that
flows from the past or could be an inherited legacy.
It was a community exclusively founded on the belief: the
un- conditional response to the call of God of which Abraham
had given the eternal example.
Such a community is OPEN TO ALL without consideration of
origin.
For example, nothing is contrary to the spirit of this
Islamic "Ummah'' then the Jewish Western idea of
"nationalism'', i.e. of a market protected by the State and
justified by the racial, historical or cultural mytho- logy
which tends to make from the "nation '' an end in itself,
and which contradicts the concept of human unity (which
concept is a particular aspect of Tawheed - unity of God -
the corner-stone of all the Islamic vision of the
world).
As well, the Qur'anic concept of "Shura'' (consultation)
requires that, in every domain and on all levels, the
members of the community must be consulted in view of
participating under the sight of God, in the elaboration and
application of the decisions on which their destiny depends.
This principle excludes at once all despotism of one man, of
one class or of one party, as well as all forms of purely
STATISTICAL, delegated and alienated "democracy".
As for the economy, it is for us to discover the MEANS to
attain these ENDS, to apply these immutable principles in
the unprecedented historical conditions of our societies,
combating the technocratic positivism, the political
Machiavellism, the confrontations of archaic and perverse
nationalisms, the unequal exchanges, the polarisations of
blocs and the equlibrium of terror.
GOD ALONE KNOWS
:
We must as well fend against the sterilizing triumphalism
and the illusion that we can find in the past - without
exerting effort for thinking and research - economic
solutions to all our present time problems, or a ready-made
political constitution.
Thus, it would be childish to reduce the Qur'an to
nothing more than an encyclopedia that saves us the
strenuous effort of scientific and technical research which
made the Islamic world the center for radiating
enlightenment to the world when the University of Cordova
flourished.
Consequent upon an immense effort of translation and
assimilation of all the great cultures of the past : of
Greece and Rome, of Persia and India, and in compliance with
the Islamic exhortation to seek knowledge "as far as
China'', a genuine synthesis and an Oriental Culture
were simultaneously born.
The basic principle is that as long as God alone
possesses and God alone commands, God alone knows.
It is that which excludes the pharaonic pretention to
usurp all God's powers or the illusion of keeping an
absolute perfected knowledge which reaches out for the
knowledge of the first causes and the ultimate
finalities.
The example of the Islamic University of Cordova in the
tenth century constitutes, from this point of view, a model
of which it would be commendable to revive the spirit in
order to develop, in our time, the sciences in such a manner
that they are not harnessed for the destruction of man, but
for his growth in the way of God.
From the Muslim University of Cordova, and from the 10th
to the 13th centuries, rays of culture in its widest form
have flooded three conti- nents :
- In
SCIENCE:
by creating therein the experimental method for discovering
the relations of things among themselves and the sequence of
causes.
- In WISDOM : such
as the reflection on the meaning of everything in its
relation to God in one harmonious world where life has a
significance and an objective.
- In
BELIEF
: such as admitting that science will never reach the
first cause, nor can wisdom reach the ultimate finality;
belief as awareness of our limits and our postulates, and
belief as reason without frontiers.
Such a concept of science and technique would enable us -
and it is that which makes its actuality - to prevent all
sciences and techniques from dragging us towards planetary
suicide.
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