The Challenge to Islamic Jurisprudence(Part One: The Challenge)

লিখেছেন লিখেছেন মহিউডীন ০৭ এপ্রিল, ২০১৩, ০৯:১০:০৯ রাত

Specialists in the study of comparative legal systems and their supporting religious frameworks have always been interested in the origins of religion as a cause of conflict. Recently, many have become even more interested in the future of religion as a cure for such conflict.

Recently, a powerful alliance of four disparate movements has come together to form a unified foreign policy in response to the new world disorder that emerged following the relative stability of the half-century-long Cold War. This quadruple alliance consists of two rationalistic trends that have originated during the past half century. These may be designated as the permanent foreign policy establishment, which seeks stability through the balance of power, and the movement known as neo-conservatism, which seeks to project America’s power to build a better world.

The other two movements may be called anti-rationalistic in the sense that a closed ideology trumps objective reason in understanding and dealing with the complex forces in the world. The origins of these two date back more than a century. They are the movement known as Evangelical or apocalyptic millenarianism, and the movement that one might call simply secular Zionism, as distinct from the older mainline Jewish concept of spiritual Zionism.

These four movements or trends differ in their potential to resolve conflicts and reduce the underlying causes. They differ especially in their understanding of Islam. They range in descending degree of openness from the permanent foreign policy establishment, perhaps best typified by Henry Kissinger, to the secular Zionists. The former have been basically indifferent to Islam, either because they thought that it might become useful in countering political radicalism or because they assumed that it is a declining force in the world and no longer will play a real role in orchestrating the global future. The secular Zionists, on the other hand, fear Islam as the only real threat to the security of Israel.

The alignment of the irrational led by Jerry Vines, past president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Reverend Jerry Falwell, with the proudly rational, neo-conservative movement, led by William Kristol’s Weekly Standard, is an unprecedented development in American intellectual history, much to the consternation of the permanent foreign policy establishment, but much to the delight of the those who fear for the security of Jews in their ancestral homeland.

Until their alignment after 9/11 in an alliance with the neo-conservatives, the extremists among the millenarian Evangelicals, namely, those who attacked Islam as a warlike religion and the person of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) by calling him a bandit and a paedophile, were a fringe phenomenon in American society. As these radicals have moved from the fringe into the mainstream, the formerly mainstream Evangelicals have concluded that these extremists are hijacking their own religion and that the moderates must actively counter the extremism that can compromise Christian love.

On May 7th, 2003, the National Association of Evangelicals convened a summit conference of forty leaders, representing 43,000 congregations, to address the issue of whether they should focus their efforts on countering or converting Muslims. Their conclusion was that the mission of proselytizing must have top priority and that this necessarily conflicts with the radical efforts to brand Islam and the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) as inherently evil and violent.

As Protestant extremism declines in the aftermath of the successful war in Iraq, the negative assessment of Islam as a religion has been taken up by neo-conservative leaders within the Catholic Church. One of the most articulate of such leaders appears to be Michael Novak, one of the top intellectuals in America’s first policy think-tank, The American Enterprise Institute.

In the April, 2003, issue of America’s leading journal on religion in public life, First Things, Novak published a seminal article, “The Faith of the Founding.” In this lead article he brilliantly portrays the essential teachings of the traditionalist movement, led originally by Edmund Burke, that led to the founding of the Great American Experiment. He becomes controversial, however, in his contention that even though some Muslims may be good, Islam is inherently bad and un-American because it does not recognize a direct relationship of the person with God and therefore can have no conception of human rights or of government limited by recognition of the sovereignty of God.

This represents an entirely new approach to Islam, because it is based not on generalizing from the action of extremist Muslims but on denial of what centuries ago the greatest Muslim scholars, all imprisoned for their beliefs, considered to be the three basic fundamentals of Islam as a religion. The newest strategy apparently is to single out these essential truths of Islam, deny that they exist, and assert that their absence constitutes the Islamic threat. This sophisticated strategy may be more effective over the long run than are the simplistic claims of Pat Robertson and Franklyn Graham that Muslims are bandits.

The challenge to American Muslims, especially after 9/11, is to explain the difference between Islam as a religion and Muslims as its supposed practitioners.

Equally important is the challenge for Muslims to put their own house in order by marginalizing the extremism that can give rise to violence and by taking advantage of the post-Iraq environment to end the poverty and oppression that feed such extremism. American policymakers cannot afford to deal only with benign theoretical formulations, when the facts on the ground, strikingly demonstrated by 9/11, are so malignant.

বিষয়: বিবিধ

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