Restoring Islam's Golden Age (Book Notes: In the Shadow of the Prophet)

Observers have noticed a disturbing pattern in Muslim communities: many people spend far too much time looking backwards and lamenting the loss of a Golden Age and too little time trying to construct a new, better age in their future. What people want is to restore what they think they had and have lost. They are sacrificing their own future or the sake of dreams about the past.

In In the Shadow of the Prophet: The Struggle for the Soul of Islam, Milton Viorst writes:

Many societies entertain a vision of a golden age somewhere in their past, but acknowledge that it is gone forever. They may aspire to a new age that will be equally golden, but inevitably different in character. Muslim believers, however, retain a conviction that, if only man can be guided into right conduct, the one and only golden age, the Prophet’s age, can be regained.

According to this belief, whatsoever has gone wrong in Islam derives from the Muslims’ weakness of engaging in misguided conduct. Only conduct that follows the shari’a, says Islam, will return Muslims to a better age. Following the shari’a, moreover, means that the age will inevitably look like the Prophet’s.

Islam thus denies to Muslims the right to participate in the changes that take place from one moment to the next in the real world. It rejects adaptation, places constraints on accommodation. As human history moves on, the doctrine of the shari’a’s immutability imposes a burden so heavy that Islamic society has been unable to keep pace. [emphasis added]

One might be tempted to dismiss dreams about a Golden Age if they did not lead, as Viorst describes, to people spending more time in the past than in the future. A truly vibrant, living, and productive society in one which looks ahead at what it can build.

It’s one thing to rely upon values and traditions from the past, but quite another to believe that you can’t create anything better than what existed in the past. Once such an attitude takes hold, people won’t be capable of creating anything good for themselves or their children.

There can’t be improvement or progress unless people believe that they can do better than those who came before. For too many Muslims in Middle Eastern nations, that’s exactly the attitude that they have adopted: they can’t do any better than the Muslims at the time of Muhammad, so they won’t even try — all they do is work to recreate what they believe those Muslims had.

Over the course of history the shari’a, in promoting religious over temporal supremacy, has probably weakened Muslim political systems. It has surely weakened the believer’s sense of loyalty and responsibility the state.

“If there is an action on the part of a caliph and a contrary tradition from the Prophet... ,” al-Shafi wrote, “that action must be rejected in favor of the tradition from the Prophet.” Imbued by its creators with divine perfection, the shari’a has denied what is generally regarded as sovereignty’s fundamental attribute: the duty to make and enforce law. This loss, distancing the state from the realities of everyday life, has paralyzed normal political development.

It is true that no state, Muslim or otherwise, has been able to ignore everyday reality. Political institutions need some freedom to respond change, whatever the shari’a says. Islam’s way, however, has not to legitimize lawmaking but to fictionalize it.

The process even acquired a name, hiyal, which is defined as “legal fictions.” States regularly designate new laws, with the ulama’s consent, as “regulations to enforce the shari’a.” Islamic officials make fanciful legal interpretations to justify them. Banks evade the Quran’s explicit ban on interest, for example, by resorting to financial tricks. No Muslim is fooled by such actions, and fundamentalist reformers routinely denounce them. But they enable Muslim states to claim fidelity to the letter of the shari’a, even while wringing out the Islamic spirit. [emphasis added]

One of the problems in the Middle East today are the weak governments which rule. Oh, the governments can be brutally repressive and thus give the appearance of being strong, but a strong government is one which has strong support from citizens who strongly believe in the nation’s stated ideals and goals.

This is not the case in most Middle Eastern countries. People don’t believe in them and aren’t very loyal to them. Muslim extremists know this and seek to exploit this fact in their efforts to undermine the superficial secularism that exists there in order to replace it with the sham Golden Age they sell to the people in the street.

If Arab leaders could articulate a positive, hopeful, and ambitious vision of the future which employs, but is not entirely dependent upon, Muslim traditions, they might have a chance to both thwart the Islamists and improve their societies. How likely is this, though?

 

Read More Book Notes from the Book Reviews on this site.