KARACHI: Holistic approach urged to understand Islam
By Our Reporter
KARACHI, Dec 6: Participants of an international conference on Tuesday called for adopting holistic approach in the understanding and interpretation of Islam. They were speaking in the working session of the two-day international conference on “Different facets of the Islamic Ummah in a globalized world,” organized by the Area Study Centre for Europe, Karachi University, in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut.
They emphasized the need for paying attention to the evolving geo-political and geo-economic realities. Islam, they said, had to be understood by the Muslims first in order to know how they could adjust to the realties of modern times.
It was also argued that hereditary or any other form of governance was against the spirit of Islam. However, it was also argued that Islam did not specify any form of governance.
They said that insistence on the part of some quarters to refuse to take cognizance of the innate mechanism of self-understanding provided by the authentic sources of Islam had led to a host of problems. It had only served the vested interests of those whose agenda seemed to be creating maximum hatred against Muslims and their religion in order to intensify mutual fears and widen the gulf of misunderstandings between Islam and large segments of humanity, they said. This widening gulf, they argued, had posed a serious threat to the peace and harmony of the world which is, has been, and always will be characterized by variety of intellectual perspectives and diversity of creeds and cultures.
Dr Jaffer Ahmad, head of the Pakistan Study Centre, Karachi University, was of the view that the phenomenon of suicide bombing and its identification with Muslims was wrong and argued that it was first resorted to in the civil war in Sri Lanka. He emphasized the need for looking at the issue in the context of the existing international system in which some people felt most deprived and denied of their rights. As long as situation in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq persisted, it would continue.
“Suicide bombing was the weapon of those who don’t have any other way of expressing dissent,” he said. There was also a reference to the big gap between West and the Islamic world and the control of some Western people on the media and the need for dialogue among the Muslims on the one hand and with rest of the world on the other.
He was of the view that Islam discouraged all sorts of prejudices and injustices and was for the whole mankind.
Prof Dr Syed Anwar Hussain of the University of Dhaka focused on “Islam in the Democratic Matrix”. His argument was that Islam appeared in a specific time and space context and not merely as a belief system, but more as a way of life with a clear mandate to bring about revolutionary changes in the social fabric. This was both a limitation and merit of Islam.
The Holy Quran, he said, abounds in numerous revelations, which if properly acted upon, can better the living conditions of humans; but any specific mention of mode of governance is conspicuous by its absence. Nevertheless, the values central to the Western concept of democracy were sure to be found in many of the Quranic revelations and practices of the Holy Prophet (PBUH).
Despite the absence of theoretical prescriptions for polity and governance relevant empirical indications may be gleaned from the practices of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) and the pious caliphs as well as those of the Muslim rulers who followed them on how Muslims should organize polity and build governance infrastructure.
The Charter of Madina drawn-up by the Holy Prophet, he argued, revealed his statesman-like ingenuity. It was not based on any Quranic revelation and was the first written modern constitution that delivered good governance in a pluralistic polity like Madina for a decade. Those principles the West adopted much later.
The city-state of Madina was neither an Islamic state nor a theocracy of any type. It was a polity quite at variance with what contemporary obscurantist Islamophiles would have desired an Islamic state to be. The polity that developed gradually over many years under successive Muslim rulers was based on improvisations from local and existing traditions and some Islamic prescriptions, he contended.
There had thus never been any institution that could be called an Islamic state. In fact, the concept of Islamic state was a later phenomenon in the 19th and 20th centuries when the Muslims were pitted against the colonial onslaught and Western modernism. But he parried the question about the significance of the sacrifice of Imam Hussain in Karbala in the context of form of governance and Islamic polity which was generally considered to be based on shoora and consent of the people.
The core point made in the paper was that early Islam, the Prophet and his close companions practised some values that subsequently formed the essential features of Western democracy. But, Muslims who came later distorted pristine Islamic ethos and spirit to serve their mundane interests.
In his presentation on “Beyond Legalism: An Islam not controversial and spiritually global”, Prof Ahmed Alami Hamedane of Morocco dealt with the facets of jihad and emphasized on its first meaning. The meaning that shocks irritates the other, embarrasses the self, and thus causes modernists and moderates to avoid treating it by discussing only its peripheral aspects.
Prof Nevad Kahteran from the University of Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, dwelt on “Universalism and inclusivism vs particularism and exclusivism: Situating the Bosnian paradigm as a model for peaceful coexistence of religions”.
The Bosnian scholar emphasized that in the contemporary world there was a greater need of mutual religious and cultural understanding, in which Sarajevo could play an important role far beyond the extent of its size and population, provided it remained faithful to its own universal vision of Islam threatened nowadays by forces both within and outside its borders.
To emphasize that Bosnia could serve as a model for inter-faith relations in Europe and the world, he not only acknowledged, but strongly promoted the idea of Bosnia as a microcosm - a paradigm - of global relations over the centuries.
Dr Mualla Selcuk’s paper was on “Ta’aruf: A Qur’anic concept and its implications for religious education.”
The Turkish scholar’s presentation was based on her ongoing work on developing new approaches in Islamic teaching.
Hamid Basyaib discussed “Radicalization of Islamic Conservatism in Indonesia”. His contention was that the issue of edicts by the Indonesian Council of Ulema in its congress last July indicated the peak of Islamic fundamentalism in Indonesia. The fatwas among other things declared that the Ahmadiyah group was heretic and therefore must be banned; prohibited marriage between a Muslim man and a non-Muslim woman; disallowed secularism, pluralism and liberal thought in Islam.
The headquarters of the Ahmadiyah group, many of its mosques around west Java and hundreds of their houses in the surrounding areas were attacked by thousands of mainstream Muslims. More than 60 Catholic and Protestant churches or places categorized as churches were closed down by force by the local Muslim leaders and their followers.
