The Association For British Muslims

[This is the text of a Paper delivered on 24 April 1999 to the "Conference on Dialogue and Education for Tolerance and Peace - A Challenge for the 21st Century" held at UNESCO, Paris, between 22 and 24 April 1999]

The Aim of this Paper is to use the relations between Islam and the Occident as an exemplar case study from which to draw appropriate lessons for other religions in other cultural contexts.

In Act II of Ghosts, Henrik Ibsen's character Helen Alving says,

"I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant, all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us."(1)

If we are to live in peace in Europe we really need to scrutinise our ideas, and especially those we have acquired or accepted uncritically, like Ibsen's "ghosts creeping between the lines", as they relate to our views on each other.

Nine hundred years ago on 15 July, 1099, the First Crusade took Jerusalem, and proceeded to massacre the inhabitants indiscriminately. Muslims, Jews and Arab Christians alike died in this farrago of butchery. And yet, as a result of this Crusade, western Europe acquired modern civilisation from the High Culture of the Islamic World. But you'll never learn in a Western institution about this debt, or even where cheques and modern banking methods come from, or that "cheque" is an Arabic word.

Just over six hundred years ago the Rennaissance began, exported into western Europe from Islamic Spain and from the Ottoman Empire. Yet the West has never acknowledged that its culture and civilisation are inextricably bound up with Islam and the Islamic World. School children remain ignorant that for centuries the standard pharmacopoeia in use in the West was that of Al Razi ("Razes"); they remain ignorant about Al Biruni and Ibnu-l Haytham and the debt that mathematics and the science of optics owe them; they may learn about the Troubadours and Minnesinger, they may even have heard of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walter von der Vogelweider, but you could bet your last dollar that they'll never hear about Ibn Hazm and The Ring of the Dove. Lt General Sir John Bagot Glubb referred to this phenomenon in a book title as The Lost Centuries - the eight hundred year long debt to Islam that is simply ignored.

At the time of the Gulf War we heard from many theologians about the concept of the "Just War" (justum bellum). If one were listening carefully one might even have heard the names of St Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine of Hippo mentioned. I don't remember anybody actually referring to Hugo Grotius or Emmerich de Wattel but they may have done. But I never heard anybody mention Ibn Rushd or Al Ghazzali, from whom Aquinas, the leading "Christian Averroïst", got his ideas. Thomist ideas on the Justum Bellum are, after all, a rehash and adaptation of the Shari'ah on Jihad.

This deafening silence that reverberates through our schools and institutions of learning on the debt of the West to Islam and the Islamic World is heard by the millions of Muslims who live in western European countries, and noted. It is noted also that several countries of the European Union, all too ready to lecture their neighbours of the Muslim World on human rights, fail to give basic civil rights to the majority of their Muslim populations. It is noted also that there seems to be an institutionally sanctioned "open season" on Islam and Muslims, portraying Islam as a savage and backward religion, that keeps women in subjugation, and which encourages fanaticism and fundamentalism among its followers.

Furthermore, it has been noticed that several prominent European Union politicians have made statements in recent years to the effect that the European Union is a recreation of Charlemagne's Empire, that the EU is a Christian agglomeration (and so a Muslim country, such as Turkey is, has no place in it), that the foundation of an Islamic State in Europe (referring to Bosnia, and the supposed nightmare of a "Greater Albania") would not be allowed, that the EU effectively paid for the Russians' war in Chechenia, and that the rise of "Islamic Fundamentalism" in neighbouring countries (specifically Turkey, Egypt, Libya, and Algeria) must be opposed. And no-one has gainsaid them.

Thus to Muslims living in the West, no less than those in the Muslim World itself, it seems that the European countries are recreating themselves as the old "Christendom" and girding themselves up against Islam again in time for the new millennium. The tardy and ineffectual interventions in Bosnia and Kosova, having first ensured that those peoples were unable to defend themselves by imposing "arms embargoes", have been unfavorably compared to the very efficient and successful Gulf War.

Faced with this deteriorating situation, it is hardly surprising that the Muslim populations of Europe are becoming dissociated from their host communities. Stumbling and somnambulant, Europe is, from the Muslim point-of-view, walking backwards to the 1930s and 40s, if not to the Middle Ages, but it is the Muslims this time who are being cast in the role of Untermenschen, and the Muslims who are being extirpated by the pogroms.

It is, therefore, up to governments to act and educators to teach urgently in such a way as to stop this drift, otherwise we will have not advanced at all from that time that gave birth to the United Nations' "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" and the Council of Europe's "European Convention on Human Rights" that followed it.

As the late Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr said, "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends".

Fifty years ago last year, on 10 December, 1948, in the aftermath of the Second World War and the horror the Western allies experienced at the "abomination of desolation" wrought by National Socialism, the General Assembly of the United Nations passed the famous Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

It is a tragic and perverse irony that at the same time as we commemorate this occasion, and the pogroms that led to it, we are witnessing the genocidal mayhem being carried out against the Muslim populations of Bosnia, Sanjak, and now Kosova, and effectively doing nothing to stop it. In fact, the "powers that be" have actively been preventing Turkey, the one country that has an historic interest and influence in the region and the power to stop the Yugoslav aggression, from intervening. The genocide in Bosnia and now Kosova will inevitably have far-reaching political repercussions in Turkey.

The Universal Declaration is a neat summary of Anglo-American cultural attitudes to the Rights of the individual and the role of governments. Perhaps this is because the principal elements of the victorious Allies belonged to that cultural group which then could be expressed as the United States of America and the British Empire and Commonwealth, but which now would need a more complicated description.

Certainly the Universal Declaration has echoes of the famous statement of the American Declaration of Independence of 4 July 1776, "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

In this cultural nexus, as these rights are gifted to man from God Almighty according to His Law - that is, 'Natural Law' - then rulers and governments may not trammel them without good cause, and then only temporarily. He has the right to "go about his lawful occasions without let or hindrance" and that these freedoms may not be curtailed in any way by any body except by "due process of the law". Natural Law in Britain and its off-shoots (USA, Republic of Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and much of the British Commonwealth) was defined by the jurisprudential debates that accompanied the British Civil War of the 17th Century.

Both sides, Royalists and Parliamentarians, agreed that 'Natural Law' meant 'Divinely inspired law', and that the Common Law to which all were subject was just this. As Sir Edward Coke LCJ put it to the King and the Lords, "Magna Charta is such a fellow, that he will have no sovereign" and "Be you ever so mighty, the Law is above you". His Royalist rival Richard Hooker would not have demurred, except to hold that no temporal court was fit to judge an anointed monarch.

So, taxation and representation apart, the Civil War was essentially not about the accountability of the King to the Law - this was agreed - but in which "court" his account would be heard. The Roundheads believed it should be before the High Court of Parliament: the Cavaliers believed that it was before God alone. Cromwell and the Roundheads won.

Certain issues were settled by this. One was that there should be "no taxation without representation", another was that the King should govern through Parliament according to this Common Law, and a third was that he was answerable in this life to the High Court of Parliament for his actions. In other words, the ruler, or the State, was legally answerable to the Law of God while here in This Life.

To gain and preserve these freedoms was considered a valid cause for war. As the Scots nobles wrote to the Pope in the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320, "non enim propter gloriam divicias aut honores pugnamus sed propter libertatem solummodo quam nemo bonus nisi simul cum vita amittit" ("it is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom - for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself").

This legacy was exported, and found its most famous expression in the American Revolution which led to the Constitution of the United States of America: a document which in a way summarises how concerned thinkers of both Whig and Tory persuasions at the end of the Eighteenth Century believed Britain should be governed. Most of the adherents of the "American Party" in Britain of the 1770s were Tories, unfortunately, as they were in the "political wilderness" after the Jacobite rising in 1745. Perhaps their most famous spokesman was Edmund Burke, and it was he who made the topically pertinent statement that "when bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle".

Which can be rephrased in the words of Benjamin Franklin, when he signed the Declaration of Independence, "We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately." The 'we' in our case being those who value the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Culturally, Britain and America, and most of the countries of western Europe, are Christian. Certainly, Christianity has played a major role in shaping them and their cultures. And religion is perhaps the most important element in any culture. To quote Edmund Burke again, "man is by his constitution a religious animal", or, as Lord Acton wrote, "the first of human concerns is religion, and it is the salient feature of the modern centuries."(2)

To a Muslim it is a perversity to have a polity which does not recognise this. Indeed, to a Muslim, such a society must by its very nature be disequilibriate and so inherently unstable. We need a state, or national, religion to conform to the dictum that it is God Almighty Who is the Fount of Sovereignty - inni-l hukmu illa li-Llah - "rule belongs only to God"(3) - and earthly governments, however formed and chosen, exercise authority only as a temporary trust from Him for which they will be accountable on the Day of Judgement.

As the great Hanafi jurisprudent Radiyuddin al-Sarakhsi wrote, "al sultanu zillu-Llahi fi-l ard" ("government is the reflection of God on the earth")(4). Governments exist so to order matters at home and abroad that God may be worshipped and human beings be enabled freely to conduct their lives in ways pleasing to the Almighty.

Some acknowledgement of this situation by governments generally is looked for by Muslims. For we Muslims living in the United Kingdom the existence and role of the Established Churches - that is, the Church of England in England and the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland in Scotland - is just such an acknowledgement.

Furthermore, the fact that the Sovereign's rule is sanctified by a religious service, with its solemn oath before God, is considered by us significant in itself. "It is a solemn acknowledgement by the head of our otherwise secular state of the ultimate sovereignty of the spiritual and moral order in human affairs."(5) There is, for us, no good argument for replacing this, unless something demonstrably better can be produced. Most of us believe that the removal of Establishment from the Church of England would be followed by out-and-out (or fundamentalist) secularism, which, in its Late Twentieth Century manifestation, is a climate inimical to any religion.

Islam has always been in favour both of an established religion and of multiconfessionalism since the days when the constitution of the Seventh Century city-state of Medina embraced Muslims, Jews and Christians, as well as some non-believing Arabs and a group of "hypocrites" (munafiqoun). And the great Ottoman Empire, inheritor of the ulus of the Byzantines (or New Rome), as the Danish academic Dr Uffe Østergaard has pointed out, was never simply an "Islamic State" but was always a polyethnic, polyglot, multicultural, multiconfessional "supra nation" (al dawlatu-l 'aliyyah), with special privileges and duties for its Muslim subjects, but very conscious that it was a continuation of "New Rome".

For us there must be a Church-State Link, or rather a Religion-State Link, in order to keep in touch with Reality (Al Haqq, which is one of the Appellations of God Almighty) and the Ultimate Sovereign (Al Malik, which is another) and draw down the Divine Blessing termed by the Muslims as barakah into the society as a whole. This link need not militate against the interests of minorities or the other faith communities, providing this Church, or religion, is willing to "do the decent thing" and act as an advocate for them, and not abuse and exploit its dominant position.

As I stated in a paper on Religious Pluralism in October 1995, 'in the January 1994 issue of Political Quarterly, Dr Tariq Modood of the London-based 'think tank' the Policy Studies Institute, ably precised the Reith Lecture of the Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks,(6) while he was developing the argument that the "principal minority community" - namely, the Muslims - was against Disestablishment of the Churches of England and Scotland, and indeed preferred a clear Anglican statement in education.

Dr Modood wrote,

"Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregation, ... in his 1990 Reith Lectures [took the] minority perspective to its logical conclusion. While these lectures make some grand claims for religion, from the point of view of our interest in citizenship and equality the following argument can be extracted from them:

(i) in the context of massive but incomplete secularisation, the fate of all religions, minority and majority, hang together;

(ii) moreover, diversity requires that there be also an over-arching public culture;

(iii) if this public culture is to have religious dimension, it will be that of the premier religion, which for historical reasons is the Church of England, consequently all minorities ought to support it as a national institution."(7)

With this recognised cultural indebtedness to Christianity in all western countries, it is a matter of concern to many Muslims that the similar situation in the Muslim World is not considered legitimate, and indeed a matter for vigorous opposition. As was said by the late Turgut Özal about some of the vituperation being levelled at Alija Izetbegovic, the President of the Republic of Bosnia and Hercegovina, in 1993, "Why is it permitted for there to be a Christian as President of the United States but not for there to be a Muslim as President of Bosnia?"

Yet all the confessional communities, including the Church of Rome, all Christian denominations, non-Christian religions, and the New Religious Movements, are minorities today. This is because the "massive but incomplete secularisation" observed by Dr Sacks has made secularist fundamentalism the majority creed of the whole of western Europe.

"'Man is made to adore and to obey. But if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.' Sidonia to Coningsby.

The terrible history of the twentieth century, starting with the decline of religion, indeed of religions, into political ideologies, and of all popular, or populist movements into tyrannies based on ideologies, is in part a commentary on this insight of the prescient Disraeli. As with individuals, the state must also make its own acknowledgement of the ultimate sovereignty of spiritual and moral values or decline into self-worship, masquerading as ideology."(8)

Like the Jews and the Christians, the Muslims believe that the condition of men will deteriorate from the time of the Last Prophet to the Day of Judgement, each succeeding generation being worse than that which preceded it, known in Islam as taghayyuru-n nas, or the "metamorphosis of men". Each season has its signs, and among the signs of the Last Days is a mounting tide of Unbelief that threatens to engulf all believers. In these days the believers must work together to help each other keep faith. One Islamic description of this Unbelief is taghout, which could be translated as "an unwillingness to accept any limitations".

Every day it is more and more evident that the Zeitgeist is this taghout: the abandonment of taboos; the exceeding of all bounds in everything; the recognition of no limits to whatever one be engaged in, whether it be speculative theology, the writing of silly books that annoy Muslims or Hindus, the taking of drugs, or the indulgence of sexual fantasies. It is Disraeli's man "finding a chieftain in his own passions". Taghout is something religions are supposed to resist and lead their flocks away from: "whoever rejects untrammelledness (taghout) and believes in God has grasped the most trusty handhold that never breaks".

There is a famous Tradition of the Prophet Muhammad which states (in paraphrase) that in the Last Days, God Almighty will take up from the earth six things. The first of these is "mercy from the hearts of men" (al rahmatu min quloubi-n nas), others are "the justice of rulers" (al 'adlu-l umara) and "the dignity of the doctors of religion" (al hurmatu-l 'ulama), and "demureness from women" (al haya'u mina-n nisa).

To many Muslims the attitude of the modern West to Islam is incomprehensible. The earlier open hostility of the Churches was easier to deal with, especially as it was based on a clearly stated (and ruthlessly enforced) concept of what it was to be a Christian. The Holy Bible was Divinely inspired as a whole, and thus immutable as a source of the sacred texts which gave authority to the Churches' pronouncements. Now nothing seems to be immutable; authority has gone from the Churches' pronouncements. A great proliferation of Christian sects abounds, most of which are open heresies (according to the earlier state of Christendom). Some verses of the New Testament, which formerly were thought important theologically, have been discovered to have been wrong or even interpolated and have been dropped (too often, however, without any change in the theology that they produced). And some simply get in the way of enabling Christians to "engage with contemporary life from the perspective of their faith" as the Anglican Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Dr Michael Nazir-Ally, advised the Muslims to do in a letter to The Times. The Churches are willing to tinker with the traditional texts of the Holy Bible, suppressing, eliding, and generally "subbing out" the unfashionable and inconvenient. What none of these myriad Christian sects, the Church of England among them, is prepared to do is to rethink the traditional attitude towards Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. Indeed, we increasingly see mediaeval slanders being revived and given new currency, even in respectable publications. This is difficult for the Muslims to come to terms with.

Islam, by stretching things a lot as Muslims view the world, is nevertheless in modern Christian terms a "Christian sect" (or more probably a heresy - if such a non-progressive and exclusionist category can exist anymore - like Arianism, Pelagianism, Priscillianism, Donatism, Socianism, and all the others that didn't match up at Nicaea, Chalcedon, Constantinople, or the various Lateran and Vatican councils), with its own teachings on Jesus Christ and its own Apocrypha. It requires belief, as fundamental matters of faith, in nearly all the things that the mainstream Christian Churches demand of their followers (such as the virginity of the saintly Lady Mary the Mother of Christ, the Immaculate Conception, the Virgin Birth, the Miracles, Jesus' status as the Messiah (i.e. Christ), the Ascension, the Second Coming). Only it doesn't accept Christ's Divinity (whether as one of the Persons of a Trinity or otherwise), Original Sin, the Vicarious Atonement, the Crucifixion and Death on the Cross (which the Churches hold to have been the method of the Vicarious Atonement), and the Resurrection.

Today, a number of publicly confessed Christians denies the Virgin Birth, dismisses many of the Miracles, and is frankly agnostic about the Ascension; there are others who don't even believe in God; some, through the influence of Evolutionism, do not believe in Adam and Eve, and thus the Original Sin, whereas others simply just don't believe in Original Sin; some deny the need for belief in the Crucifixion and Resurrection, with some among them claiming that it is, in any case, not an historical event; and there are some who continue to deny the Trinity and the Divinity of Christ, holding that he was some sort of "super prophet" but certainly not God.

Yet all these are counted as acceptable "Christian" positions today by the Churches (in the past they would be, and have been, anathematised as heresies). Yet, to the mystification of the Muslims, Islam - which displays fewer such "heretical" beliefs - is not even accorded the new-found respect and legitimacy which is given to these heresies, when for centuries that is just what the Churches' propaganda identified it as being. And, at the very least, having once called the Prophet Muhammad "a renegade Cardinal", the Churches could accord him the status they give to St Paul. Or, if not that, St Augustine of Hippo. Or, if not that, St Thomas Aquinas; for, after all, the Thomist theology of the Conte d'Aquino derives largely from Islam in the first place. The courtesy of simple respect for Islam as a true and legitimate religion and for its Prophet as a genuine holy man and teacher is all that the Muslims look for.

This would be a major step in taking Islam out of the frame of demonology it has been fitted with recently, and only the Churches can give this particular lead. If they are not to abdicate completely any claim to moral authority in the Third Christian Millennium, then they must seek this rapprochement with the Muslims and Islam. It is not the believers who are trying to bring our civilisation down in a Götterdämmerung, but the secularists who will not accept the role of religion in society or the debt our cultures owe to it.

In the past, Britain and America gained much from the refugees from European persecutions and they in their turn made significant contributions to the development of the Anglo-American culture that produced the Universal Declaration. It would be a betrayal of the hopes of all those generations seeking "safe havens" if the Anglo-American world were now to take up the mantle of the persecutors of yore.

The Prophet Muhammad said in three of his Traditions, "You shall not enter The Garden until you have Faith; and you cannot attain to Faith until you love one another.(10) Have compassion on those who are on Earth, and He Who is in heaven will have compassion on you.(11) God will show no compassion to him who has no compassion toward all human beings.(12)"

References:

1. Ibsen, Henrik, Ghosts and Other Plays, (trans by R. Farquharson Sharp), Everyman's Library (ed Ernest Rhys), J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd, London 1911, p 105-6
2. Acton, the Right Hon the Lord, Lectures on Modern History, Macmillan, London, 1906 (Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History, delivered at Cambridge, June 1895)
3. Quran, Surah Yusuf 12:40
4. al-Sarakhsi, Radiyuddin, Sharhu-s Siyari-l Kabeer (Commentary on the Conduct of State), vol 1 chapter 15
5. Hailsham of St Marylebone, the Right Hon the Lord, On The Constitution, Harper Collins, London, 1992
6. Sacks, Dr Jonathan, "The Persistence of Faith: Religion, Morality and Society in A Secular Age", The Reith Lectures 1990, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1991
7. Modood, Dr Tariq, "Establishment, Multiculturalism and British Citizenship", Political Quarterly, 65 (1), London 1994, pp 53-73
8. Hailsham, op cit, p 52
9. Bible, AV/KJV, Exodus 20: 3-5
10. Muslim on the authority of Abu Hurayrah ("la tadkhulouna-l Jannata hatta tu'minou wa la tu'minou hatta tahabou")
11. Al-Tirmidhi and Abu Daoud on the authority of Abdullah ibn Amr ("urhimou man fi-l ardi yarhamukum man fi-s sama'")
12. Al-Bukhari and Muslim on the authority of Jarir ibn Abdullah ("la yarhamu-Llahu man la yarhamu-n nas")