TO GAIN BACK OUR HONOR, WE NEED TO GO BACK TO THE QURAN AND SUNNAH

If you go on the streets of Cairo and ask an average well-educated young man about the direction that Egypt should take, whether to be more liberal and follow in the footsteps of the West or to be more conservative and follow in the footsteps of the Muslims of the Golden Age, he will most likely reply that Egypt should follow in the footsteps of the West because we live in the 21st century. In fact, that is the response most Muslims will give. We live in 2014, so we can not follow something that is 1400 years old. We need to change it and modify it to fit our times and situations.

I will not try to argue from a religious point of view. I will not quote hadiths or Quranic verses to make my case that the way to move forward as Muslims is to cling to our past. I will simply use the demise of the Ottoman empire and the demise of our Caliphate to make my case. As the Ottoman Empire started leaving the Quran and Sunnah, it became "the sick man of Europe" and eventually diminished along with the Caliphate.

The basis of the Ottoman empire in the 1300s was Sharia (a political system based on the Quran and Sunnah). It prided itself in following the Quran and Sunnah. As it grew in size and might, it eventually assumed the position of defending Islam and the position of the Caliphate. It gave refuge to persecuted Christians and Jews, followed Shariah in giving them their rights and place in Ottoman society. The empire swelled in size and might, conquered half of Europe and controlled most of Muslim lands. It was the ultimate super power of the world.

However, things started to change in the 1800s for the Ottoman Empire. In the face of rising European powers like Spain, England and Germany, many within the government of the Ottomans began to question the direction in which the Empire should head. The influentials amongst the government proposed that in order to be more powerful than the Europeans, the Empire needed to be more European.

Soon, came the Tanzimat reforms that basically abolished Shariah law from the Empire. The ideology at the time was that if you get rid of religion in general, just like the Europeans, you will become more successful. Some of the changes included: government workers wore European-styled uniforms, military troops came only from Turkish descent, secular courts replaced Islamic judges, a finance system based on the French model, legalization of homosexuality, enforcement of an “Ottoman” identity instead of unique cultural identities, and the reform of the educational system to be based on a science/technology curriculum instead of traditional subjects such as Quran, Islamic studies, and poetry. There was an overall attempt to remove Islam from the government and public life.

All of these changes took place in the 19th century leading up to World War I in the early 20th century. And we all know what happened during and shortly after the war. The Caliphate was abolished, Palestine in British/Zionist control, and all of the Middle East divided up by different European nations, while Russia took the Bulkans.

Umar Ibn al-Khattab, the second Rightly Guided Caliph, once said:

“We were the most humiliated people on earth and Allah gave us honor through Islam. If we ever seek honor through anything else, Allah will humiliate us again.”

This is exactly what happened to the Ottomans. They tried to seek glory and power in something other than Islam and in return the entire empire along with the Caliphate (that ran continuously for 1300 years) was abolished. So, to say that we need to keep chasing secularism and leave Islam to gain back our glory as Muslims, is pure insanity. History has proven to us that this approach does not work. And if we do not learn from history, we are nothing but madmen.



Credit: Lost Islamic History, lostislamichistory.com

A CASE FOR RELIGION PROMOTING SCIENCE

When we think of science and religion, thoughts of Galileo and the Catholic church ignite in our heads. Thoughts of the church burning books and imprisoning great thinkers haunt us. We think of the "Dark Ages," when little to no advancement in science or culture was made. So naturally, we conclude that science and religion can not co-exist. If we want a religious society, we must avoid science, and if we want a free thinking society, we must leave religion.

However, the concept of science and religion being incompatible is uniquely a Western problem. For the bulk of Christian Europe, science was suppressed. It has only been about 400 years that scientists and philosophers freely, to a certain extent, think. However, this was not the situation in the rest of the world, especially in Muslim and Asian lands. For most of Muslim history, science was promoted by their religion.

The problem with us, Westerners, is that we view every culture and society through the lens of our own history. Since science and religion did not work out in the West, it should not work in the rest of the world either.

Many Western Muslims are confused by this dilemma as well. That in order to be a critically thinking person, we must leave Islam and follow the West into "separation of church and state."

However, if we analyze Muslim history and its contribution to human civilization, we realize that Muslims need Islam to become a productive civilization again. From the 7th century to the 18th century, Muslims had the most powerful empires; the greatest scientists, philosophers, engineers and doctors, while at the same time being extremely devout to their religion.

Muslims produced the greatest Islamic scholars along with the greatest scientific scholars. While one scholar codified Islamic jurisprudence, another scholar created the numerical digits that we use today. They all worked side by side and complimented one another, a relationship that was to be found nowhere else in the world.

All of this was going on while Europe had little to no progress. Spaniards and Frenchmen would travel to Muslim empires to seek knowledge and bring it back to their home lands. Interestingly, today it is the other way around. The only difference is that the West is not religious. It is extremely secular, just like the Muslims were extremely religious.

However, this form of scholarship and knowledge would eventually vanish from Muslim lands. Why? Because Muslims left Islam. In my next post I will dive into this topic more. When the Ottomans adopted a policy of secularism, it perished in scholarship and economic might, and the entire empire eventually crumbled, creating problems that we (Americans) still deal with today in the Middle East. Stay tuned!