ISLAMS GIFTS TO THE WORLD [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Islam Today?

By Sayyid Mujtaba Musavi Lari

What has happened to us, the heirs of so brilliant and
magnificent a civilisation? What has reduced us to our
present living conditions? Why have we ceded the hegemony
of our world to others? What has caused the decline in
our culture, in our science and our political power? What
stopped our progress in its tracks? Why have we yielded
our leadership in manufactures and science to Westerners
so that we now need them where they once needed us? Why
must Muslims, with all their splendid past in East and
West, hang their heads in the modern world?

It was not blowing our own trumpet or banging our own
drum that raised Islam to world pre-eminence in its time.
It was our culture, our remarkable spiritual and social
revolution. Shame that we should waste our strength in
conflicts amongst ourselves and in internecine
tugs-of-war which have reduced the glory of Unity to an
empty phoneme.

A strong nation can only be built on firm principles
of manners, morals, order - sole sources of progress.
Islam never owed its power to cannons and tanks and
weapons but to the pre-eminence in thought amongst its
Ulema, in character amongst its peoples and in following
the guidance of God on the good road (for which we pray
in the Fatihe 17 times a day), the road of
justice, fellowship, brotherhood.

History demonstrates unmistakably that whenever the
Muslims have constructed their philosophy of life in the
spirit of the teachings revealed to them by Heaven, they
have prospered : and whenever they have deserted those
teachings, adversity and misfortune have been visited
upon them. The Muslims who founded the brilliant culture
and social wellbeing of the past followed those teachings
more closely than we do, individual, society and nation
alike.

The sun of culture shone while just measure and
proportion was given to science, thought, matter and
spirit. When we deserted those, the banner of endeavour,
diligence and combat for right fell from our hands, only
to be grabbed by the West in self- aggrandisement.

Where is the old Muslim sincerity: integrity, honesty
and truthfulness? These were once the fences on either
side of our path. When we transgressed across them we
were lost in a trackless desert, and abandoned the holy
calling, announced as God's purpose for us, of leading
mankind to live as God wills. Abandoning that destiny, we
sank in the quicksands of corruption, ignorance and
wretchedness which engulf us today. Yet a truly united
Islam could return to that heavenly vocation and lead
mankind's feet on to the spiritual road. This would be a
blessing for all.

Napoleon's companion in exile on the island of St.
Helena wrote: In Egypt Napoleon constantly repeated
his amazement at the blessings which the Prophet of Islam
and her other great men in history had brought to the
foreign lands they took under their sway. He looked with
hope to Islam as the force which might again confer such
blessings on the world, even saying: I think I will
take up Islam as my religion'.

A true Islamic society would be very different from
that which obtains anywhere in the world. Its thinking
and its living must once again incarnate those heavenly
principles of its inception. As the poet said:

Islam's pure truth's from spot
or blemish free:

Our Muslims blame for any fault you
see.

To take its full share in that moral and spiritual
revolution which must come to the entire world, Islam
must orient itself in today's global realities. It must
then undertake those internal reforms which will be its
restitution for past backwardness. It must balance
spiritual and material conditions in the right proportion
in accordance with those principles of perfection which
shaped the glories of its past and which are dictated by
the Lord of both worlds - this one and the next. In these
it will find, not merely its own internal stability, but
also the secret of stability for the world and the way to
mediate it to all mankind.