ISLAM AND ARABIAN CULTURE

One obsession of our modernists is to convince their audience that the Islamic way of life has no connection with Arabian culture, especially the Arabic language. In their opinion, the spread of the classical Arabic of the Quran and Arabic as official language of all Muslim lands would not in any sense contribute to the cause of Islam! Perhaps they would prefer that Muslims adopt English and the Latin alphabet as more beneficial since, after all, English is a universal language and Islam a universal religion. Such is the modernist mind at work!

Some of them badly confuse the issue by doubting the desirability of Muslim converts adopting Arabic names. Only a confirmed modernist could do this. In support of their argument, they will point to such famous converts as Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, the esteemed translator of the Quran into its English meaning, and insist he was a good Muslim even though, with the sole addition of “Muhammad” he retained his English name. There is no doubt that Marmaduke Pickthall was a good Muslim, much less can his considerable services to the cause of Islam in the Western world be questioned regardless of the name he chose for himself. However, the question here is not only what is merely permissible but what is best. Although, according to the Shariah, it may be perfectly permissible for a Muslim to retain a non-Arabic name, is it not nevertheless preferable for the convert to assume a complete Muslim name with the intention of severing all traces of any previous identification with a non-Islamic way of life? The same is true in regard to dress.

69 vert to assume a complete Muslim name with the intention of severing all traces of any previous identification with a non-Islamic way of life? The same is true in regard to dress.

A practicing Muslim who wore the Western mode of dress before the introduction of the present, tight, “teddy” fashion may not necessarily have violated any specific injunction of the Shariah.

So long as his clothing was modest and decent, it was quite all right.

But even if that is the case, would it not be far better if out of love for the Holy Prophet, he would prefer the same kind of clothes to follow the Sunnah and above all, the Hadith which warn believers never to copy the dress or the manners of the unbelievers?

All which our Holy Prophet approved and recommended is Sunnah and this Sunnah includes even such things as many people eating with fingers out of a single dish, sitting and sleeping on mats or rugs on the floor, beards, robes, turbans and Arabic language.

To be sure such practices are not obligatory or “farz” as Salat, fasting in Ramadan, Zakat or Haj and merely to fail to live in this manner may not in itself be any sin, but to ridicule and scorn this as fit only for primitive beduins of seventh-century Arabia and to uphold Western ways as superior is to scorn and ridicule the Sunnah of the Holy Prophet. And how can one who has contempt for anything the Holy Prophet did, consider himself a good Muslim?

The issue at stake is: what is the motive of these people for belittling the importance of the “Arabian”

70 elements in Islam? It is these so-called “Arabian” characteristics which give to Islam its distinctive identity and culture. This is just what the modernizers object to so strenuously. The purpose of the modernist movement is to tear from Islam as much as possible that will not outrage the unwary. Thus they attempt to strip from Islam its flesh down to the bare bones (and they would take away the bones too, if they could!); attack all those aspects of Islam which impart concrete distinctiveness and cultural independence from divergent ways of life and insist that Islam is nothing but a few general principles. Thus Islam is tolerance, brotherhood, good-will and world peace; Islam is socialism, nationalism, welfare state, liberalism, rationalism, pragmatism, humanism and material progress. So flexible, so eclectic is the “Islam” of the modernists that it can be anything and everything. And if Islam can be anything, then it is nothing! And this is precisely what they are aiming at!

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