A CRITIQUE OF ISLAM IN MODERN HISTORY

¹The theme of this book is the author’s analysis of the reaction of Muslim intellectuals in the Arab world, Turkey, Pakistan and India to the challenges of twentieth century civilization.

Wilfred Cantwell Smith clearly regards the creation of Pakistan as a mistake.

He chides the Pakistanis for idealizing the past.

He says: “It is impossible, indeed meaningless, to try to reproduce in one age, the government of another. Pakistan cannot relive a segment of the history of Arabia.”

The author paints a bright future for the Muslims who remained in India:

In 1930, Hussain Ahmad Madani, pronouncing India to be the nation of its Muslims, provoked from Muhammad Iqbal a scornful retort in poetry that a Muslim can have no other nation than Islam. Recent events have at least begun to dislodge this conviction.

The Indian Muslims have seen law and order prevail.

They have seen how police have stopped fanatical Hindu riots against them and how the government has prevented the conversion of a mosque into a Hindu temple.

They find themselves free to practice and preach their religion. Not much reflection is needed to realize that the welfare of the Muslims in India depends on a secular state. Whatever traditional theology may say, secularism works. As a result, relatively few Indian Muslims still cling to the Islamic state idea.

24 Wilfred Cantwell Smith cannot accept the fact that Islam is more than a system of belief and ritual, but a complete way of life which both in theory and practice is absolutely irreconcilable with Hindu culture.

To judge Pakistan as a mistake just because there has been some corruption in the government and controversy as to what form a modern Islamic state should take, completely misses the point. In order for Islamic civilization to find full expression in that part of the world, there had to be a Pakistan. Even if the Pakistani Muslims have failed to make the most of their potentialities, the opportunity for them to do so still exists which is lacking in India.

The author, however, reserves his harshest criticism for the Arabs.

He brands them as unrealistic reactionaries and isolationists who are unjustified in feeling that the West is out to crush Islam. He chides the ulema of Al-Azhar for hesitating to compromise the doctrines of Islam in order to make them more compatible with Western ideas. That the Arabs have failed to produce a Thomas Paine or a Voltaire, he regards as one of their major shortcomings.

The only Muslim people for which the author seems to have any real sympathy are the Turks.

As is well known under Kemal Ataturk, the Khalifate, the Shariah 25 the Arabic alphabet and the Muslim calendar were abolished.

As if all this radical surgery were not enough, religious organizations were banned, Muslim universities forcibly closed and major mosques like Aya Sophia were converted into museums.

“Already,” he says, “during the 1920’s, sweeping changes in the ceremonies of Islam, including its prayer-ritual and mosque services were being officially discussed.” This included, among other things, the elimination of Arabic and the prayer prostrations as well as the introduction into the mosque of pews and a choir singing Western-style hymns to the accompaniment of an organ.

“By what religious authority, it may well be asked, did they proceed to do this? The modernist Turk proceeds on the authority of the revolution.”

Yet Kemal Ataturk was an apostate who could not boast enough of his atheism.

But the author, ignoring this fact, continues to argue, “Certainly the Turks have not renounced Islam but reviewed it. They feel that if Islam is to be acceptable to the educated, modern man, it will have to be expressed in an entirely different way.”

The result has not only been the repudiation by Turkish intellectuals of the Shariah but also a feeling of isolation and a lack of identification with the rest of the Islamic world.

On few subjects are modernist Turks so emphatic as asserting that pan-Islam is dead.

And on no questions are their emotions so quick as in disclaiming any religious involvement with the modern Arabs 26 who are to many of them repellent and contemptible, to say the least. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that some Turks consider Arab Muslims much as an American Protestant might look down upon an Ethiopian Copt—politically irrelevant and religiously benighted.

Any suggestion that the new faculty of theology at Ankara would be another Azhar is either laughable or shocking.

Rather they intend it to compare with the Union Theological Seminary at Harvard.

The author declares that if a Martin Luther were to appear, he would get a ready hearing among the educated classes in Turkey.

The assumption here, he says, is not a question of becoming Christian, but rather of being modern instead of medieval.

The spirit of modern Western civilization is so hostile to religion that even Christianity has fared miserably. Today, in most of Europe and America, Christianity, especially the Protestant faith, is remote from the daily life of its adherents who only occasionally go to church to pay it lip service.

Yet this seems to be the only future that Wilfred Cantwell Smith can suggest as desirable for Islam.

A case can be made that divisions between different civilizations are no longer valid and that modern civilization, though it first made its appearance in the West, is spreading throughout the world and superseding all other cultural patterns. Modern secularism is therefore no longer distinctively Western but has 27 become a universal trend which all civilizations are in the process of assimilating. As a result, the mundane welfare of the Muslim peoples will increasingly depend on social progress independent of religious considerations. Secularism must be religiously tolerated. If the Muslims resist this Caesar-God dichotomy, they are doomed.

In other words, Muslims must destroy their faith if they are to preserve it! According to this same sinister reasoning, the sophisticated Turkish intellectuals who frankly repudiate the teachings of the Qur’an, the authority of the Sunnah and abandon the Shariah, not only in practice but also as an ideal towards which to strive, can rightfully claim to possess the true Islam!

Wilfred Cantwell Smith likes to have himself regarded by Muslims as a sympathetic student of Islam. He claims his observations to be objective, but a careful reading of this book by any sincere, thinking Muslim, will clearly reveal the abysmal depths of his hostility.

Unfortunately, his thinking represents the views of the majority of orientalists both in my country and abroad. Their basic enmity towards Islam differs from that of the old fashioned Christian missionary only in that it is expressed in a much more subtle way.