Sad Message on a Happy Day !

Daily Times, January 11, 2006
EDITORIAL: Hajj: sad message again on a happy day

Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al Sheikh, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, delivered the Hajj sermon at Masjid al Nimra in Arafat on Monday. He urged the Muslims of the world to close ranks and unite against campaigns targeting Islam and Muslims. “You, Muslims, should work to cement your unity. You should work to develop economic, political and military means to defend yourselves against attacks by your enemies.” He said terrorism was not allowed in Islam and those who sought to link it to Islam were guilty of an unforgivable conspiracy against the Muslims. He regretted the state of “subjugation” of the Muslims at the hands of a few states and declared that the economically advanced West had “given nothing but grief to the Muslims”.

The Sheikh said that the Muslims’ failure to forge unity had allowed the enemies of Islam to bully Muslims: “Several anti-Islam campaigns have been launched in the name of combating terrorism. These campaigns are malicious and aimed only at targeting Islam and Muslims.” He also called for respecting the rights of women and “holding judges and judicial authorities in high esteem”.

Like last year, the message was downbeat. In fact, one can’t remember if there ever was a happy message given to the Muslims on the occasion of their two Eids when they deserve to be encouraged with an affirmative view of life. As for the content of the message, much of it should have been shown first to an expert of international relations and modern statecraft.

But sadly, the inclination towards handing out this baleful message about the current state of affairs is routine with the Muslim clergy. No one among the clerics of Pakistan knows how to avoid threatening people and give them a positive view of their lives instead. If you ask an economist, he will not agree with the clergy about the fundamental indicators of Muslim life in the 20th century. The political scientist will not agree that the Muslims are subjugated. He will instead point out that in the middle of the last century most Muslim nations were freed from the yoke of colonialism and given a chance to live in their own sovereign states and make their own decisions about how they wanted to live. On the issue of terrorism, a Muslim political observer would have told the Sheikh to keep in mind that there was a disagreement over the definition of terrorism and that there would be problems of comprehension if he was challenged over what he was saying. Also, his assertion that the West had given “nothing but grief” to the Muslims was a half-truth, embarrassing in its reductionism to any educated person.

There is a difficulty however which the Muslims must ponder, preferably without the tutelage of the clergy, and that is that, in comparison to the development indicators among non-Muslim nations, Muslim states have not done well in the past 50 years. The backwardness manifest in the following picture has to be interpreted by the social scientists of the Muslim world and not a cleric who can think only in terms of military dominance and will be satisfied only if the Muslims overcome their “weakness” with the sword and conquer other nations they perceive as the enemies of Islam.

There are 1.44 billion Muslims in a world of 6.47 billion. That makes them 22.24 percent of the world population. Muslims produce 70 percent of the world’s oil and gas. But their share in the world GDP is only five percent. And their share in world exports is only seven percent. They trade among themselves only up to 13 percent. There are four big Muslim countries: Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria and Bangladesh. They make up 46 percent of the world’s Muslim population. In terms of perception of corruption, out of a list of 158 countries, Bangladesh is 158th, Nigeria 152nd, Pakistan 144th, and Indonesia 137th. There is not a single Muslim country among the world’s 25 most ‘clean’ countries. Out of the 19 most ‘corrupt’ countries of the world, nine are Muslim.

But a cleric is the last person to interpret these facts and give us the solution. With our experience over the past centuries, we know what he is going to say. Over and over again, his message has been heard in great collective depression, but his advice has carried hardly any practical value. One conceptual issue that the “literalist” cleric will never understand is the difference between ethic and worship. Ethic is related to work and has nothing to do with religion. Excessive clerical emphasis on ritual and a total disregard for work ethic has compounded the difficulty of running an economically efficient state. Clerical refusal to reconsider the old laws of fiqh stands in the way of modern commerce; and “clever” foreign banks are allowed to diddle the pious Muslims out of real profit through the heela (subterfuge) of Islamic banking.

The Sheikh of Mecca has paid lip-service to the rights of Muslim women, but if you were to engage him in serious legal reform to ease the situation for them, he would not take a minute to quote the relevant hadith and consign them all to hell. One great curse of the Islamic world is the social and legal disabilities placed on half of its population. In Pakistan, for instance, three reports by “special commissions” on the rights of women under the Constitution have recommended the removal of Hudood laws but the “literalism” of the clergy and their followers will not let the dreaded anti-women Hudood be replaced with the equally valid system of Islamic ta’zeer.

And why are the Muslims intellectually backward? Because they proliferate in numbers, thinking that Islam bans contraception, and are unable to educate themselves. The Sheikh was wrong when he bemoaned the military weakness of the Muslims. The Muslims are not militarily weak (they even have a nuclear bomb); they suffer from weakness of the mind. The education they get is mostly indoctrination they would be better off without. The bleak picture presented at Arafat was bleak only because the clerical worldview behind it was not informed with knowledge the new generation Saudi Arabia has acquired in recent years. Why not get a young Saudi social scientist to vet the speech before the Sheikh is allowed to read it? This will break the monotony and might well communicate something useful to the Muslims of the world.