Unawareness of
the Modern Age

Rational investigation in the modern age is based on empirical realities that are very useful for Islam based on firmly established truths. Had the Ulama understood Western thought deeply, they would have welcomed it instead of becoming its enemy.

In November 1967, I wrote an article, titled Daur-e Jadeed ko Jaanne ki Zarurat (Need for Understanding the Modern Age), was published in the Urdu weekly al-Jamiat. In it, I pointed out that:

The revolution in thought and action that has overtaken the world has produced many challenges for Islam. However, it is such a tragedy that while the ummah has been faced with this serious situation for a long time, no serious efforts have been made to understand the modern problems.

In 1894, the Nadwatul Ulama, Lucknow, appointed a committee consisting of leading Indian Ulama whose task was to suggest sensible reforms in the madrasa curriculum. On this occasion, Maulana Shah Muhammad Husain noted:

One fault of the current curriculum [the Dars-e-Nizami] is that it does not give us any course of action to counter modern philosophy that is today attacking Islam. Hence, I think it is appropriate that a book about modern philosophy should be prepared, and this can easily be done by requesting a Muslim who has received a good education in modern philosophy and English [to write this book]. He can scan the anti-Islamic issues of modern philosophy, translate them into Urdu, and present them to the Nadwatul Ulama. The Nadwatul Ulama can write a reply to them and introduce this in the [madrasa] syllabus, and students can study this during their holidays or in their free time.

Around a century has passed since this suggestion was made, but it has yet to become a reality. In this period, the Nadwatul Ulama claims to have made significant progress, but, surprisingly, this book suggested by Maulana Shah Muhammad Husain around a hundred years ago remains absent from its curriculum.

Ten years before the Partition of India, Maulana Abul Ala Maududi wrote a book titled, Tajdid-o-Ihya-e-Din (The Renewal and Revival of Islam). Surveying the failure of Islamic movements, from that of Shah Waliullah to that led by Shah Ismail in the early 19th century, he contended:

Sayyed Ahmad Shahid and Shah Ismail Shahid rose to launch an Islamic Revolution. However, they did not send a delegation of accomplished Ulama to Europe to study the secret of the power and progress of that community that was spreading as fast as a storm, using new instruments, new resources, new methods, and new sciences and arts. They never thought of finding what sort of institutions had been established in its homeland, what forms of knowledge it possessed, the pillars of its civilisation, and what, in contrast to it, we [Muslims] lacked. (Tajdid-o-Ihya-e-Din, 1999, Lahore, p. 128)

Sentiments of this sort have been repeatedly voiced for a long time now, yet not a single Muslim religious scholar of note has so far travelled to the West with the specific purpose of doing this sort of research. Nor has any such scholar studied Western literature in-depth with this goal in mind. In recent years, some Ulama has indeed got the opportunity to travel to Europe and America, but these visits had nothing to do with the sort of research we are talking about here. All the Ulama who go to Europe or America, do not go there in the true sense of the term. They simply travel to meet some Muslims living in Europe or America. Once there, they do not establish any real connections with the Western world or study the conditions prevailing there.

Take the instance of two books to understand this point further. The Egyptian Islamist activist Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966) penned a work titled, The America I Have Seen, and the Indian Muslim religious scholar Maulana Abul Hasan Ali Nadvi (d. 1999) authored a travelogue in Urdu titled Do Mahiney Amreeka Mein (Two Months in America). Despite what their titles might suggest, both these books have nothing to do with any in-depth study of American life. If someone reads Maulana Nadvi’s book, he will be stunned that the author spends two whole months in America, but he does not meet a single American in this long period, nor does he study any American institution to understand the American philosophy of life.

If someone were to read these books, he might well gain some superficial and negative impressions about America, but he will obtain absolutely no idea of the secret of American power or the heritage of thought on which America’s ideological structure is based.

The bare fact is that the present-day Ulama have absolutely no understanding of Western thought. Our Ulama has a wrong picture of Westerners based on incorrect information, just as the old Orientalists had a bad image of Islam. For instance, it is said that Westerners are ‘believers in Reason alone’, that they are advocates of unrestricted freedom of thought, and that, as a Muslim scholar once quipped, “The creed of the Western man is: ‘nothing exists except for Reason.’” However, this is a very wrong interpretation of Western rationality. The Westerners regard research-based thinking, rather than uncontrolled thinking, as the basis of Reason. In the olden days, people used to think and argue using religious arguments. However, in the modern age, the bases for philosophical investigations are not the preconceived hypotheses of any belief or ideological system but, instead, actual, empirical realities. This understanding of rationality is beneficial because Islam is based on firmly established truths. Had the Ulama understood Western thought deeply, they would have considered it worthwhile and welcomed it. However, they became its enemies based on very superficial knowledge, heaping scorn on it.