An Open System
In our last we reproduced at length the report of the Pakistan Finance Minister’s address at the International Islamic Economic Conference at Karachi. Some of the points brought out in that address, touching upon the polity and economy of Islam, strike the very core of the teachings of Islam and must form the guiding principles of the reconstruction of Pakistan. The first and foremost of these points, the most vital and yet the most missed point is that Islam is not a static system, a fixed rigid quantum that permits of no change and as such is incapable of keeping pace with the march of time and adapting itself to the changed and fast changing conditions of the world. The finance minister rightly said:
”Islam too brought into being a socialistic system of distinctive stamp and adopted ways and means that were practicable in the situations which it had to handle. But the way towards infinite further development was kept open. Islam did chalk out a system of life, but it was an open system with ample room for progressive adaptation to circumstances.”
This sums up the profound wisdom of Islam, one of the greatest beauties of its teachings – this quality of elasticity, progressiveness, motion, change, adaptability.
We wish to emphasise this because to our mind the theologians of Islam during the period of decadence fostered just the opposite frame of mind and thereby did incalculable harm to the cause of social, political, economic, and intellectual progress of the Millat of Islam. Whereas the West, thanks to the spark of Islamic inspiration of free inquiry and investigation which penetrated in those lands through Muslim Spain, threw off the yoke of the Church which had banned all intellectual activity and barred the way to progress, and was taking stride after stride in the domain of sciences and arts, capturing the forces of nature and harnessing them to their service, the Ulema of Islam kept the Muslim mind practically locked by denouncing free inquiry as damnation. Past-worship (taqlid) was considered highest virtue. As recently as our own times, the great Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, the Seer of Aligarh, had to face a whole storm of the Mulla fury for daring to advocate Western education. Till only the other day the venerable Ulema of Mecca, the custodians of that fountainhead from which flowed whole streams of knowledge, arts, sciences, light and learning, moved heaven and earth when the Saudi Government wanted to install telephone system there. It must be the work of the devil, they argued, if a man talking from a distance of hundreds of miles could be heard at the other end. When however one of them was made to put the receiver to his ear while at the other end someone was made to recite a passage from the Quran, the Ulema had to revise their opinion; for the devil is supposed to be incapable of reciting the Word of God.
It is not for nothing that the Communists hurl at men of religion the taunt that religion is the opiate of the masses. Islam itself which was but another name for breaking all shackles, both on the mind and body of men, which was a spur to intellectual activity and a spirit of adventure and enterprise was converted by our Ulema into a dope, inducing sleepiness, inertia and inactivity. The mind of Islam was sealed, so to speak—jammed. The result was inevitable. The Western nations who took the Islamic spark of quest and enterprise to their heart progressed by leaps and bounds, won ascendancy in the world and dominated us politically, economically and intellectually.
The finance minister has thus struck a very vital chord and if Pakistan and other Islamic countries are to take their rightful place in the march of life, they must reorient their conception of Islam and cease to consider it something tied up to the chariot wheel of the past. They must remember that Islam is a progressive force, it is motion—ever onward motion. Stagnation is the direct negation of Islam. Islam is another name for being on the march, incessant march, ever onward march. This is the law of all life. And this exactly is Islam.
Unfortunately, the idea of the finality of prophethood and that of the Quranic revelation have been misconstrued so as to foster this stagnant frame of mind. The Holy Prophet Muhammad (peace on him) was the last of the prophets because he unfettered the mind of humanity from every extraneous pressure and threw open the floodgates of unlimited quest and inquiry before it. No more prophets were needed because man was thrown upon his own intellectual resources to seek, pursue and shape his own destiny the light of the Quranic revelation. This revelation is final in the sense that it opens up all possible vistas of thought and life before man that it indicates the main outlines which the development of human life, social, economic and in every other sphere, must follow—not in the sense that it has banged the door to all progress and development. The Quran is a perfect code of life, the Iast word on wisdom pertaining to the regulation of human life on healthy lines because it lays down all the basic principles that are essential for social well-being and progress. But the application of those principles to the ever-changing set-up of conditions is a never-ending progress. By a strange twist, however, or intellectual perversion, this greatest beauty of the Islamic system was converted by a narrow-visioned class of theologians into a clog on the free play of the Muslim mind and his progress in the race of life.
Nothing could be a more perverted view of Islam than to attribute finality or perfection to it in the sense of rigidity, inflexibility, and stagnation. The writer remembers the very forceful way in which Allama Iqbal once repudiated this conception of perfection during one of the frequent evening talks which he had the occasion to have with this great thinker of our day. Perfection in the sense of having attained a fixed point of excellence, however high, the Allama explained, meant stagnation and stagnation meant decay, and deterioration. God Himself, he said, waxing eloquent on the point, could not be attributed the idea of “perfection” in this sense – the sense of having come to a stand-still at a certain point. The Quranic conception of a Godhead was:
کُلَّ یَوْمٍ ھُوَ فِیْ شَاْنٍ
” Every day He has a new glory”
Iqbal was a very strong advocate of the principle of motion and change. Progress from old to ever new, according to him, was the principle of life and the basic urge of the Quranic message. He strongly advocated that the door of ijtihad was open for all time to come and urged on the enlightened Ulema to re-write the Fiqah in the light of modern conditions. Maulana Muhammad All for whose writings on Islam he had a great respect was specially pressed many times by the Allama to undertake this work and supply this crying need of the day. The whole of his poetry which is rightly said to be steeped in the spirit of the Quran is a burning passion for change, more change and yet more change. In his poetic flights his fascination of this innate urge of life carries him to the limit of accosting God Himself with the plaint:
طرح نو افگن کہ ما جدت پسند افتادہ ایم
این چہ حیرت خانہ ئی امروز و فردا ساختی
” Fashion a new way, for I am a lover of the new!
What is this wonder house of today and tomorrow that Thou hast made?”
The finance minister is not supposed to be a scholar of Islam but he has shown a wonderful grasp of the very core of Islam in bringing in his address this basic principle of adaptability in the system of Islam to bear upon the solution of the various problems that are just now facing Pakistan – problems of land-tenure, of socialization, of Islam’s position vis-à-vis democracy-cum-communist struggle for world domination. He rightly emphasizes that Islam is not tied up to the apron strings of a dead past, nor is it going to be a “camp-follower” of any new-fangled ideologies from the West, that in the light of the Quranic revelation whose sole purpose is to advance the well-being of human society, the world of Islam must learn to stand on its own legs and face life on its own. What is still most amazing is that in his faith that the West itself is coming round and adopting bit by bit the Islamic way of life he is speaking in right Ahmadiyya strain. It is this Movement alone, the vanguard of progressive Islamic thought, which raised this very cry full half a century ago and actually planted the flag of Islam in the heart of the West, as it were, by opening-missions at Woking, Berlin and several other centres in Europe and America. To us naturally the Finance Minister’s note of hope, optimism and faith in the ultimate triumph of Islam over all other ideologies is doubly welcome. It is the correct Quranic note, long forgotten and neglected by Muslims and it is a happy sign of the times that enlightened and eminent men are now opening their eyes to this high Divinely ordained destiny of Islam. It is in this burning glowing faith in Islam, as Mr. Ghulam Muhammad has rightly emphasized, that lies the best guarantee of the future greatness and glory of Pakistan.
Mohammad Yaqub Khan
Friday, December 16,1949.
(This article was provided courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., USA)
