SHEDDING POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Mohammad Yaqub Khan
Editor : The Light

“He it is who raised among the illiterates an Apostle from among themselves, who recites to them, His communications and purifies them, and teaches them the Book and the Wisdom although they were before certainly in clear error.”

هُوَ ٱلَّذِى بَعَثَ فِى ٱلْأُمِّيِّـۧنَ رَسُولًا مِّنْهُمْ يَتْلُوا۟ عَلَيْهِمْ ءَايَـٰتِهِۦ وَيُزَكِّيهِمْ 

وَيُعَلِّمُهُمُ ٱلْكِتَـٰبَ وَٱلْحِكْمَةَ وَإِن كَانُوا۟ مِن قَبْلُ لَفِى ضَلَـٰلٍ مُّبِينٍ

(Al-Jumuah (Friday) Ch. 62, Verse 2)

ISLAM like all religions coming from God was primarily and mainly an appeal to the spirit, the moral sense, and to the intellect of man, as is evident from the verse quoted above. As such it was an appeal to the individual self of man and had no tradition or culture as it is called so far as the Arab mind was concerned, when it was first preached in the desert lands of Arabia. The opposition of the pagans, however, made it into a cause and the cause gradually assumed a political status as it had to. It started on a carrier of conquest, moral and spiritual, as much as cultural and political. For centuries there was no power on earth that could resist its onward march. This achievement and the memories of this historical experience, naturally, became, in course of time, a part of a Muslim’s very being. Without meaning to be unpatriotic we may even safely assert that this political consciousness, after a lapse of time, over-shadowed his original religious consciousness.

All that can be said in extenuating the gravity of this lapse is that Muslims are not alone in this. It has been the common fate of all religions that started with similar objectives. As we stand today, we appear to the world and we are in fact, a political nation with all the implications of this term in this age of ours.

It seems however, time has come for Muslims to shed their political consciousness or at least to throw it in the background as much as they can. True, a people that has been gathering this political consciousness for pretty near one and a half thousand years will find it difficult to empty its mind of those innumerable memories of historical achievements that have become the warp and woof of its traditions; and it may even wonder if it can at all be done. But it seems to be a decree of fate that they must do it at all costs and this obviously to fulfil their mission to the world.               

Since their first reverses in their bid for world supremacy in competition with the “Christians in the Iberian Peninsula, the Muslims have been fighting throughout these centuries a losing battle, so to speak, everywhere in the world. They have been increasingly tasting the bitterness of humiliation, frustration and political setbacks. Indeed, a point was reached in this struggle when it seemed to the world as if Muslims had ceased to exist and together with them the faith they professed. The flickering political glory of the “sick man of Europe” was finally liquidated by the Western powers sitting in council – and that was, it was a thought, the end of Islam in the world.

Fortunately, however, so far this vanquishment had been at the hands of a nation that was a world power, possessing a world culture and as such had some measure of chivalry and broad-visioned tolerance. As a result of this not only did Turkey survive this death warrant against its political existence but even in India where two centuries of British Christian rule had done all that it could, to mischievously pervert the Muslim history, it had yet left the Muslims a large measure of freedom not only to keep alive their meagre political memory, in their relics and monuments but also to somehow maintain their institutions and culture in existence.

It seems, however, that a harder blow was reserved for them to teach them a yet harder lesson. Since the partition of erstwhile India, the fate of half the Muslim population of this sub-continent bas fallen into the hands of a nation whose peculiar standard of political conduct does not allow any other culture and tradition to exist within its sway. The 45 million of Muslims in Bharat, therefore, are not to retain their language and culture, their tradition and institutions, if they are to live in that state. That is the decision of the ruling class of Bharat. They must abjure their entire culture and shake off their historical memory if they are to exist at all. Herein evidently is the lesson in its extreme form that Providence seems bent upon imparting to the Muslims of the world in general and to the Muslims of the neighbouring state of Pakistan in particular.

God speaks to His Prophets and Awliya in revealed words and he speaks to us – ordinary mortals, through events that happen inspite of our efforts to the contrary. It is not fatalism but a reading of facts and acknowledging what actually exists. Certainly, this awful political helplessness of our own kith and kin across the border with all the monuments of our political glory before their very eyes has a lesson for us, however grim.

If we look back in history we shall find a situation similar to this confronting another historical nation in the world. The Jews in Egypt under the atrocious rule of Pharaoh were in a state of helplessness not vary dissimilar to the condition of our co-religionists in India. The Prophet leader of the nation at that time received from God an instruction for this nation that should act as a beacon light to us in this present dismal situation. The instruction reads,

وَأَوْحَيْنَآ إِلَىٰ مُوسَىٰ وَأَخِيهِ أَن تَبَوَّءَا لِقَوْمِكُمَا بِمِصْرَ بُيُوتًا وَٱجْعَلُوا۟ بُيُوتَكُمْ قِبْلَةً وَأَقِيمُوا۟ ٱلصَّلَوٰةَ وَبَشِّرِ ٱلْمُؤْمِنِينَ

” Take for your people houses to abide in Egypt and make your houses places of worship and keep up prayer and give good news to the believers.”

Yunus (Jonah) 10:87

There are evidently two messages in this instruction – the Jews are asked to continue living in the country and they are also to get back to their purely individual religious life. It is evident the expression of Jewish religious cultural life in its collective form and in public had become impossible under the brutal measures of Pharaoh. God who delivered them later could have delivered them before this situation arose. But in the Divine wisdom there was a need for a lesson to the Jews, a lesson intended to make them sink deeper in their consciousness and recover their pure spiritual impulses deep beneath the clamours of national life. This was a necessary preparation for the highly developed political life which was awaiting them in the future. The lesson was hard – it was a training in a wholly transformed outlook on life – to emerge in a new outlook steeped in self-immolation, restraint, asceticism and a strict sense of individual responsibility. But the destiny awaiting was equally great.

Signs are not wanting to show that we Muslims are heading for a similar experience. The Indian situation vis-a-vis its vast Muslim population, is a signal for a similar self-purification on the part of the Muslims of the world. The lingering pride of political over-lordship, the swelled consciousness of numberless achievements in the different fields of human culture, the glorious heritage of an international brotherhood – all these have to be set aside, for a time at least, to realise afresh the first beams of pure religious consciousness dawning upon the virgin mind of the early believers, having neither any past nor any future before them, but a glorious realisation of an ever-present God from Whom flowed all life and to Whom was the eventual return of all men and events.

The millions of Indian Muslims have, by the very force of circum-stances, to go through this process of self-purification. But we Muslims of Pakistan also have to do it on our own, in sympathetic cooperation and in the light of our lesson vicariously learnt. If we are not blind to facts, we have already moved a lot in this direction, but we are to complete the journey now. It seems to be a concession to the followers of the last Prophet, that the whole lot of this Ummat has not to pass through this ordeal of fire. It appears we are expected to be intelligent enough to read the sign of the times in the fate of a large number of our fellow believers who happened to be our compatriots only a short while ago.

A saintly band of religious enthusiasts, the early Muslims were, whose only armament was the Quran, whose only politics was their thought and talk about God, and whose homeland was the mosque or its substitute – any humble space where they could freely place their forehead on the ground in full-hearted remembrance of the invisible Lord of their life and destiny. So are we required to be in this age of ours, to qualify ourselves for the ushering in of the new age of social peace and cooperation which is to dawn upon humanity at the end of the great travail through which it is passing at the moment. That is, in short, the message of the Indian situation to the Muslims of India and to us their fellow believers in Pakistan and to all the Muslims the world over.

(The Light – Sunday, April 16, 1950)