What I Saw in England (Part 9)

Imam,Mohammad Yakub Khan,The Woking Mosque, England.

Currents of Life in the West and East turning

in the reverse directions

Whereas people in the West have reached the saturation point in respect of achievements in the fields of worldly advancement and they are already beginning to see and suspect the clay-feet of their materialistic civilization, people in the world of Islam have just started that cycle and are in the grip of regular craze after worldly prosperity.

I am sorry this series had to be interrupted because in the meantime a more urgent issue cropped up which, to my mind, amounted to tarring the fair face of Islam with the blackest brush. This is the primitive creed of coercion in the matter of religion, prescribing capital punishment for Muslims who may renounce the Faith. The fact that it was given the highlight of publicity in America in a Christian missionary quarterly, and on the authority of a man of the scholarship of Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi made it all the more imperative to challenge that libel on Islam a religion which, for the first time in the history of mankind, proclaimed “no-compulsion in religion” as the cornerstone of its message and mission.

The very first thing, therefore, that I would like to take note of, while reverting to the topic of the suspended series, is the complete freedom of conscience in England. What the Quran taught 14 centuries ago, people in the U.K. practise in daily life in letter as well as spirit. You may stand up in any street corner, and pick holes to your heart´s content in Christianity, even pour fun on its holy founder whom popular belief regards as “son of God”, without any let or hindrance. Perhaps, you may draw even a bigger crowd than the Church prelate preaching from his improvised pulpit close by, if you know how to go about your business and humour the floating audience. That the Imam of the Mosque, Woking should be invited to deliver a religious sermon from a Church pulpit bespeaks a climate of freedom inconceivable by people in Muslim countries. My colleagues, Maulvi Mohammad Yahya Butt and Mr. Iqbal Ahmad were also kept busy by a regular flow of invitations from churches and clubs and societies to give them talks on Islam. If anybody were to seriously suggest that it was an affront to Christianity and must be stopped, he would have only invited public ridicule. Even conversions to Islam are dismissed as the person´s own concern, and if a Churchman were ever to raise an alarm that it is going to shake the foundations of the State he would be branded as a madcap.

Indeed, I came across a regular campaign against the compulsory Bible hymns and lessons with which children´s schools open every new day´s work. It was condemned as interference with the free development of the child mind and an abuse of public money. The criticism came from atheistic circles of which the Weekly Freethinker is a mouthpiece of a long standing and considerable influence. They even organise a whole network of street-corner preachers against Christianity. I recollect writing to this paper, controverting some of its articles against God and religion, expressing the hope that the Islamic conception might be more acceptable to rationalist friends. It was duly published but a rejoinder was not long to appear, saying that when Islam had gathered sufficient followers in that country, it would be time for the atheist press to turn its guns in that direction.

It is only in a climate of such unfettered freedom that the flower of faith can at all blossom. That was exactly what the Quran envisaged – complete freedom in the matter of adopting or renouncing a religion. It wanted its teachings to be accepted or rejected on merit, by the free exercise of individual judgement, unfettered either by State legislation or social sanctions. That is what makes me feel that the West´s spirit of free intellectual inquiry is an ideal climate for Islam to receive a fair hearing.

Another glaring contrast which I have hinted at in my previous Notes is the reverse directions in which the currents of thought are moving in the East and the West. Nationalism has had its day in the West, where people are already scanning international, inter-racial, inter-continental, even inter-planetary horizons. Muslim countries which made nationalism the battle cry of their independence struggle have started putting that creed on the pedestal of a deity and are devoutly burning incense at its altar. Even from the Arab countries from which once rose Islam´s world encompassing cry of one humanity and one-world one hears frantic and slogans of Arab nationalism. I do not deprecate this. Perhaps this is a necessary stage in their onward march, forced on them by foreign machinations. What I want to underline is that in the West nationalism is already easing to be the main driving force in life. People hold it responsible for all the international conflicts and bloodshed in the past. They are thinking in terms of greater and greater co-existence, co-operation, even cohesion between nations and nations – a trend which is unmistakably in the direction of Islam´s universal brotherhood of man.

In the matter of scientific and technical knowledge, I found the West in a much-chastened mood. People there are exactly in the predicament of the thirsty man described in the Quran who mistakes a desert mirage for a stream of water and greedily marches on towards it but on arriving there finds nothing but dry burning sand. People in the West are awakening to the fact that peace of mind cannot be bought for dollars or annexed with tanks and bombers. That is a turn for the better in the pace of events. The East is only just beginning the cycle of technological development which the West started two centuries ago. It looks upon this development as the panacea for all its ills. The panacea, however, is yet nowhere in sight. In Pakistan at least it does not lie in our mouth to claim that despite some substantial progress made in the various fields of development, the common man´s lot is any the better for all that.

This is, however, not to be understood as any minimisation of the need of scientific and technological developments. All I want to underline is that side by side with these we must not ignore our true heritage as Muslims – the abiding values of the spirit which alone can bring true happiness and prosperity.