Author: Izharul Haq
Publication: The News
Date: March 15, 2012
URL: http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-9-97743-Quixotic-concepts

A growing number of religious luminaries who exhort the Muslim masses to shun everything Western are settling in the same West. Allama Tahirul Qadri is headquartered in Canada. Dr Farhat Hashmi of Al-Huda fame has been pleading with the Canadian judiciary to enable her to make that “non-Muslim” country her new home. My friend Dr Muzaffar Iqbal too has preferred Canada over the 57 Muslim countries. He talks of “ten long years filled with those stark realities and the eventual painful squeeze” which resulted in his departure from Pakistan. Well, barring less than five percent of them, Pakistanis as a whole are even more squeezed in, but they are not as lucky as Dr Iqbal, who now addresses his countrymen trapped in the ill-fated airliner.

When Muzaffar Iqbal wants us to “imagine” a union of Muslim states, it is nothing more than mere imagination. A union of Muslim states is a utopia, a fantasy. First, there has never been any such union in any phase of Muslim history. That the Ottoman Empire covered the largest belt of Muslim population, or the Middle East was part of a single administrative unit under the Ottomans, is nothing more than self-defeating nostalgia. The Ottomans and other such “caliphates” were in fact dynasties sustaining themselves on the basis of conspiracies, tyrannies and exploitation of the masses. Muzaffar uses the terms of empire and caliphate alternatively for the Ottomans and bewails that the caliphate was ended by “that terrible drunkard” in 1924. Interestingly, Maulana Maudoodi, the architect of “political Islam,” a term used very fondly by Muzaffar, wrote a book Khilafat-o-Mulookiyat, which discussed how the caliphate was converted into a monarchy after the death of Hazrat Ali.

Secondly, the idea of such a union, in all probability, will remain a myth and the ground realities indicate that. The close of the century witnessed the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and Arab countries such as Egypt and Jordan. On the other hand, Syria attacked Jordan in 1970 and occupied Lebanon in 1976. Iraq invaded Iran in 1980 and occupied Kuwait in 1990. The two parts of a divided Yemen fought with each other for a decade. Pakistan broke into two halves. The rich Arab states of the Middle East look askance at Iran’s nuclear capability and Israel’s threat to destroy this capability gives them a cosy feeling.

Quixotic concepts like Muslim unity are taking the spotlight away from crucial issues like the backwardness of the Muslim world in education, science and technology.

Out of 57 Muslim states, there is not a single state to which Muslims can emigrate. On the contrary, millions of Muslims have adopted the USA, Canada, France, the UK, Spain, Australia and other developed countries as their new home, in search of rule of law, better education prospects for their next generations and a respectable living. The primitive land-ownership pattern, illiteracy, corruption, political instability, moral decline, lack of equal opportunities, and many other social ills in the Muslim world are pushing more and more Muslims to non-Muslim, “Kafir,” countries. In this backdrop, proposing a union or confederation of Muslim states is meaningless.

Muazaffar Iqbal taunts “others” for having “no grounding in Arabic.” With his grounding in Arabic, Dr Iqbal should know that his favourite term “political Islam” is not valid vis-a-vis the Quran, the hadiths and fiqh (jurisprudence). Islam cannot be divided into political and non-political Islam. What an irony that scholars like Javed Ghamdi who do have “grounding in Arabic” have to leave the country because of threats to their lives by protagonists of political Islam.