AL-HUDA
Foundation, NJ U. S. A
the Message Continues ... 4/76
Newsletter for December 2007
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Mission of Muslims in
A Grand Strategy to Marginalize Extremists by Dr. Robert Dickson Crane Grand Strategy
Two thousand years ago the
two most influential persons of that time for the future
of humanity were Jesus Christ and Sun Tzu. Jesus,
‘alayhi as-salam, taught how to wage peace. Sun Tzu
of
Grand strategy is morally
neutral because it can serve any policy goals. It is a
tool, just as useful for Mother Theresa as for Osama bin
Laden. Grand strategy calls for a process of
forecasting and planning to incorporate all the relevant
variables, both threats and opportunities, into a
holistic strategic design for the pursuit of policy
goals. Grand strategy may utilize vision-expanding
exercises, such as the construction of alternative
scenarios, based on hypothetical assumptions about
factual reality and on probability assessments about the
success of alternative strategies to pursue these goals
within the given scenario. Ideally, grand strategy may
require reassessment of the goals themselves and even of
the larger policy paradigms that originally gave rise to
the goals.
Grand strategy is both
ontologically and epistemologically revolutionary. The
prophets of God were always the greatest revolutionaries
of their time. The prophets of monist materialism, such
as Lenin, Mao Tse Dung, Hitler, and Herzl, are here
today and gone tomorrow. They belong to the dregs of
history, because they excluded the spiritual dimension
of human nature, which is eternal, even though they
hypocritically tried on occasion to enlist its spiritual
terminology to advance their utopian dreams. They were
not grand strategists.
The purpose of grand
strategy is to shape the global future. This was the
topic of my book, Shaping the Future: Challenge and
Response, which was published by the Center
for Civilizational Renewal in
II. Changing Enemies into Friends
The greatest challenge to
civilization today is how to address the cycle of
demonization and counter-demonization gaining ascendancy
among extremists in all religions, with spill-over
effects, both constructive and destructive, in official
government policies.
The key issue is how to
deal with demonizers. One policy option, indeed a great
challenge, may be to turn them into friends. In the
Qur’an, the two poles of guidance, both of them equally
valid and important, as described in Part One of this
series on “The Mission of Imams in America,” are
highlighted in the Qur’an: 1) “But it may well be that
Allah will bring about mutual affection between you and
some of those whom you now face as enemies, for Allah is
infinite in His power – and Allah is much forgiving and
a dispenser of grace” (Surah al Mumtahana, 60:7);
and 2) “But if they do not stay their hands, seize them
and slay them whenever you come upon them, for it is
against these that We have clearly empowered you [to
make war]” (Surah al Nisa’a, 4:91).
A preliminary issue in
grand strategy is always to identify the enemy, and, if
there are many such, to prioritize one’s efforts against
them. Immediately after 9/11, the thrust of the general
Muslim response was to target extremist Muslims,
epitomized by Osama bin Laden, as a threat not only to
other Muslims but to
In the global war against
terrorism, whose side are the Muslim bashers on?
Certainly they are against extremist Muslims, even if
some of them are equally extremist themselves. Based on
the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend,
are not the Muslim bashers functionally friends of
Muslims. The common enemy is the diverse movement of
extremist Muslims who resort to terrorism for whatever
purpose and thereby, in an unending cycle of cause and
effect, precipitate the logical, but equally immoral,
response of terroristic counter-terrorism.
Muslims generally are much
more concerned about perversions of the Qur’an and
sunnah by non-Muslims, because many have imported the
tribalistic culture of their homelands which requires
“circling the wagons.” Cartoons about the Prophet
Muhammad, salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa salam, enraged
Muslims more than did Al Qa’ida’s beheading of innocent
captives in
If we can recognize that
the Muslim bashers, like Robert Spencer and Jihad Watch,
really are on our side in the global war against
terrorism, how can we convince them that their strategy
is counter-productive? It should seem obvious by now
that demonizing Islam merely breeds more Muslim
extremists by evoking extremist reactions. Most
ironically, the Muslim bashers support the Muslim
terrorists by agreeing with their perversions of the
Qur’an and sunnah. We can turn today’s Muslim
bashers into friends, however, only if they can bring
themselves to adopt a paradigm of grand strategy,
whereby tactics support strategy rather than undermine
it. It takes two to tango. III.
Walk the Talk
The practical task of
Muslims should be to provide ecumenical leadership in
bringing a new paradigm of justice to bear in
The latest trend among the
leading think-tanks is to define a good Muslim as a
“moderate” who is basically disassociated from both
Islam and the political process. A moderate Muslim,
nowadays, is not one who is committed to Islam as a
religion against those who would pervert it for
un-Islamic agendas, but rather one who perverts it by
claiming that Islam as a religion is itself perverted.
What would an Islamic
grand strategy have to say about such counter-productive
trends? Instead of focusing on the tactics of trench
warfare and losing sight of the big picture, grand
strategy would suggest that the real issue is
paradigmatic. Instead of exhausting one’s energies in
fighting Muslim bashers, it would be more productive to
develop and promote the enlightened Islamic paradigm
that gave rise to the Islamic civilization a thousand
years ago. This civilization imploded when its guiding
jurisprudential paradigm was abandoned and was replaced
by an obsession merely to preserve the externals, which
without the holistic paradigm of classical Islamic
thought no longer had much meaning.
This process of revival is already underway, as shown
ithe most unlikely places. One of the old stalwarts of
Islam in
In Sister Mumina’s
article, “Standard Shift,” published in the July/August
2007 issue of Islamic Horizons, she recommends
that to reconnect with God and understand Islam one must
use as a framework the maqasid al shari’ah as a
universal code of human rights. The percolation of this
classical Islamic paradigm down to the bowels of
An important first step in
the revival of classical Islam, as well as of the
traditionalist wisdom at the heart of every religion, is
to recognize that bias exists and that it must be
understood and countered in order to preserve the purity
of Islam or any other world religion. This is
especially important for Muslims who have been
abandoning the potential of Islam in the development of
a global civilization based on cooperation of all
religions in pursuing peace through justice.
Muslims and others would
do well to absorb the findings of a new book, translated
from Arabic into English by the International Institute
of Islamic Thought, entitled Epistemological Bias in
the Physical and Social Sciences, edited by
Abdelwahab M. Elmessiri.
This
book collects the best eleven of more than eighty
studies in seven volumes developing the new discipline
of fiqh al-tahayyuz, or the “scholarship of
bias,” as a methodology for recognizing, understanding,
and transcending the covert transmission of one culture
in a deconstructive way to another. The methodology is
equally applicable to all one-way intrusions that
disrupt and overcome another culture.
The editor of this
effort to develop a systematic methodology for
identifying and overcoming epistemological bias provides
a book-length introductory chapter, “The Gate of Ijtihad:
An Introduction to the Study of Epistemological Bias.”
This is followed and explicated in ten studies by Arab
scholars, each charged with identifying the latent
biases encountered in his or her own discipline, and
each tasked to identify the elements or features that
have been excluded as exogenous variables in the
dominant Western epistemological model and which can be
observed and incorporated only by means of a new
methodology expressing a new paradigm.
Bias at the highest level
disentangled from its negative sense is not at all a
defect and, in fact, can be considered to be a gift of
God. “Bias is a basic component of the human donnee
[fitrah] and is associated with the humanness
of man and woman, i.e., with the very existence of the
human being as a non-natural creature that cannot be
reduced to the general laws of nature. Whatever is
human includes within it a degree of individuality and
uniqueness and, therefore, bias.”
Twenty years later, I was
asked as a non-Muslim to write a manual on Islam for the
employees of the Fluor Corporation in
This defensive mindset
reflects the lack of ijtihad as a primary goal of
competency in Islamic education and relegates Muslims to
irrelevance in world affairs. The “me too” mentality
implies that Islamic scholarship has nothing to offer in
addressing the issues of conscience in the world. In
effect, it leaves Muslims no choice but to agree with
the secular fundamentalist legal systems that have come
to dominate in Western culture, in which justice has
been crowded out as the real meaning of “the rule of
law” and been replaced by the imposition of “peace,
freedom, and democracy” without any moral content.
In addition to its 39-page Author’s Preface,
the Raysuni book introduces the systematic analysis of
the maqasid al shari’ah with a 72-page history of
this normative paradigm. Such a history of its
development from one generation to the next over a
period of hundreds of years, beginning with the era of
the sahaba, had never before been written in any
language. It provides an essential backdrop to any
genuine understanding of Islamic law, both in theory and
in addressing the specific issues that have arisen over
the centuries among the classical scholars.
This monograph was
translated into English in 1992 from the Arabic, Usul
al-Fiqh al-Islami: Manhaj, Bahth wa Ma’rifah, by the
International Institute of Islamic Thought as the second
publication in its major program to make the best of the
literature on the maqasid available in English to
the reading public. The first publication by the IIIT
on the maqasid was the Arabic publication of the
Raysuni book, under its title Nazariyat al-Maqasid,
in 1991.
The major purpose and effort during untold
centuries of some of the best minds in the world was to
understand the divine wisdom underlying Islamic rulings
by identifying a Qur’anic methodology and orthodox
process to develop the Islamic vision, values, and
principles required to preserve the purity of Islamic
guidance in applying these rulings. In his introduction
to this volume, Shaykh Al-Alwani writes, “They made it
clear that every legal ruling in Islam has a function
which it performs, an aim which it realized, a cause, be
it explicit or implicit, and an intention which it seeks
to fulfill, and all of this in order to realize benefit
to human beings or to ward off harm and corruption.”
This is the basis of all inductive reasoning in Islamic
thought and, in turn, of its major contribution to human
civilization.
The efforts of the
greatest Islamic scholars during the early Islamic
centuries focused on the practice of ta’lil,
which is the identification of the causes and purposes
(the ‘illah) of texts, especially of divine
revelation, in order better to understand through
ta’wil the underlying meanings, while fully aware
that no person or group of persons can ever grasp the
full extent of divine wisdom.
By reviving the queen of
Islamic sciences, the maqasid al shari’ah,
through such crown jewels as this English publication of
the Raysuni book, the Muslim umma has passed a
major milestone in pursuing the task of promoting
Islamic knowledge by reforming and Islamizing Muslim
thought. As Shaykh Taha puts it in the introduction,
the reason for translating the Raysuni book on the
maqasid is “to help Muslims make the mental
transition from a preoccupation with particulars to a
concern with universals, from stopping at outward
structures to attention to truths and meanings, from
imitation and subordination to creativity and
authenticity, and from a focus on means and methods to
activity for the purpose of achieving intentions and
objectives.” Only in this way can Muslims provide both
intellectual and spiritual leadership so that all
peoples in all cultures can better cooperate in serving
their purpose of existence as stewards of creation. Direct from the Horse’s Mouth
The seminal thinker and
even founder of the current revival of Islam as a leader
in the global pursuit of peace through justice is
Muhammad al-Tahir Ibn Ashur, who advanced to become the
Chief Mufti of Tunisia during the 1930s when the world
was in profound economic depression and the militant
atheism of Communism was already threatening to engulf
the world. His Treatise on Maqasid al Shari’ah,
first published in Arabic in 1946, is the first analysis
of the maqasid al shari’ah or purposes of Islamic
law as a system of thought since the death of the master
of the subject, Ibn Shatibi, and of ijtihad generally in
the Arabic speaking world, six hundred years ago.
Al Shatibi’s manuscript,
Al Muwafakat, was first published in printed form
when Ibn Ashur was a boy. Born in 1879, Ibn Ashur’s
rediscovery of Al Shatibi led him to counter the inroads
of secular modernism worldwide by pursuing his lifelong
commitment to independent study of the shari’ah
as a jurisprudential paradigm or framework of Islamic
thought superior to all the European ideologies that
were leading the world into chaos.
The entire purpose of classical Islamic
jurisprudence, according to Ibn Ashur’s maqsudi
paradigm, is to raise awareness and respect for
tawhid, which is the coherent order in diversity
that points to the Oneness of its Creator, and to
strengthen one’s taqwa and love of God. He
contrasted this with the modernist or positivist concept
of order embodied in the jahiliyyah, which refers
exclusively to stability through material dominance,
superficial security, and short-term expediency without
any reference to higher moral norms or principles.
Ibn
Ashur’s revival of classical Islamic law also broadened
the concept of justice to inform all public policy on
issues of conscience. Although the standards of
application, using the guidelines of istislah,
were stricter for enforceable law, the same
principles were applicable through the looser standards
of istihsan for public policy guidance, as well
as in applying the spectrum of juristic categories,
unknown in Western positivist law, ranging from required
(wajib), recommended (mandub), and morally
neutral (muba), to makruh (to be
discouraged) and haram (forbidden). This
provided a framework of ethics based on Qur’anic
revelation (the haqq al yaqin of wahy)
as well as on natural law (the haqq al ‘ain
or sunnat Allah) through the ijtihad of
human reason (haqq al ‘ilm).
In this way Ibn Ashur introduced Islamic law
as a universal framework of reference for both private
morality and public policy, as well as for philosophy
and for the convergence and mutual support of faith and
reason. The abandonment of this major intellectual
contribution of Islamic civilization to the world was
the major cause of the Islamic civilization’s decline.
Grand Mufti Ibn Ashur envisioned the revival of the
maqasid as the most important means to reform Muslim
thought in order to restore Islam as a global leader in
restoring the wisdom of traditionalist thought in all
the world religions.
Ibn Ashur’s development of the maqasid
of the ‘usul al fiqh served to restore the nature
of the shari’ah as a system of education designed
primarily as guidance for persons and communities in
following the will of God, rather than as merely a set
of enforceable requirements and prohibitions. This
contrasted starkly with the positivist concept of law in
the West, where law is created by humans, not by God,
and exists only to the extent that it can be and is
enforced by the monopoly of coercion in the state. The Islamic civilization has always had its own means to inoculate itself against the virus of extremism. As the resurgent civilization of Islam revives to play a major role in world affairs, one of its major tasks must be to combat extremist threats from within. This effort, however, can succeed only if both Muslims and others learn to differentiate between Islam the religion and Muslims as adherents who may or may not understand and practice their own faith. Only in this way can those who now profess to be enemies of Islam understand and embrace the grand strategy of cooperation with committed Muslims who share their concerns and are better situated both to plan and take effective action. |
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