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Sir Agha Khan III
on the causes behind Muslim's decline
courtesy: Jawad Khaki, Seattle, WA
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This is a letter from the late Sir Agha Khan 111 to Dr.
Zahid Husain President, Arabiyyah Jamiyyat, Karachi. The
letter is dated 4th April, 1952.) I
"
First of all I must thank you for so kindly praying for
my health. The Almighty has graciously allowed me some
further time to be able to serve the great cause which
you and I have at heart. I had promised when I made the
donation of Rs. 10,000 to send you my views and I take
this occasion of doing so.
Of
late in Pakistan various people have said that the
downfall of the Muslim states during the last 200 or 300
years has been due to forgetting Islamic principles and
this is a warning for the people of the new God-given
state of Pakistan. Certainly I agree that we forgot
Islamic principles in these three hundred years, but
here great care must be taken to understand what Islamic
principles we forgot and what Islamic principles we did
not forget, for, it may be, that the stress is being hid
in the popular mind on what we had not forgotten. For
instance, the Ulemas in Iran were ever more powerful,
more influential, more believed in, more obeyed than in
the early part of the 19th century during Fatehali
Shah's reign. The Shariat law was in every way being
carried out, rites and ceremonies were exactly obeyed,
the poor received regular help and assistance and Zakat
was general Yet that was for Iran the most disastrous
period because they went to war, foolishly trusting on
prayers, against Russia and lost the whole Caucasus,
Georgia and half Azarbaijan. It is generally said in
Iran that the Ulemas assured the troops who had inferior
arms that if the prayer Joshaun was read, they could
face the superior armament of the Russians.
Unfortunately they did and they were massacred and
defeated and had to accept finally the humiliating
treaty of Turkamanchia.
During
the same 18th/19th centuries in Turkey and North Africa
also, the rites, ceremonies and alms for poor were
carefully carried out and yet those were the years of
the disastrous wars with Russia and Austria with regular
loss of territory.
Only
in India we can say that the downfall was due to the
forgetting of our principles of rites and ceremonies and
Shariat law, but here apart from such failures, the same
forgetting of another fundamental Islamic principle,
which had led to the downfalls in Iran and Turkey, also
worked and was perhaps the principal cause.
In
North Africa, from Egypt to Morocco, rites and
ceremonies and the ordinary laws of the Shariat and poor
relief were strictly observed and yet year by year
throughout the 19th/20th centuries, independence was
removed and Europe conquered in one form or other,
Morocco being the last which was lost in our time for
the same faults. There was another fundamental Islamic
principle which the Muslim world during the last 300
years more and more forgot and they lost everything.
Islam
is fundamentally in its very nature a natural religion.
Throughout the Quran God's signs (Ayats) are referred to
as the natural phenomenon, the law and order of the
universe, the exactitudes and consequences of the
relations between natural phenomenon in cause and
effect. Over and over, the stars, sun, moon,
earthquakes, fruits of the earth and trees are mentioned
as the signs of divine power, divine law and divine
order. Even in the Ayeh of Noor, divine is referred to
as the natural phenomenon of light and even references
are made to the fruit of the earth. During the great
period of Islam, Muslims did not forget these principles
of their religion.
Under
Muavia and the other Omaiyyads, the Islamic navy was
supreme in Mediterranean, better ships, better knowledge
of wind and tide were placed at the disposal of the
Muslim navy and thus the land conquests of half Western
Europe rendered possible and easy.
Even
the historian Gibbon says that when the Turks conquered
Constantinople, the Muslim artillery was far superior to
any other in Europe, and far greater knowledge was known
of the consequences of powder and fire than anything
that the Greeks had at their disposal. This alone led to
the rapid Turkish conquest of the Balkan Peninsula and
Constantinople and coming up to Vienna. Just as under
the great Omaiyyads they had almost reached Paris.
But
at the end of the 17th century and beginning of the
18th, the European Renaissance rapidly advanced in
knowledge of nature, namely all those very Ayats of God
to which the Quran refers when Muslims forgot the Ayats,
namely natural phenomenon, its law and order which are
the proofs of divine guidance used in the Quran, but we
stuck to our rites and ceremonies, to our prayers and
fast alone, forgetting the other half of our faith. Thus
during those 200/300 years, Europe and the West got an
advance out of all proportion to the Muslim world and we
found everywhere in Islam (inspite of our humble prayer,
our moral standard, our kindliness and gentleness
towards the poor) constant deterrioration of one form or
another and the Muslim world went down. Why? Because we
forgot the law and order of nature to which the Quran
refers as proof of God's existence and we went against
God's natural laws. This and this alone has led to the
disastrous consequences we have seen.
Today
public opinion in Pakistan is standing at a critical
moment. If again we look upon Islamic principles as only
rites and ceremonies and forget the real Ayats of God's
natural phenomenon, then not only Europe but China and
India will go so far ahead of us that either we will
become like North Africa, humble protectorates or we may
have like Turkey to throw over much that is most
valuable and precious in our mental outlook. To avoid
this, what are we to do? Any fool can tell you of the
disease but what is the remedy, how are we to save both
teaching of Islam, knowledge of nature and our daily
Islamic life of kindliness, gentleness and prayers? If
the present method by which the Ulema being brought up
on one line of studies and the scientific youth on a
different one continues, then disaster will come because
there will be a fundamental misunderstanding in the
outlook of intellect and faith in the soul of the
nation. We must learn from our enemies what saved
Christianity for Europe. It was the fact that, as the
Universities at the time of the Renaissance and
centuries that followed went forward with natural
studies, at the same time, the same universities had
faculties of divinity in which the priesthood was
trained. The atmosphere of science permeated the
atmosphere of Christian divinity studies and the
atmosphere of the Christian divinity students permeated
the atmosphere of the scientific studies; thus both grew
and developed together. Christianity adapted itself to
science, though it is any thing but a natural religion
being based on fundamental irrational principles which
are the break up of natural law and order, while science
accepted these extraordinary miracles as temporary
breaks of the natural law of the universe.
Alas,
Islam, which is a natural religion in which God's
miracles are the very law and order of nature, drifted
away and still drifting away, even in Pakistan, from
science which is the study of those very laws and orders
of nature.
You,
gentlemen, have a great responsibility. The only
practical hope I see is that all your universities in
Pakistan should have a faculty of Islamic religious and
philosophical studies attached to ordinary curriculum
for post-graduate students, who alone could be
recognized as Ulemas. Something of the kind I know is
being prepared in Egypt. A great Muslim divine, alas
dead far too soon, the late Sheikh al-Maraghi, insisted
in Azhar that natural laws should be taught according to
the latest discoveries; but if we turn to Iran,
Pakistan, North Africa, outside Egypt, we find that the
Ulemas are being still brought up on the same old lines
and the modern students on a totally different line.
There is no unity of soul without which there can be no
greatness.
My
voice alone is the voice of an old sick man in the
wilderness, but you members of the Jamiyyat are not old
members and sick men. Insist, you who have taken up the
study of the language of the Quran, to make the spirit
of the Quran also the spirit of Pakistan. Remember that
in the great first century they knew more about sea and
wind than Europe ever did for hundreds of years to come.
Today where are you? Unless our universities have the
keen graduated Ulema school for men brought up in the
same atmosphere as the science students, realizing the
fundamental truth that Islam is a natural religion of
which the Ayats are the universe in which we live and
move and have our being, the same causes will lead to
the same disastrous results.
You,
members of the Jamiyyat should bravely request the
enlargement of our universities and the increase of
their numbers on Aligarh lines, and insist on post
graduate degrees for Ulema, just as there is for
scientists brought up in the same way. I influenced my
friend Mohsenul Mulk to do something of the kind in
Aligarh. Alas, he died and after his death my direct
influence on the powers of Aligarh got less and less,
though something of the kind to which I here refer did
come up in Aligarh. It did not go the whole way as it
would have gone, still if Mohsenul Mulk had lived and I
had been able to continue my influence, but it was an
improvement and it has given you Pakistan. Without
Aligarh no Pakistan would have come, but to live we want
many Aligarhs with science and religious philosophy and
education blended in one atmosphere realizing that God
of the Quran is the one whose Ayats are the universe.
This
is my most important message to you, brothers of
Jamiyyat. If your prayers have given me life enough to
write this letter, your prayers have done some good."
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