Islam and the Modern World


Figure 1.--This photo was taken in Salalah, Oman. A boy has a photo taken with his father's rifle, or perhaps his own rifle. The boy is wearing western style casual clothing, including a jersey of the Barcelona Football Club and UNICEF. The western style garments has replaced the cloths wrapped around the waist that were for centuries the clothing of poor children. The image exemplfies the conflict throughtout the Muslim. There is on one an impulse toward the modernity and tolerance of the West and all it has to offer in terms of material progress. And this is contested by the pull of Islamic tradition with its violence, intolernce, and economic failure.

A Pakisani reader poses an interesting question. He suggests that since the 7th century when Gabriel delivered the Holy Koran to Mohammed that humans and human society have not changed measurably except for technological innovation. There surely are inate human characterics that are biological and genetic. These as our reader suggests do not change. There are, however, beliefs, customs, lifestyles, and values, it semms to us that have changed. These changes, as a result, of the Renaissance, Reformation, nligtenment, and other developments have changed substantially in the West, but to a much lesser extent in the Islamic world. The question becomes just what are these changes and why has the Muslim world failed to adopt to them. Muslims enjoy modern technology and the benefits of it, but it is all imported from the West. Muslim society seems incapable of generating modern technology. Few Muslims seem aware of this are dare to ask themselves why.

Basic Question

A Pakisani reader poses an interesting question. He suggests that since the 7th century when Gabriel delivered the Holy KorAN TO Mohammed that humans and human society have not changed measurably except for technological innovation. Our reader writes, "Islam is timeless and for all people of all times and so therefore there is no "renaissance or reformation" in Islam as rightly pointed out by you in your website under the caption "Comprehensive way of life." You should ask yourself my friend: what is so "modern" about our times that is different from the age God was revealing the Holy Quran to Muhammad 1400 years back? Take aside the science and technology you will find absolutely no difference in beliefs, customs, lifestyles, values. There were atheists back then and there are atheists now. They too had banking system based on interest/usury as we have now. Those people drank wine and ate pork and so do people today. There is hardly any difference. And there was this man Muhammad, who Michael Hart in his book The 100 most Influential People of All Times, rated him as the best, the number 1, acknowledged, alongwith many other critics of Islam etc, that this man, Muhammad, eradicated all the evils of his country and transformed the entire nation into pious believers and worshippers of God. How did he do that? Intellectuals of our times profess that if this world is going to get rid of its problems it has be through Muhamamd's methodology i.e. Islam. Unfortauntely for some people there are vested interests in the status-quo. The interest-based banking system is how our elites make their money and so why would they allow such it to be abolished from the economic system as Islam proposes."

Innate Characteristics

There surely are innate human characterics that are biological and genetic. These as our reader suggests do not change. It is because that elements of human behavior do not change that the great ethical teachers (Buddah, Confucius, Jesus, Mohhamed, Plato, and countless others) can speak to us over the ages.

Human Nature

There has been a debate for centuries about the actual state of human nature. This discussion has over time been largely philosophical. In the 20th century more scientidic approaches have entered the debate. A HBC reader has provided a perceptive assessment of the debate. "One of the major issues confronted by historians today is whether human nature is a constant over the centuries (the so-called "essentialist" claim) or whether it is "constructed" (i.e., formed by a complex of social and environmental pressures that are forever in flux--the so-called "constructivist" position). One of the areas in which this debate has been raging during recent decades, for instance, is that of human sexuality. Many modern feminists and gay-rights activists, for example, believe that sexual identity itself (as well as differing conceptions of it) have undergone substantial change over the centuries owing to a whole complex of social, intellectual, religious, and biological conditions that have been steadily evolving. We know, for instance, that a Medieval man was biologically different in certain ways from a 21st-century man in terms of height, weight, size, and resistance to disease (the nature his immune system). Changing climatic conditions change men physically. Medieval men may have had same-sex erotic relationships but certainly could not have considered themselves to be "homosexual" or "heterosexual" in terms of fundamental identity--concepts that did not yet exist in earlier centuries and that actually came into human consciousness only during the 19th century. Basic moral attitudes have also changed substantially as civilization has developed. In Elizabethan times, for instance, it was considered entirely appropriate to punish treason by a barbaric process of hanging men until they were only half-dead, then cutting them down from the gallows to be publicly disembowelled and cut into four pieces by the executioner. No government or legal system in today's world (even Islamic governments) would sanction this degree of gruesome brutality because moral sensitivities about punishment have greatly shifted. Our attitudes about what is right and wrong have undergone great change in many respects. It used to be thought, for instance, that masturbation deserved the most severe chastisement from parents and mentors because "self-abuse" exposed boys to the likelihood of hell-fire and damnation (the subject was never even recognized as applying to girls). Almost no educated parent today could accept such a doctrine, realizing that masturbation is a normal and natural experience of most children as they mature. I think many educated persons today would say that certain basic principles of good and evil have been ordained by God--for example that unselfishness toward others is a good and that unprovoked cruelty to others is an evil--but our definitions of what actually constitutes approved unselfishness or permissible harshness to others is constantly subject to alteration as society evolves and as individual human beings grow in wisdom, knowledge, and maturity. Medieval men used to believe that the entire physical universe was geocentric (a system with the earth as its center). Copernicus taught us otherwise, and we now know that earth is infinitessimally tiny in respect of a virtually limitless concept of physical reality. Such vast changes in our conception of what lies beyond the earth necessarily alter our conception of the nature of man and of his relation to what is eternal and what is mundane and corporeal. Think how the arts of painting, music, and literature have expanded our conception of human imagination and possibility in ways totally unavailable to Medieval culture. It can be argued that Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Mozart, for example, have actually changed human nature by stretching our sense of human possibility and achievement. Technological change is only one of the many kinds of change that has occurred over the centuries. Your Pakistani reader doesn't seem to acknowledge the degree to which historical change necessarily modifies and complicates his assertion that human nature remains the same today as it did in the age of Mohammed."

Changes Since the 7th Century

There are, however, beliefs, customs, lifestyles, and values, it semms to us that have changed. These changes, as a result, of the Renaissance, Reformation, and other developments have changed substantially in the West, but to a much lesser extent in the Islamic world. The question becomes just what are these changes. We seem a vast aray of important differences between the 7th and 21st century.

Technology

Muslims enjoy modern technology and the benefits of it, but it is all imported from the West. Muslim society seems incapable of generating modern technology. Few Muslims seem aware of this are dare to ask themselves why. This is especially notable because Muslims once led the world of inquiry and made important mathamatical and tecchnological avhievements. Some Muslims were actually on the cusp of inventing science and the scientific method. But then the Muslim world lapsed into a theological mind set that no longer fostered free thought and inquiry, falling behind the west, mising ouut on the great era of scientific advance.

Outlook

The Renaisance changed the outlook of the West. Instead of a god-centered world, the West developed the attitude adopted by the ancient world that man is the measure of all things. This change has not taken place in the Islamic world. As our Pakistani reader ponys out, for a Muslim "The purpose of life according to ISlam is to only 'worship God'." This basic difference we believe in part explains the difference betwween the Islamic world and the West. Western man has broanded his life path beyond worshiping God and the result has been technological advances that have permited radically different life styles. This different outlook explains why in the modern world no important technological discoveries have come from the Islamic world.

Law

Modern people see laws as made by men and not god-given. Ibdividuals in the 7th century had no real political rights. They were ruled by absolute rulers who they had no role in selecting. And they had to obey laws they had no role in making. Today it is widely held that individuals should elect government officials and have a role in making the laws they live under. This belief is so widely held that even totalitarian societies such as the Soviet Union went through the formality of elections.

Individual Human Rights

Individuals in the 7th had few basic human rights. There was no right to self expression. There was commoinly no limits to the power of the state or legal niceties such as habeus corpus or abuses such as torture. There was only limited protection of private property. Legal codes were very basic. The expansion of indivual rights is also reflected in the abolition of slavery. Today the extension of civil righs is a profound departure from the 7th centuyry. Important documents such as the American Bill of Rights or the Inited Nation Declsration of the Rights of M

Childhood

Modern people now see childhood as a destince era of life during which childrebn should be protected and not be held as accontavle as adults for their mistakes.

Sexual orientation

The Koran takes a draconian view of homosexuality. The only country in the Middle East today with a degree of toleration toward homsexuals is Israel. Israeli homosexuals can adopt, openly serve in the army, enter civil unions and are protected by exceptionally strongly worded anti-discrimination legislation. Muslim countries following Koranic instructions are very repressive. Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar and Syria punish homosexual conduct with flogging, imprisonment, or both. But that is fairly light punishment compared to Iran, Saudi Arabia and Yemen where homosexuals are put to death. This included teenagers. Other Muslim majority countries impose a wide range of pebalties on homosexuals.

Women

Modern people see women very differently than was the common view in the 7th century. We now see women as individuals who should be treated equally before the law and should be able to persue education and careers as they see fit.

Religious liberty

Attitudes toward religion are very different today than in the 7th century. There surely were athiests in the 7th century, but to freely express this pont of view could get you killed. Toleration for differing religions varied, but minotity religions were at the least denoed rights are subjected to special taxes. Today we generally beliee that religion is a matter of the individual conscious and that every individual has a right to chose his religion and to convert to other religions if he or she so desires. As I understand it, the Koran prohibits a Muslim from converting to another religion.

Public education

There were in the 7th century very few people who could read and write. Today there is widespread public literacy in the West, although in some Muslim countries there are still high levels of iliteracy, specially among women. This massive expansion of literacy and education has significantly increased the average citizen's awarness of his world and outlook.

Measures of State Success

Many of these changes relate to how modern people measure the success of a country and state. Here we are talking about a range of economic and social achievements. Many but not all ae susceptable to statistical measures.

Reader Comments

"To approach the world whereby ones only purpose in life is to worship God is to believe in a God who is more like a Kim Jun Um rather than a God of mercy and forgiveness. God did not make autonotons. Rather he made humans with free will with the ability to question things and grow. Just imagine if Jews still followed absolutely the Law as laid out in Deuteronomy.Woman would be killed for disobeying their husbands and people would be killed for eating shell fish. The Islamic way seems to stifle creativity and growth.I dare say that had the most fundamentalist in the Christian community dominated America since its inception we may have gone the way of the Muslim World." I was always curious what Yahweh's beef with shellfish was. I would make a poor Jew, shrimp not to mention bacon are two of my favorites. I think it important to consider not only the ideas, but the time lime. The OT has some pretty rough, brutal passages, but those books are very old. I an mo Biblical scholar, but the early books seem to have been written down about 500 BC and presumably are based on an even older oral tradition. You see some much more humane ideas in the NT written down something like 100 AD or so. Human thinking in the West had progressed to ideas like the Good Samaritan and Turn the Other Cheek. Mohammed set down he Koran some like-600-700 AD. That was more than a millennium after the OT and a half a millennium after the NT, but he reverted to the OT brutality. I think Christianity in our modern PC world takes a bad wrap. Don't forget that democracy, capitalism, science, and the industrial revolution came out of the Christin West. And all of this began at a time that the Church played a far more important role in society than the modern world. And the Calvinists that played an important role in it I think would make modern fundamentalists look like poor lost sinners..







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Created: 1:58 AM 2/3/2007
Last updated:12:44 AM 9/1/2016