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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (44125)	5/1/2003 11:35:16 AM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50167

``O returner from Hind, renew thy faith.''. Zachary latif at its best..!! "A Muslim Under Progress" has penned down some very interesting thoughts (I would link to the post but the permalink button doesn't seem to be working) on the rise of the Wahabbi movement and I would recommend it. I dislike Wahabism and the movement since I am against their imposed "austerity" and their continual clamour for casting away Islamic civilisation (which deriving from the Arabian penninsula has now come to be a composite of the cultures in the Meditteranean basin, Iranian world and the Indus region that ultimately stretches to the Malay East) in favour of an exclusive focus on the Holy Quran and the Hadith. I respect the fact that the revelations of Islam are the defining characteristic of the Muslim ummah however there is an overlay of sophisticated Islamic thought, from Idris (who was the architect of Islamic law) to Ghazali (the promulgator of Islamic orthodoxy), bereft of which creates radical movements and a degree of fanaticism that is an archaic remnant of past eras. It is precisely this dual heritage that tempers Islam and allows it to reach an accomodation with the modern era, and Wahabism is a disruptive radical force because it practises a religion that is shorn of the urbanity cultivated over a millenia. Wahabism and movements of its ilk continually believe that the Islamic world is a monolithic entity whereas there are deep geo-historical and socio-economic faultlines that give rise to the distinctiveness of specific cultures. Those cultures are an organic outgrowth of the interplay between the juxtaposition of Islamic religion and the indigenous response. "Nothing should be Sacred" should be the axiom for Islamic thinkers and philosophers however what is critical to the growth of the civilisation is a healthy respect for the non-Islamic indigenous influences that helped to shape Islam as it is practised today. To continually deny these important and critical strains would be analogous for Europeans to discard the Helleno-Latin heritage in favour of the Judeo-Christian bible despite the glaring fact that the interaction between these dual heritages has come to define Christendom. Further Notes: Pan-Islamism, as I have echoed earlier, is a failure because it negates the distinctiveness of disparate Muslim cultures. A cursory examination of the Islamic Crescent gives a brief description of the faultlines in the Sunni Islamic world (I have for the moment excluded the Shi'ites). The Semitic south west is defined by the Maliki School of thought, whereas in the Turko-Iranian lands the Hanafis (who are renowned for their tolerance) are predominent and the Shafii's provide theological guidance to the Muslim Malays lands of the far east. The Hanbali school, admittedly the most retrogade school of thought and considered to be a macroosm of radical & austere schools of thought, lingers on in Saudi Arabia & Qatar. Thankfully it is the Hanafi school predominates across a wide swathe of the Muslim world and commands the most adherents since it is dispersed throughout Anatolia, the Balkans, the Caucasus range, Central Asia and the Sub-continent otherwise one can one shudder at the thought at the Hanbali advancing and converting masses of people to their dogma. The most fundamental faultline within Sunni Islam is the distinction between "desert Islam" and "monsoon Islam". The former represents the variant that was nutured by Arab mores and is of a more austere puritanical order (thus more prone to fanaticism) whereas Monsoon Islam denotes the cultures influenced by the Indian cultures. The name is taken for the monsoon regions of India, Bangladesh and South East Asia where Islam is of a more esoteric mix and at times reached a syncretism with the host culture so as to be indistinguishable from Hinduism. No wonder in the 8th century when on returning home to Damascus Arab settlers in Sindh (Pakistan) were admonished ``O returner from Hind, renew thy faith.''. The failure of Pakistan and Bangladesh to cohere into one nation is primarily due to this break between Desert and Monsoon Islam (also not to neglect the fact that the Pakistan army were meanwhile commiting a mini-genocide against the Bengali populace). Pakistan's history of being prone to invasions from the Afghan highlands and the Indus Valley a transitional medium between the Sub-continent and the Islamic world has led to be a boundary between the practises of desert and monsoon Islam. The population is roughly divided as typified by the Punjabi trait of venerating Sufi saints, who are no more than Islamicised versions of Hindu yogis, whilst the Pathans practise of a form of Islam that finds close kin in the Bedouin practises in the hinterlands of Saudi Arabia. Zachary Latif 13:13 Comment(1) latif.blogspot.com