altmuslim - Making men(ds) with method

The Quran, the life of Muhammad, the hadith (including the fabricated ones), and Islamic History, all offer many things that are good and noble. Rabia of Basra, Rumi, Hafiz, Iqbal and Shirin Ebadi are all believers and righteous.

The Quran, the life of Muhammad, the hadith (including the fabricated ones), and Islamic History, all offer many things that are reprehsensible and anachronistic. Bin Laden, Zarqawi, the Taliban, the Jihadists, are all believers and evil.

Would it were that the age of the latter was the one that had waned, and the age of the righteous was at hand? Unfortunately this is not the case. Although it is true that beneath and behind the foliage that the firebrands have grown there are many industrious ants of righteousness and justice, the difficulty is that they have been catacombed in their tunnels and must wind through labyrinths to escape. Would it were that these labyrinths were physical, the kind built by Daedalus. Then it would be easy to wield a sledgehammer against them and murder the Minotaur.

Rather than hammers, it will be creativity and intelligence that will let the ants to emerge from the darkness, and with their superhuman strength, drag the entire garden back towards the sun. What will be curious is the method the reformists will use. The most pressing question is: in light of the fact that Islam, like every other religion and ideology, has produced the best and the worst kind of person, how will the best kind of man now emerge? How will the best kind of man cull and sift the cavalcade of history before him? How will he challenge those who read history as a handmaiden to brutality? In my opinion, he must learn from those that engaged in such redescriptions before. I speak of: Niccolo Machiavelli, John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes.

In "The Prince" 㠷ich inaugurates the age of creativity and mental flexibility in the West ȳ
chiavelli's lessons relating to the ends justifying the means are *not* the most important lessons of the book. What's significant about the book is the way in which historical figures are constantly recast and redrawn in order to make them comport with Machiavelli's vision of the world. For example, Moses, who gave up his position at the Pharoah's court to lead a tribe of slaves, is redescribed by Machiavelli as a prince, and rewrites the incident of the Golden Calf to suit his purpose. Machiavelli does a similar re-casting of Achilles. That Greek warrior, long heralded as the quintessential "man" is redescribed by Machiavellie as an animal, thus destroying any romantic fantasies a warrior might have of him.

John Locke conducted a similar intellectual nuance in his major work: "The Two Treatises of Government." It is in the second book that he discusses his theory of labor and his social contract and from which the modern nation-state emerges. But it is in the first where the dirty work gets done and which should be more relevant to reformists today. Locke lived at a time when the divine right of king was not questioned. In fact, all political theory linked the power of the king with the power of God, and therefore, it was impossible to question what the king's men did. The predominant promoter of the divine right of king was the philosopher Robert Filmer whose book "Patriarcha" gave a 'rational' gloss to the theory of divine right of king. Filmer's essential argument ws that because Genesis 3:16 says to Eve that "and your desire shall be to your husband and shall rule over you" it means that Adam is the perennial Patriarch and his fatherhood can only be manifest in one type of government: monarchy. In the First Book, Locke goes after this theory and carries out one of the most brilliant cases of historical redescription. Locke says, while he will concede that Adam was a monarch, one has to wonder what kind monarch he was since he had to work for a living and had to subdue the entire earth. In fact, Locke finds it curious that the scriptures say to Adam: "In the sweat of your face you shall eat your bread." In other words, what Locke did was to redescribe Adam from a monarch into a laborer, thus dismantling the entire intellectual edifice on which the divine right of king was situated, and opening the door to republican theories of governance.

Finally, in the Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes engaged in another kind of redescription of history. Rather than rewriting and emphasizing various elements of personalities or historical occurrences, he argues that our language itself is constituted of something that has been handed down to us. Since we don't always know what we inherit, it would be wise to make an inventory of language. Thus the first part of the Leviathan is Hobbes setting forth common words and providing meanings to them. He redefines every major and important word of the English language according to his own taste. Words like "power" and "dreams" and "pagan" and "religion" are all re-defined. Once he has introduced fluidity into language it was not all too difficult to set forth an entirely new theory of politics.

There are lessons in the aforementioned thinkers for Muslims. Muslims must take the Quran and describe what it says based on what they know and what they aspire towards. The Fourth Caliph Ali once said: "The Quran is but ink and paper. It is we who speak." For quite some time now it has been the demagogues of the faith who have been speaking. They have been the ones who have managed to describe our history according to their self-serving purpose. They are the Robert Filmer's of Islam. We must step forward and redescribe our history in such a way that it gives you the result you want: peace and prosperity; instead of being a tool for your destruction.

Note that there will be many who will jump at you from the fringes (of ignorance or of naivete) and say: "you are not being faithful to history, yours is a history of violence, a history of war." They will call themselves believers, they will call themselves humanists. In the end they are both myopics who do not wish you to meander from your catacombs of loneliness. Stay stuck to your static yesterday, they say.

We, however, know better. We, however, will simply laugh at them and say, "you are misguided, it is history which must give us its fidelity. It is we who tell the past who we are today, and we who leave history in our wake."

Past is profane.

"The coming only is sacred."