Saturday, August 18, 2007

Even Angels Ask

Continuing with my series- Advice to Young Muslim;

Advice No. 2; Don’t be like the following ‘scholar’ mentioned in the quote below- and read ‘The Road to Mecca’ and other books by Muhammad Asad ( but with a critical mind).
Out of the crowded bustle of Mousky Street, Cairo’s oldest shopping centre, we reached a small, out-of-the-way square, one of its sides occupied by the broad, straight front of the Azhar Mosque. Through a double gate and a shadowy forecourt we entered the courtyard of the mosque proper, a large quandrangle surrounded by ancient arcades. Students dressed in long, dark jubbas and white turbans were sitting on straw mats and reading with low voices from their books and manuscripts. The lectures were given in the huge, covered mosque-hall beyond. Several teachers sat, also on straw mats, under the pillars which crossed the hall in long rows, and in a semicircle before each teacher crouched a group of students. The lecturer never raised his voice, so that it obviously required great attention and concentration not to miss any of his words. One should have thought that such absorption would be conducive to real scholarship; but Shaykh Al-Maraghi soon shattered my illusions:

‘Dost thou see those “scholars” over there?’ he asked me. ‘They are like those sacred cows in India which, I am told, eat up all the printed paper they can find in the streets … Yes, they gobble up all the printed pages from books that have been written centuries ago, but they do not digest them. They no longer think for themselves; they read and repeat, read and repeat- and the students who listen to them learn only to read and repeat, generation after generation.’

‘But, Shaykh Mustafa,’ I interposed, ‘Al-Azhar is, after all, the central seat of Islamic learning, and the oldest university in the world! One encounters its name on nearly every page of Muslim cultural history. What about all the great thinkers, the theologians, historians, philosophers, mathematicians it has produced over the last ten centuries?’

“It stopped producing them several centuries ago,’ he replied ruefully. ‘Well, perhaps not quiet; here and there an independent thinker has somehow managed to emerge from Al-Azhar even in recent times. But on the whole, Al-Azhar has lapsed into the sterility from which the whole Muslim world is suffering, and its old impetus is all but extinguished. Those ancient Islamic thinkers whom thou hast mentioned would never have dreamed that after so many centuries their thoughts, instead of being continued and developed, would only be repeated over and over again, as if they were ultimate and infallible truths. If there is to be any change for the better, thinking must be encouraged instead of the present thought imitation…’

Shaykh Al-Maraghi’s trenchant characterization of Al- Azhar helped me to realize one of the deepest causes of the cultural decay that stared one in the face everywhere in the Muslim world. Was not the scholastic petrifaction of this ancient university mirrored, in varying degrees, in the social sterility of the Muslim present? Was not the counterpart of this intellectual stagnation to be found in the passive, almost indolent, acceptance by so many Muslims of the unnecessary poverty in which they lived, of their mute toleration of the many social wrongs to which they were subjected?

- The Road to Mecca, pp.189-90 (emphasis mine)

Muhammad Asad is talking about the Azhar of the early twentieth century, and as I understand it has largely modernized its curriculum. However in a lot of the other Islamic countries it still seems, ‘read, repeat and don’t think’ to be the standard approach.

Related;
The Sorry State of Knowledge in Islamic Countries
Even Angels Ask! Corruption of Public Discourse in Islamic Countries
Muhammad Asad (1900-1992): The Pakistani Connection
Excerpt from The Road to Mecca;
When we returned home, I happened to glance at my desk on which lay open a copy of the Koran I had been reading earlier. Mechanically, I picked the book up to put it away, but just as I was about to close it, my eye fell on the open page before me, and I read:
You are obsessed by greed for more and more
Until you go down to your graves.
Nay, but you will come to know!
Nay, but you will come to know!
Nay, if you but knew it with the knowledge of certainty,
You would indeed see the hell you are in.In time, indeed, you shall see it with the eye of certainty:
And on that day you will be asked what you have done with the boon of life.

For a moment I was speechless. I think the book shook in my hands. Then I handed it to Elsa. "Read this. Is it not an answer to what we saw in the subway?"


Berlin to Makkah

Book recommendations from Tom Palmer

Suicide Bombing Cannot Bring Salvation

Multimedia;
A Conversation with Muhammad Asad

Muhammad Asad Speaks on Bedouins & The Desert

Talal Asad (son of Muhammed Asad) discussing 'On Suicide Bombing'"

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