Nearly thirty years ago, in late 1977, I was in Los Angeles, California with the late Sheikh Al Azhar, Dr. Abdul Haleem Mahmoud, at a press conference he gave within days of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem, which was, as you all know, hailed in the West and reviled across the Arab and Islamic world. At the press conference the reporter from Time Magazine asked him, “Do you think that America could become a Muslim country?” Without missing a beat, he answered, “Why not? Islam is the Way of God and Peace. Americans believe in God and in Peace. It’s not impossible.”
Today that question would never be asked - ever. And the answer would be met by outrage and revulsion. Islam has become anathema to the non-Islamic world and a source of internal conflict for Islamic States and this has a lot to do with a failure of communications.
Since that time, we have seen a frightening and tragic deterioration of communications that has led to the alteration of the image of Islam from a way of benign spirituality, forbearance and purification into a strident and threatening political ideology. We have seen the rise of intolerant, xenophobic, heretical and suicidally murderous extremism. We have seen a mass confusion among ordinary Muslims as to how to reconcile modern life with the practice of their faith. We have seen the wholesale disenfranchisement of Muslim youth from traditional forms of Islam. We have seen the continuing isolation of several Islamic states from global society. And we have seen a prevailing fear and loathing of Islam and Muslims throughout the non-Islamic world. I’m sorry to say that this miserable state of affairs can be largely attributed to the dangerous and widening rift between the media and the institutions of Islam.
The irony, of course, is that we have never had access to more information or a wider and more diverse media environment than we have today and, with the advent of what in my business we call new media – that is to say, digital, interactive media, or what the telecoms people are now calling seamless mobility – we can link in, anytime, anywhere, to other worlds in ways and with speeds that would have been completely inconceivable less than 15 years ago. Yet, we are living in a global society as conflicted, confused and insecure as it is interconnected. And much of this conflict, confusion and insecurity in Muslim societies and in Muslim communities in non-Islamic societies can be attributed to the chasm that separates Islam from the media.
On the one hand, religious scholars have absolutely failed to adapt to the modern world. Islam is still being interpreted and taught based upon mediaeval paradigms that bear no relation to the world we live in. And, while there is no question that the pervasiveness of media has had a profound, transformative impact on the world we live in, religious scholars and institutions of religious learning have utterly failed to cope with or respond to this powerful force in any positive way, nor have they made any effort to understand how the mass media works.
On the other hand, journalism and mass media have emerged out of an aggressively secular, sometimes revolutionary and ultimately subversive modern tradition that exalts freedom of speech and expression above all else, including religious belief and practice.
In most Islamic societies, journalists have no qualification to write or comment upon Islam or Islamic issues. Whereas in many developed parts of the world, a journalist might have a PhD in his field, in Muslim countries the same reporter who covers public or social affairs or business news will be allowed to comment upon a religious issue or juristic decision without any qualification at all.
Today that question would never be asked - ever. And the answer would be met by outrage and revulsion. Islam has become anathema to the non-Islamic world and a source of internal conflict for Islamic States and this has a lot to do with a failure of communications.
Since that time, we have seen a frightening and tragic deterioration of communications that has led to the alteration of the image of Islam from a way of benign spirituality, forbearance and purification into a strident and threatening political ideology. We have seen the rise of intolerant, xenophobic, heretical and suicidally murderous extremism. We have seen a mass confusion among ordinary Muslims as to how to reconcile modern life with the practice of their faith. We have seen the wholesale disenfranchisement of Muslim youth from traditional forms of Islam. We have seen the continuing isolation of several Islamic states from global society. And we have seen a prevailing fear and loathing of Islam and Muslims throughout the non-Islamic world. I’m sorry to say that this miserable state of affairs can be largely attributed to the dangerous and widening rift between the media and the institutions of Islam.
The irony, of course, is that we have never had access to more information or a wider and more diverse media environment than we have today and, with the advent of what in my business we call new media – that is to say, digital, interactive media, or what the telecoms people are now calling seamless mobility – we can link in, anytime, anywhere, to other worlds in ways and with speeds that would have been completely inconceivable less than 15 years ago. Yet, we are living in a global society as conflicted, confused and insecure as it is interconnected. And much of this conflict, confusion and insecurity in Muslim societies and in Muslim communities in non-Islamic societies can be attributed to the chasm that separates Islam from the media.
On the one hand, religious scholars have absolutely failed to adapt to the modern world. Islam is still being interpreted and taught based upon mediaeval paradigms that bear no relation to the world we live in. And, while there is no question that the pervasiveness of media has had a profound, transformative impact on the world we live in, religious scholars and institutions of religious learning have utterly failed to cope with or respond to this powerful force in any positive way, nor have they made any effort to understand how the mass media works.
On the other hand, journalism and mass media have emerged out of an aggressively secular, sometimes revolutionary and ultimately subversive modern tradition that exalts freedom of speech and expression above all else, including religious belief and practice.
In most Islamic societies, journalists have no qualification to write or comment upon Islam or Islamic issues. Whereas in many developed parts of the world, a journalist might have a PhD in his field, in Muslim countries the same reporter who covers public or social affairs or business news will be allowed to comment upon a religious issue or juristic decision without any qualification at all.
At the same time, institutionalized Islam has not only lost touch with the modern world, it has also lost touch with its own roots – the roots of classical knowledge. This is not a new phenomenon. In the 14th century, Imam Abu Hamid Al Ghazali in his masterwork Ihya Ulum Al Din described how the meanings of the praiseworthy sciences had been reduced and degraded to such an extent that they had become blameworthy and the first such science he mentions is jurisprudence, or fiqh. According to Al Ghazali, and I quote:
“In the early period of Islam, the term fiqh was applied to the science of the path of the hereafter, and the knowledge of the subtle defects of the soul, the influences which render works corrupt, the thorough realization of the inferiority of this life, the urgent expectation of bliss in the hereafter, and the domination of fear over the heart.” But, Al Ghazali contended, the meaning of fiqh had been reduced to “the knowledge of unusual legal cases, the mastery of the minute details of their origins, excessive disputation on them, and retention of the different opinions which relate to them.”
According to Al Ghazali, this reduction of the practice of fiqh created confusion that caused scholars to devote themselves solely to abstruse legal opinions to, and I quote: “the neglect of the science of the hereafter and the nature of the heart.” He wrote, “Upon my life the word fiqh (discernment) and the word fahm (understanding) are nothing but two names for the same thing.”
So what does all this have to do with media, which is my area of expertise. I’ll tell you. Last week I went on to the global Internet search engine Google and typed in the word “fatwa”. Do you have any idea how many entries there are for this word? 4,780,000! And almost every entry refers to terrorism or intolerance. If you log on to Google Images and type in “fatwa”, nearly every image is linked with Osama Binladin, Ayman Al Zawahiri, terrorism or violence. If you think that this has no relevance to the issue then you’re living on another planet.
And what are Muslim scholars doing about this? Well from all evidence, making things worse.
“In the early period of Islam, the term fiqh was applied to the science of the path of the hereafter, and the knowledge of the subtle defects of the soul, the influences which render works corrupt, the thorough realization of the inferiority of this life, the urgent expectation of bliss in the hereafter, and the domination of fear over the heart.” But, Al Ghazali contended, the meaning of fiqh had been reduced to “the knowledge of unusual legal cases, the mastery of the minute details of their origins, excessive disputation on them, and retention of the different opinions which relate to them.”
According to Al Ghazali, this reduction of the practice of fiqh created confusion that caused scholars to devote themselves solely to abstruse legal opinions to, and I quote: “the neglect of the science of the hereafter and the nature of the heart.” He wrote, “Upon my life the word fiqh (discernment) and the word fahm (understanding) are nothing but two names for the same thing.”
So what does all this have to do with media, which is my area of expertise. I’ll tell you. Last week I went on to the global Internet search engine Google and typed in the word “fatwa”. Do you have any idea how many entries there are for this word? 4,780,000! And almost every entry refers to terrorism or intolerance. If you log on to Google Images and type in “fatwa”, nearly every image is linked with Osama Binladin, Ayman Al Zawahiri, terrorism or violence. If you think that this has no relevance to the issue then you’re living on another planet.
And what are Muslim scholars doing about this? Well from all evidence, making things worse.
(To be continued)
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