Alla inlägg taggade med: "Muhammad Iqbal"

As a cultural movement Islam rejects the old static view of the universe, and reaches a dynamic view. As an emotional system of unification it recognizes the worth of the individual as such, and rejects bloodrelationship as a basis of human unity. Blood-relationship is earthrootedness. The search for a purely psychological foundation of human unity becomes possible only with the perception that all human life is spiritual in its origin.1 Such a perception is creative of fresh loyalties without any ceremonial to keep them alive, and makes it possible for man to emancipate himself from the earth. Christianity which had originally appeared as a monastic order was tried by Constantine as a system of unification.2 Its failure to work as such a system drove the Emperor Julian3 to return to the old gods of Rome on which he attempted to put philosophical interpretations. A modern historian of civilization has thus depicted the state of the civilized world about the time when Islam appeared on the stage of History: Det verkade då som att den stora civilisationen som det hade tagit fyra tusen år att konstruera var på gränsen till upplösning, och att mänskligheten sannolikt skulle återvända till det tillstånd av barbari där varje stam och sekt var emot nästa, och lag och ordning var okända . . . The

gamla stamsanktioner hade förlorat sin makt. Därför skulle de gamla imperialistiska metoderna inte längre fungera. De nya sanktionerna skapade av

Kristendomen arbetade splittring och förstörelse istället för enhet och ordning. Det var en tid fylld av tragedier. Civilisation, som ett gigantiskt träd vars lövverk hade översvämmat världen och vars grenar hade burit konstens och vetenskapens och litteraturens gyllene frukter, stod och vacklade, dess stam inte längre levande med hängivenhets och vördnads flödande saft, men ruttnade till kärnan, riven by the storms of war, and held together only by the cords of ancient customs and laws, that might snap at any moment. Was there any emotional culture that could be brought in, to gather mankind once more into unity and to save civilization? This culture must be something of a new type, for the old sanctions and ceremonials were dead, and to build up others of the same kind would be the work

of centuries.’The writer then proceeds to tell us that the world stood in need of a new culture to take the place of the culture of the throne, and the systems of unification which were based on bloodrelationship.

It is amazing, he adds, that such a culture should have arisen from Arabia just at the time when it was most needed. There is, dock, nothing amazing in the phenomenon. The world-life intuitively sees its own needs, and at critical moments defines its own direction. This is what, in the language of religion, we call prophetic revelation. It is only natural that Islam should have flashed across the consciousness of a simple people untouched by any of the ancient cultures, and occupying a geographical position where three continents meet together. The new culture finds the foundation of world-unity in the principle of Tauhâd.’5 Islam, as a polity, is only a practical means of making this principle a living factor in the intellectual and emotional life of mankind. It demands loyalty to God, not to thrones. And since God is the ultimate spiritual basis of all life, loyalty to God virtually amounts to man’s loyalty to his own ideal nature. The ultimate spiritual basis of all life, as conceived by Islam, is eternal and reveals itself in variety and change. A society based on such a conception of Reality must reconcile, in its life, the categories of permanence and change. It must possess eternal principles to regulate its collective life, for the eternal gives us a foothold in the world of perpetual change.