A Disturbing Idea

Let’s begin with the imaginary world of the year 2072. Modern civilization has disappeared. Actually, first, let’s turn the clock back a little, to understand what went wrong in this imaginary world.

Before 2072, modern civilization was progressing as usual. Then a series of tragic nuclear-environmental disasters killed countless innocent lives. Tragedy demands answers. And since technology— or to be more precise, research scientists — was what gave modern civilization its “progress”, it was clear who to blame. Violent mobs called for the destruction of all schools and universities, and soon, laboratories were being burnt to the ground. The reactionary group, Anti-Science, came into power, and angry mobs went door to door hounding for anything remotely related to the sciences and technology. From Bill Nye’s videos on gravity for 5th graders to textbooks on synthetic biology, everything was destroyed. The global uprising climaxed with scientists being mass executed. The Dark Ages had set.

During this time, a brave group began to secretly preserve bits and pieces of the forbidden information and resources: periodic tables, sheets of research papers, iPhones and wireless speakers, etc. These brave souls dug holes in their backyards and buried the scientific knowledge deep underground, in hopes that a future generation could salvage the tradition of science. Maybe one day, the Dark Ages would end in this imaginary world.

Well, eventually, that future generation did arise —in the year 3250. After a millennium of rule under the technophobic Anti-Science political party, people around world began to protest. The dominant power structure fell away and its place came an enlightened group, the Pro-Tech movement. Why the support of technology? People of the 33rd century knew that many centuries ago —back in 2072 when modern civilization still flourished — science and technology was the backbone of society. So, the billions of activists under Pro-Tech wanted to bring that era back. They demanded a revival of science and technology, just like in those good ‘ole days, before the Anti-Science mobs suppressed scientific thought.

Soon astounding archaeological discoveries were made. These were — you might’ve guessed — the science-related stuff the few brave souls hid in their backyards in the 21st century. Some of those hidden fragments of scientific knowledge, buried deep underground were dug up. These rare artifacts would now become the cornerstone for a revival of science and technology.

Pieces of tech gadgets and scientific documents — representative of the ancient, 21st century technological heights— soon became the focus of the entire world. Exhibits of iPhones and Sony Walkmans were shown around the world. Fragments of scientific papers were dug up, and it seemed that scientific progress was inevitable. Sure, it was the 33rd century and it’s been 1,200 years since science last flourished, but why not revive those golden days from these recovered artifacts?

In this imaginary world, children memorized the words and numbers on the periodic table. Adults eagerly memorized the theories of Pythagoras and Newton. The external cases of iPhones and Walkmans were carefully reconstructed by sculptors with aluminum and glass. The people thought they were doing real research and a breakthrough was going to happen any day.

For years, Pro-Tech activists vigorously debated on scientific issues —when they found a torn manuscript of the great Einstein, they wondered, for e=mc^2, does the c stand for color and does the m stand for magic? — but for some reason it wasn’t helping them come up with nuclear technology that Einstein’s science originally led to. Despite the identical-ness of the iPhones sculptures to the original, people wondered why the replicated gadgets wasn’t helping with telecommunication. Even with all the focus on the ancient artifacts — recovered fragments from Einstein or iPhones from the era before the Dark Ages — why couldn’t society advance?

The 33rd century project in this imaginary world made no real scientific progress — all their efforts were essentially pointless. It was based on duplicating fragments and relics from a bygone era. The Pro-Tech activists, confident that by just using various bits of scientific language they could bring back science, didn’t realize they were missing most of the puzzle pieces. While these ancient artifacts definitely represented 21st century progress, they only represented that earlier era’s progress insofar as they were part of a larger scientific context. Because the 33rd century activists had no clue that basic concepts like the scientific method or the model of the atom was what led to the golden era’s technological success, their revival attempt was doomed to fail from the start.

What was the point in creating this imaginary world?

I believe that our modern take on Islam is similar to Pro-Tech movement’s revival attempt in their imaginary world — and it too is failing.

In the 1700s, Muslim populations began to become colonized, and by the 20th century the world’s Muslims, more or less, had become subservient to Western powers. Of course, it first began politically, but rapidly — and more subtlety — the enslavement took psychological and intellectual forms. Colonialism uprooted the organic ways of living and thinking for millions and replaced the deep fabric of Islam (that had sustained generations for over a millennium) with a new worldview that instead emphasized economic efficiency and secularism.

But like the Pro-Tech activists who wanted a revival of the Scientific Era, today’s faithful look back at the golden age of Islam when the earlier Muslims led a “good life” — a life, the envy of modern Muslims. But to bring back that era when Islam opened doors for all sorts of human growth isn’t easy.

The modern take on Islam is colored by the eyes through which we look, and if modernity’s eyes can only see economic efficiency, power and domination, it is only that we will find when we look at Islam. Using an Islamic vocabulary (e.g. jihad) and focusing on “religious” terms gets us nowhere, since the historical social-moral world they were a part of, has long been eradicated.

And so, we use a vocabulary that does come from Islam —phrases like ‘sharia law’ or ‘the ummah needs to unite’ — but not realizing that such terms were historically embedded in a larger fabric that has now disappeared. What remains of pre-modern Islam are isolated relics.

No matter how obsessively Muslims try to duplicate the surviving fragments, much of this essentially pointless. The early Islamic vocabulary— which we mistakenly believe is representative of Islam by itself—doesn’t make sense outside of the contexts in which it came from. Not only does it not make sense, it miserably fails at its original purpose when we try to duplicate it in our modern life without having the necessary underlying foundation.

At a global level, see the ‘noble’ attempts to revive the sharia in Iran, Pakistan, and now, with ISIS, and how they’ve all failed at producing the essentials of Islamic society. At a smaller level, see any masjid where the imam gives beautiful khutbahs on the ‘sunnah’ and akhlaq of the Prophet, yet inter-personal enmity and beef between families are widespread. To some degree, we all suffer from a reductionist take on Islam. This is expected: if a person is flooded with the crudeness of modernity, how else is she to see Islam except crudely?

Increasingly, Muslims have began to cloak their failure with the line, “Islam is for its followers and not for everyone”. Because so much of the modern attempts to revive Islam is embarrassingly crude, we comfort ourselves by saying that as a religion among many, it’s only for its followers. With that closed-minded defensiveness, outsiders see Islam as cultist — and rightly so. We’ve forgotten that Islam isn’t for Muslims or for the devout. When real Islam stepped into a place, humans were given a foundation to reach their inner potential — whether that be in a spiritual or scientific realm, etc.. Islam came for human beings, any qualifier attached to that line is to pervert the historical record.

Whether it’s a college kid confused with some ‘rule’ on gender interaction or it’s a single mother with shame trying to fit into her unwelcoming Muslim community, the crises of the modern Muslim is the same one faced by the Pro-Tech activists in the imaginary world: How to replicate the fruits of an era when that era’s foundational roots have been wrecked and only bits and pieces survive? To blindly photo-copy those surviving fragments is to settle for failure.

There is an alternative. Taking this alternative means to try to transcend the crudeness of modern world — to take off those colored lenses — and reconstruct how Islamic society actually used to work, and how the fragments (that have survived) used to fit into their larger social-moral context. This alternative route doesn’t appeal to modern tastes. It’s far too much work — it requires extensive historical, anthropological, social retrieval work. But it’s only here that Muslims have hope to bring back some of the golden-ness of early Islam.

My attempt in the following sections is far less ambitious. I only want to retrieve concepts that others have overlooked. I’ll focus on an arbitrary range of topics, from the role of physical touch to the cultivation of authenticity. The underlying social-moral infrastructure of early Islam needs to be thoroughly understood and embodied within us before we try to make sense of the bits and pieces that we’ve been left with.