MODERN AND CLASSICAL ISLAM IN CONTRAST

On this page we summarize, in point form, the contrasts between classical Islam and post-Caliphate or modern Islam. The watershed between the two periods is the First World War and its aftermath, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the dissolution of the Caliphate and the rise of Wahabi Islam in the Arab heartland.

 

The Prophet of Islam - may peace be upon him - foresaw and spoke about the modern age:

It is reported - but Allah knows best - that the Prophet Muhammad - may peace be upon him - said, "A time will come when the people will vie with each other in building big mosques but very few will attend them."

 

CLASSICAL ISLAM

 

*Culturally diverse - Arab, Turkish, Persian, Indian and other influences.

*Pan-Islamic Caliphate

*Four Schools of Law with Hanafi Law dominant.

*Many Sufi brotherhoods (attached to traditional crafts).

*Diverse centres (Shrines of saints)

*Instruments, such as the Sufi Orders, across the Sunni/Shia divide.

*Multi-ethnic empires

 

POST-CALIPHATE ISLAM

 

*Arabic monoculture (Turks, Persians, Indians and others blamed for 'polluting' pure Islam)

*Post-Madhabs (Most Muslims no longer subscribe to a classical School of Law. Madhabs blamed for failing to resist colonialism. Hanbalite heresy - Wahabism - dominant.)

*Wahabi dominance and control of Holy Places and pilgrimage - Meccan centralism.

*Destruction of Shrines (Desecration of Arabia.)

*Sufism in decline (seen as a Hindu innovation, for example) - the rise of Western Sufism.

*Post-caliphate ethnically-cleansed nation states, most of them failures.

*Sunni/Shia divide hardened into nation states.

 

The following excerpt is a description of the Middle East during the 1890s in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire and concerns the impressions recorded by the famous English convert Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall. Readers are invited to compare this description with the tragic state of the Middle East, Palestine and Lebanon, today, and ask 'How did this happen? What went wrong? How did we go from A to B?:

Some of [Pickthall's] experiences in the twilight of that exotic world may be re-read in his travelogue, Oriental Encounters. He had found, as he explains, a world of freedom unimaginable to a public schoolboy raised on an almost idolatrous passion for The State. Most Palestinians never set eyes on a policeman, and lived for decades without engaging with government in any way. Islamic law was administered in its time-honoured fashion, by qadis who ... were local scholars. Villages chose their own headmen, or inherited them, and the same was true for the bedouin tribes. The population revered and loved the Sultan-Caliph in faraway Istanbul, but understood that it was not his place to interfere with their lives. It was this freedom, as much as intellectual assent, which set Marmaduke on the long pilgrimage which was to lead him to Islam. He saw the Muslim world before Westernisation had contaminated the lives of the masses, and long before it had infected Muslim political thought and produced the modern vision of the Islamic State, with its 'ideology', its centralised bureaucracy, its secret police, its Pasdaran and its Basij. That totalitarian nightmare he would not have recognised as Muslim. The deep faith of the Levantine peasantry which so amazed him was sustained by the sincerity that can only come when men are free, not forced, in the practice of religion. For the state to compel compliance is to spread vice and disbelief; as the Arab proverb which he well-knew says: 'If camel-dung were to be prohibited, people would seek it out.' Throughout his life Pickthall saw Islam as radical freedom, a freedom from the encroachments of the State as much as from the claws of the ego.

 

Site Map

 Unto Him is the real prayer! - Koran 13:14