Author: M. Asem Ismail Zahi
Humanism (Part 11)
Humanism Confronting the Muslim!
In the name of humanity, the true Muslim is told Brother, do not withdraw from people! For all of humankind is a single family; therefore, deal with it as you would with members of your own family, and do not consider yourself a being set apart! Participate in “human” activities and in the manifestations of “human” civilization!
We do not say to them: Have you treated Muslims as members of your “human” and global” family? Have you granted them their rights on the basis that they are part of this family? Have you refrained from pursuing and persecuting them? Have you not displaced or expelled them? Have you not shown bias against them? Have you not united in harming and abusing them?
We do not say such things to them, because disputing with them is of no benefit. Rather, we present a witness from among their own ranks, one who cannot be accused of bias in his testimony.
This person is Arnold Toynbee, the renowned contemporary historian, whose hostility and prejudice against Islam and Muslims is itself a well-known matter.
In one of his lectures entitled “Islam, the West, and the Future,” after dividing the world, in the face of the process of Westernization, into two groups—the irrational fanatics and the reckless imitators, and after praising the movement of Kemal Atatürk as an imitator of the West, he states:
The Western observer ought to observe the limits of good conduct and propriety and refrain from mockery; for what the Turkish imitators are doing is, in fact, transforming the condition of their homeland and compatriots into a state whose absence we used to criticize them for, owing to the West’s treatment of Islam—whereas now, albeit belatedly, they are striving to imitate precisely a Western government and a Western nation.
He then says:
Once we have fully understood the goal they intended, we can only ask in astonishment: does this goal truly justify the effort expended in their struggle to attain it?
He further remarks:
We do not love the Muslim Turk who imitates us, who provokes our anger when he looks down upon us from above as a Pharisee and a heretic, thanking God for not having made him like us. And because the former imitating Turks considered their creation to be from a ‘special clay,’ we sought, by portraying this ‘special clay’ as something repulsive and ugly, to diminish the Turks’ stature and greatness. We called them ‘the unknown Turks’ until, in the end, we succeeded in destroying their self-confidence and compelled them to carry out this ‘imitative’ revolution which they are now implementing before our very eyes…
And he continues:
Now, after the Turks have been transformed under our instigation and supervision, and after they have become such that they seek every means to make themselves resemble us and the nations around them, we now feel constriction, pressure, and even a sense of anger and resentment…
much like the verse of Samuel, when the Children of Israel confessed the ugliness and baseness of their objective and expressed a desire for a king.
For this reason, our new complaint against the Turks in this situation is inappropriate; and the Turk can rightly reply to us that whatever he does will, in our eyes, be deemed wrong.
In any case, our criticism of the Turks may be harsh and unbecoming, yet it is neither driven by malice nor prejudice, nor is it irrelevant. Thus, if the Turks’ efforts do not come to naught (that is, if we hypothetically assume they succeed), what civilizational legacy would result? This point reveals two fundamental weaknesses of the imitators’ movement:
First: the Atatürk movement is imitative and derivative, not creative. Therefore, even assuming its success, instead of releasing even a particle of creative capacity within the human soul, it merely leads to an increase in the quantity of products manufactured by the tools and machines already produced in the societies being imitated.
Second: even in the case of astonishing success (hypothetically), which represents the highest level the imitators can reach, it would merely provide a path of escape for a tiny minority within the societies that adopt this imitative method. The majority have no hope of joining the ruling class of the imitated civilization, and the outcome for this majority is, in reality, an increase in the number of the proletariat (workers) of the imitative civilization. [1]
Mussolini’s observation was sharp and incisive when he said: There are proletarian nations just as there are proletarian classes and individuals.[2]
This is the issue.
In truth, the Muslim’s adherence and firm attachment to Islam is itself something that drives the enemies of Islam into a kind of madness and fury. They will not rest until they have destroyed or weakened this commitment; and among the means they employ to this end is the call to humanity and globalism. If the Muslim, in practice, becomes weak and no longer preserves his defining characteristic, he is then humiliated, just as Europe humiliated the Turks after Atatürk uprooted their Islam and replaced it with Western culture.
This is while one of the Christian missionaries, in his book “The Onslaught upon the Islamic World,” states:
Europe feared the Sick Man (the Ottoman Caliphate), because three hundred million people stood behind him, ready to enter war at a single gesture of his hand.
This final statement brings us to the second point, or second objective, namely, the employment of the call to humanity as a weapon in the war against Muslims. [3]
To be continued…
References:
- Al-Dāwī, ʿAbd al-Razzāq, The Death of Man in Contemporary Philosophical Discourse, p. 189, Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, Beirut, Lebanon.
- Ṣubḥī, Dr. Nabīl, Islam, the West, and the Future, pp. 51–53, translated by Majd, Homāyūn Publications: Farzān-Rūz, Tehran.
- Al-Sayyid Walad Abāh, ʿAbdullāh, Modern and Contemporary European Thought, within An Introduction to Forming the Student of Knowledge in the Human Sciences, Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, Lebanon, 2019.
