By Ziauddin Sardar
Philosophy Press, September 14, 2009
What Enlightenment? It may have been good for Europe, but for the rest of the world in general, and Islam in particular, the Enlightenment was a disaster. Despite their stand for freedom and liberty, reason and liberal thought, Enlightenment thinkers saw the non-West as irrational and inferior, morally decadent and fit only for colonisation. This legacy is not only with us but is positively thriving in the guise of neo-conservative thought, dogmatic secularism and scientism.
For key Enlightenment thinkers, such as Voltaire, de Montesquieu, Volney and Pascal, Europe occupied a special place: it was to be the destiny of humanity, construed as Western man. They worked hard to provide a rational justification for colonisation. They rationalised the medieval images, anxieties and fear of Islam and its Prophet – so evident in the sections devoted to Muhammad in Pascal's Pensées – and presented them as evidence for the innate inferiority of Islam. They deliberately suppressed the Muslim contribution to science and learning and severed all intellectual links between Islam and Europe. Their Eurocentricism thus further locked Islam into an exclusive confrontation with the West, which continues to this day.
For thirteen and fourteenth century thinkers of Christendom, such as Roger Bacon and John Wycliff, Islam was simply a pagan, enemy Empire. To their credit, the Enlightenment thinkers saw Islam as a civilisation. But it was a civilisation grounded in a backward society and inferior political institutions and religious beliefs at its core. In Mohammad and Fanaticism, Voltaire denounced Islam in harsh and hostile terms. Later, in the Essai sur les moeurs, he was a little more restrained, but the judgement did not change. He still saw Islam as an embodiment of fanaticism, anti-humanism, irrationalism, and the violent will to power. But despite this, Muslims did have a few positive aspects. They could move towards greater tolerance thanks largely to Islam's loose sexual standards, which made it akin to a natural religion. While Jesus was good, Christians had become intolerant. But Muslims were tolerant despite their evil Prophet. Positive development in one case, negative in another. This is how Voltaire reconciled his deep seated prejudices about Islam and Muslims with reason.
For all their sabre-rattling against religion, Enlightenment thinkers saw Christianity as the standard of civilised behaviour and norm of all religion. In effect, they further naturalised the natural law theory of medieval Christianity which had always been vague in the sense of never precisely defined, yet also highly specific in being a universalising of Christian norms as the standard for human behaviour. Islam remained the antithesis to Christianity. Thus, in Les Ruines, Volney announced that "Mohammad succeeded in building a political and theological empire at the expense of those of Moses and Jesus' vicars." Or, in the scene where he has an imam speaking about "the law of Mohammad", "God has established Mohammad as his minister on earth; he has handed over the world to him to subdue with the sabre those who refuse to believe in his law." Volney described Muhammad as the "apostle of a merciful God who preaches nothing but murder and carnage," the spirit of intolerance and exclusiveness that "shocks every notion of justice". While Christianity might be irrational, Volney declared that it was gentle and compassionate but Islam had a contempt for science – a truly bizarre claim since Volney himself, and all his fellow Enlightenment thinkers, learnt most of their science and philosophy from such names as al-Frabi, Ibn Sina and ibn Rushd.
While the Enlightenment may have been concerned with reason, its champions were not too worried about truth when it came to Islam. They not only shamelessly plagiarised philosophy, science and learning from Islam, but the very hallmark of Enlightenment, liberal humanism, has its origins in Islam. It is based on the adab movement of classical Islam, which was concerned with the etiquette of being human. Islam developed a sophisticated system of teaching law and humanism that involved not just institutions such as the university, with its faculties of law, theology, medicine and natural philosophy, but also an elaborate method of instruction including work-study courses, a curriculum that included grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, medicine, and moral philosophy, and mechanisms for the formation of a humanist culture such as academic associations, literary circles, clubs and other coteries that sustain intellectuals and the literati. The adab literature and institutions were, in fact, what enlightenment was all about in Islam. One cannot have a revolt on behalf of reason in Islam because reason is central to its worldview: reason is the other side of revelation and the Qur'an presents both as "signs of God". A Muslim society cannot function without either. While Muslims can hardly be exonerated for the decline of reason and learning in Muslim civilisation, it was colonialism that as deliberate policy destroyed adab culture in Muslim societies.
But Enlightenment Europe swallowed the adab system, including textbooks, en masse. However, since it was a product of an inferior culture and civilisation its origins had to be shrouded. Thus, classical Arabic had to be replaced with another classical language, Latin. This was followed by a systematic expunging of all traces of the influence of Islamic thought on Europe. From the days of Voltaire right up to 1980, thanks largely to the efforts of Enlightenment scholars, it was a general western axiom that Islam had produced nothing of worth in philosophy, science and learning.
The Enlightenment legacy that Islam and Europe have nothing in common, that Islam is only a darker shadow of the West, that liberal secularism is the destiny of all human cultures, is much in evidence in our newspapers and television, literature and scholarship, as well as in our politics and foreign policies. It is the bedrock of Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" hypothesis, Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilisation" thesis, and the neo-conservative "Project for the New American Century". Voltaire's Bastards, to use the title of John Ralston Saul's brilliant 1992 book, are busy rationalizing torture, military interventions, and western supremacy, and demonising Islam and Muslims. The Enlightenment may have been big on reason but it was, as Saul shows so convincingly, bereft of both meaning and morality.
Forgive me if I don't stand up and salute the Enlightenment.
Ziauddin Sardar is the author of Balti Britain: A Journey Through the British Asian Experience (Granta)
http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=288
Monday, September 21, 2009
Secular Nepal celebrates first Eid with independent moon-sighting
By IANS
Kathmandu: Clad in white clothes and white caps, thousands of Muslims thronged to mosques to pray and celebrate as a newly secular Nepal announced the first public holiday for Eid-ul-Fitr and the first Nepali moon-sighting committee independently heralded the rise of the moon that marks the start of the festival after a month of fasting and intense prayers.
Nepal, once the only Hindu kingdom in the world where conversions were a punishable offence, marked its transformation into a secular democratic republic by declaring Monday a state holiday on occasion of Eid.
The communist-led government of Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal announced that all its diplomatic missions abroad would also remain closed Monday for Eid.
Before he left for New York to attend the 64th UN General Assembly, the prime minister issued a message, hoping Eid, with its tradition of helping the poor, would strengthen mutual respect and harmony in Nepal.
The top leaders of the major parties also issued public messages, greeting the Muslim community on the occasion of Eid. They included former prime minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda, whose Maoist party, bent on a collision course with the government, has also called a truce to honour the string of different religious festivals that started this month.
It is estimated that about 10 percent of Nepal's over 29 million population are Muslims with major concentrations in the plains in the south. The Terai lowlands saw the first major Muslim penetration in the late 1850s after the failed Sepoy Mutiny in India against British rule when many people, including some of the leaders of the revolt, fled to Nepal.
Eid celebrations this year have been boosted by the recent arrest of the leaders of two militant Hindu underground organisations that had asked Muslims and Christians to leave Nepal or face dire consequences.
Earlier this month, Nepal police arrested Ram Prasad Mainali, the chief of the Nepal Defence Army, who had masterminded attacks against a church and two mosques in Nepal, killing at least five people.
Close on the heels of Mainali's arrest, police also nabbed Vinod Pandey, the chief of another shadowy Hindu militant group, the Ranavir Sena, which had been demanding the restoration of Hinduism as the state religion.
Also, for the first time, the Muslim community in Nepal determined on its own that Eid would be celebrated Monday.
The Ruel-e-Hilal Committee formed to sight the new moon sent observers to Rautahat and Sunsari districts in the Terai.
The committee announced Sunday that the new moon had been glimpsed around 6.30 p.m. local time. Based on the sighting, it was announced that Eid would be celebrated Monday.
The Muslim world still remains divided over the sighting of the new moon.
This time too, there have been two Eids with parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East and US celebrating Eid Sunday.
However, in Bangladesh, India and Nepal the festival is being celebrated Monday.
Kathmandu: Clad in white clothes and white caps, thousands of Muslims thronged to mosques to pray and celebrate as a newly secular Nepal announced the first public holiday for Eid-ul-Fitr and the first Nepali moon-sighting committee independently heralded the rise of the moon that marks the start of the festival after a month of fasting and intense prayers.
Nepal, once the only Hindu kingdom in the world where conversions were a punishable offence, marked its transformation into a secular democratic republic by declaring Monday a state holiday on occasion of Eid.
The communist-led government of Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal announced that all its diplomatic missions abroad would also remain closed Monday for Eid.
Before he left for New York to attend the 64th UN General Assembly, the prime minister issued a message, hoping Eid, with its tradition of helping the poor, would strengthen mutual respect and harmony in Nepal.
The top leaders of the major parties also issued public messages, greeting the Muslim community on the occasion of Eid. They included former prime minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda, whose Maoist party, bent on a collision course with the government, has also called a truce to honour the string of different religious festivals that started this month.
It is estimated that about 10 percent of Nepal's over 29 million population are Muslims with major concentrations in the plains in the south. The Terai lowlands saw the first major Muslim penetration in the late 1850s after the failed Sepoy Mutiny in India against British rule when many people, including some of the leaders of the revolt, fled to Nepal.
Eid celebrations this year have been boosted by the recent arrest of the leaders of two militant Hindu underground organisations that had asked Muslims and Christians to leave Nepal or face dire consequences.
Earlier this month, Nepal police arrested Ram Prasad Mainali, the chief of the Nepal Defence Army, who had masterminded attacks against a church and two mosques in Nepal, killing at least five people.
Close on the heels of Mainali's arrest, police also nabbed Vinod Pandey, the chief of another shadowy Hindu militant group, the Ranavir Sena, which had been demanding the restoration of Hinduism as the state religion.
Also, for the first time, the Muslim community in Nepal determined on its own that Eid would be celebrated Monday.
The Ruel-e-Hilal Committee formed to sight the new moon sent observers to Rautahat and Sunsari districts in the Terai.
The committee announced Sunday that the new moon had been glimpsed around 6.30 p.m. local time. Based on the sighting, it was announced that Eid would be celebrated Monday.
The Muslim world still remains divided over the sighting of the new moon.
This time too, there have been two Eids with parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East and US celebrating Eid Sunday.
However, in Bangladesh, India and Nepal the festival is being celebrated Monday.
Kashmir celebrates Eid with prayer for peace
By IANS,
Srinagar ; Thousands of Muslims gathered at various prayer grounds and mosques across Kashmir Valley Monday to offer Eid-ul-Fitr prayers.
There were no reports of any untoward incidents and sources said Eid prayers concluded peacefully everywhere.
The holy month of Ramzan ended Sunday after the crescent was sighted at various places in the Valley heralding the beginning of the Islamic month of Shawwal.
The largest number of devotees in this summer capital gathered at the Hazratbal shrine, the Eidgah grounds, the Polo ground and the Jamia Mosque.
Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and his father, union minister and National Conference president Farooq Abdullah, offered Eid prayers at the Hazratbal shrine and mingled with thousands of devotees who had gathered there to offer prayers.
As clerics prayed for peace in the world and unity amongst Muslims, youth and children wore new clothes and hugged each other in the traditional Eid greeting.
Unlike earlier years, no alarm was raised amongst the security forces or the general public in Srinagar and other major towns over the loud noise created by the bursting of firecrackers.
At many places in the city, officers and troopers of the paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) were seen greeting the locals and patting children as a goodwill gesture.
"I have been manning this picket for so many months now that I recognise most of the residents in this area. It is nice to see people enjoying life today," said a CRPF trooper here.
As a goodwill gesture, authorities released some separatist leaders Sunday evening, including Muhammad Nayeem Khan, president of the separatist National Front and member of the moderate Hurriyat group led by Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, and Asiya Andrabi, chief of the women's separatist group Dukhtaran-e-Milat.
Srinagar ; Thousands of Muslims gathered at various prayer grounds and mosques across Kashmir Valley Monday to offer Eid-ul-Fitr prayers.
There were no reports of any untoward incidents and sources said Eid prayers concluded peacefully everywhere.
The holy month of Ramzan ended Sunday after the crescent was sighted at various places in the Valley heralding the beginning of the Islamic month of Shawwal.
The largest number of devotees in this summer capital gathered at the Hazratbal shrine, the Eidgah grounds, the Polo ground and the Jamia Mosque.
Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and his father, union minister and National Conference president Farooq Abdullah, offered Eid prayers at the Hazratbal shrine and mingled with thousands of devotees who had gathered there to offer prayers.
As clerics prayed for peace in the world and unity amongst Muslims, youth and children wore new clothes and hugged each other in the traditional Eid greeting.
Unlike earlier years, no alarm was raised amongst the security forces or the general public in Srinagar and other major towns over the loud noise created by the bursting of firecrackers.
At many places in the city, officers and troopers of the paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) were seen greeting the locals and patting children as a goodwill gesture.
"I have been manning this picket for so many months now that I recognise most of the residents in this area. It is nice to see people enjoying life today," said a CRPF trooper here.
As a goodwill gesture, authorities released some separatist leaders Sunday evening, including Muhammad Nayeem Khan, president of the separatist National Front and member of the moderate Hurriyat group led by Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, and Asiya Andrabi, chief of the women's separatist group Dukhtaran-e-Milat.
Prayers, feasts mark Eid celebrations
By IANS,
New Delhi : Thousands of people dressed in new clothes thronged mosques across the capital Monday to offer prayers on the occasion of Eid-ul-Fitr before heading off to enjoy elaborate feasts with relatives and friends.
Eid, celebrated on the first day of the Islamic month of Shawwal, marks the end of the period of fasting during the holy month of Ramzan.
"After praying at the local mosque I will go to my friends place where all of us will enjoy sevian (a sweet made of vermicelli). Later in the evening we have planned a big family gathering," said Moinuddin, a resident of Jamia Nagar in south Delhi.
Eid is an Arabic word meaning "festivity", while Fitr means "charity".
The days leading up to Eid had seen people on a shopping spree, purchasing new clothes, utensils, dry fruits and other ingredients for the grand Eid feast.
Delhi Police have made elaborate security arrangements -- apart from diverting traffic at various places, particularly near mosques.
"We have made adequate security and traffic arrangements for the day to avoid any problems," a police officer said.
New Delhi : Thousands of people dressed in new clothes thronged mosques across the capital Monday to offer prayers on the occasion of Eid-ul-Fitr before heading off to enjoy elaborate feasts with relatives and friends.
Eid, celebrated on the first day of the Islamic month of Shawwal, marks the end of the period of fasting during the holy month of Ramzan.
"After praying at the local mosque I will go to my friends place where all of us will enjoy sevian (a sweet made of vermicelli). Later in the evening we have planned a big family gathering," said Moinuddin, a resident of Jamia Nagar in south Delhi.
Eid is an Arabic word meaning "festivity", while Fitr means "charity".
The days leading up to Eid had seen people on a shopping spree, purchasing new clothes, utensils, dry fruits and other ingredients for the grand Eid feast.
Delhi Police have made elaborate security arrangements -- apart from diverting traffic at various places, particularly near mosques.
"We have made adequate security and traffic arrangements for the day to avoid any problems," a police officer said.
Muslims in Switzerland observe eid
By KUNA,
Geneva : Muslimms in Switzerland observed on Sunday eid prayers at the Geneva grand mosque and in all Muslim centers around the country. Hundreds of Muslims observed the prayers at the country's mosques and prayer corners.
Prayer leaders around the country concentrated today in their speeches on brotherhood and solidarity among Muslims in support of the most in need under occupation and with those suffering from internal conflicts.
In all Islamic centers, a box for Zakat was placed so that Muslims could contribute to the most in need around the globe.
Switzerland is home to more than 350,000 Muslims.
Geneva : Muslimms in Switzerland observed on Sunday eid prayers at the Geneva grand mosque and in all Muslim centers around the country. Hundreds of Muslims observed the prayers at the country's mosques and prayer corners.
Prayer leaders around the country concentrated today in their speeches on brotherhood and solidarity among Muslims in support of the most in need under occupation and with those suffering from internal conflicts.
In all Islamic centers, a box for Zakat was placed so that Muslims could contribute to the most in need around the globe.
Switzerland is home to more than 350,000 Muslims.
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