by Ahmed Keeler
It is, however, the post-modern philosophers, such as Foucault, Derrida and Butler, who express the ultimate disillusion with modernity and are delivering the death blow to the idea of progress. Their ideas are riding high in the universities of the West and are seeping into the mainstream of society. Their philosophy is challenging hierarchy and reducing everything to a state of relativity. It is a critique that offers little to humanity and is, in fact, the last and closing manifestation of the West’s downward trajectory.
But what of the other conquest undertaken by European civilisation, namely, the conquest of nature? This is proving to be a pyrrhic victory. There is no question that we have achieved much of what the 16th century natural philosopher Francis Bacon aspired to in ‘wringing from nature her secrets and exploiting her powers’. However, in so doing, we have created an environmental crisis that threatens to destroy us. Modern man is being enveloped by multiple, exponential and escalating crises of unprecedented, unimaginable scale.
THE AGE OF CRISES
THE ATOM BOMB launched humanity into a new age; one in which for the first time we could envisage the destruction of life on earth by our own hand. Since the splitting of the atom, many other means to bring about total destruction have been devised in the laboratories of the scientists; yet it is they who are warning us that we are now standing on the threshold of global annihilation. In what follows, I have outlined some of the landmarks in the unfolding of the crises.
In 1947, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set up the Doomsday Clock. The clock was intended to represent an analogy for the threat of global nuclear war. Since 2007, it has also reflected climate change, and new developments in the life sciences and technology that could inflict irrevocable harm on humanity. On the clock, the hypothetical global catastrophe is presented as ‘midnight’ and The Bulletin’s opinion on how close the world is to a global catastrophe as the number of minutes to midnight. Its original setting in 1947 was seven minutes to midnight. It has been set backward and forward 23 times since then, the smallest-ever number of minutes to midnight being two; this occurred in 1953 and in January 2018, due to ‘the looming threats of nuclear war and climate change’. As of January 2019, the clock still stands at two minutes to twelve.
In 1962, Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring was published in America, in which she warned against the dangers of the pesticide DDT. The book was met with fierce opposition from chemical companies. One spokesman stated, ‘Miss Carson claims that the balance of nature is a major force in the survival of man, whereas the modern chemist, the modern biologist, the modern scientist believes that man is steadily controlling nature.’ Her book sold half a million copies in six months, and her case was so well argued, striking a nerve in popular consciousness, that it spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy, led to a nationwide ban on DDT for agricultural uses, and inspired an environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S Environmental Protection Agency. The book had a global impact, bringing to the world’s attention the dangers of chemical agriculture and the futility of the war against bugs, which would simply lead to their mutating and becoming ever more dangerous.
However, scientists are telling us that spring is now silent across most of the developed agricultural lands. The naturalist and TV presenter Chris Packham, in a deep analysis of the rapid disappearance of flora and fauna in the UK concluded, ‘Our generation is presiding over an ecological apocalypse and we’ve somehow or other normalised it.’ German scientists are warning of ‘ecological Armageddon’ as a recent study shows that three-quarters of flying insects in nature reserves across Germany have vanished in the last 25 years. The California almond crop is pollinated by bees that are being shipped thousands of miles across America on trucks. Report after report carries the same message: we are destroying the eco-system on which we depend.
In 1972, The Limits to Growth was published by the Club of Rome. For the first time, this report brought to the attention of a global public the contradiction between exponential economic and population growth on the one hand, and a finite world on the other.
In 2008, the world financial system came perilously close to collapse. It began in 2007 with a crisis in the sub-prime mortgage market in the United States, and developed into a full-blown international banking crisis. Excessive risk-taking by banks helped to magnify the financial impact globally. Massive bail-outs of financial institutions and other palliative monetary and fiscal policies were employed by governments. Whilst the bankers came out of the crisis which they had caused unscathed, millions of ordinary people’s livelihoods were destroyed. William White, the central banker who famously predicted the crisis of 2008, has warned that ‘the world is facing a new crisis caused by an explosion of debt.’ Many economists now see as inevitable the collapse of the modern financial system that has lost touch with reality. Global growth is now fuelled by governments going deeper and deeper into debt, made possible by the creation of money out of thin air. The banks were bailed out by governments, but who, the economists ask, will bail out the governments?
In 2009, Sir John Beddington, Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government, warned of a perfect storm on the horizon:
It is predicted that by 2030 the world will need to produce 50% more food and energy, together with 30% more available fresh water, whilst mitigating and adapting to climate change. This threatens to create a ‘perfect storm’ of global events.
In 2012, responding to the deepening environmental and other crises, Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, co-founded at Cambridge University the Centre for the Study of Existential Risks. The Centre is dedicated to the study and mitigation of risks that could lead to human extinction or civilisational collapse. Their research focuses on biological risks, environmental risks, risks from artificial intelligence, and how to manage extreme technological risk in general.
In 2017, Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer for England, was so alarmed by the build-up of resistance to antibiotics, that she warned we faced a ‘post antibiotic holocaust’ if we continued along this trajectory. She stated, ‘Super bugs will kill us before climate change’.
But it is global warming that has tipped the balance, and is now providing a consensus among scientists that it is our way of life that is the root cause of the phenomenon. Something is fundamentally wrong with the way we are living on earth. Although climate change had been discussed within the scientific community for decades, it was in 1976 with the Russian climatologist Mikhail Budyko’s statement ‘a global warming up has started’, that it was reported more widely. It took a decade for the international community to become fully engaged, and then the ponderous global institutions were mobilised and new bodies formed to address the crisis. In 1988, the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was jointly established by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and later endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly. The IPCC produces reports that support the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the main international treaty. The objective of the UNFCCC is to ‘stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic (human-induced) interference with the climate system’. Now there are thousands of scientists world-wide, who are engaged in the study of climate change and global warming. Their warnings are becoming ever more urgent, but the temperature continues to rise. In its latest report the WMO states:
The concentrations of key gases in the atmosphere that are driving up global temperatures reached a new high in 2017 and there is no sign of reversal in this rising trend.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres reported in September 2018:
Climate change is moving faster than we are … if the world doesn’t change course by 2020, we run the risk of runaway climate change … we are careering towards the edge of the abyss.
Many scientists cannot see us surviving the crises, including the late Professor Stephen Hawking, who spent the last years of his life researching space travel to take us to other solar systems. In his final book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, he stated:
We have given the planet a disastrous gift of climate change, rising temperatures, reduction of the polar ice caps, deforestation and decimation of animal species; we are running out of space; the only places to go to are other worlds. It is time to explore other solar systems; spreading out may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves.
We have now travelled far into the Age of Crises and ironically it is the scientists, out of whose laboratories the crises have emerged, that are daily warning us of the perils we face. We are also being educated concerning the proliferation of natural disasters that are being exacerbated by global warming, such as the increase in the severity and frequency of hurricanes and, with the rise of sea levels, the increased damage caused by inundations to coastal and island communities.
Lawrence M Krauss demonstrated the fragility of the artificial world we have created when he surmised that a giant solar flare could destroy the information fabric of the world and, with it, modern civilisation would collapse. With all of these man-made threats joining traditional fears of the four horsemen of the apocalypse – pestilence, war, famine and death – it is no wonder there is political and social unrest and an alarming increase in mental illness amongst the young.
But there is another fear that has emerged out of the chaos of the Age of Crises; this is what has become known as Islamic terrorism, a phenomenon replicating modernist ideologies and subverting the traditional patterns of Islam. Beginning in the late 1970’s it reached a crescendo with the destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York on 11 September 2001. For the USA it was seen as the deadliest event since Pearl Harbour and ushered in ‘the war on terror’, an expression first used by George W Bush. This war, which now engages many nations around the world against an enemy that has no territorial base, has led to a transformation in homeland defence and the conduct of warfare. Muslims are watching in horror as a newly-created sect, driven by rage and revenge, is perpetuating acts of indescribable cruelty in the name of Islam – an ignorant sect that is breaking the fundamental tenets of Islam in a vain and ludicrous quest for universal hegemony, a sect that is making the world hate and despise their religion. The ill-conceived Iraq war escalated the terrorism and has brought chaos to the Middle East, resulting in the greatest displacement of people since World War II.
A West that is losing confidence in its identity sees Islam as a cultural threat and is pulling up the drawbridge. Fortress Europe and America are attempting to stem the flow of migrants, many of whom are Muslims seeking shelter from the storm. Nationalism and the extreme right, which have such a terrible and recent history in Europe, are on the rise. The stage is becoming perilously set for the Muslim to become the scape-goat for a western world in crisis.
Those wishing to defend Islam, both westerners and Muslims, invoke the ‘Golden Age of Islam’ and the contribution that Muslims made during the European Dark Ages to the creation of the Modern World. But this opens the door to detractors, who ask ‘What have they contributed since?’ Amongst these is the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, who in his introduction to Robert R Reilly’s book The Closing of the Muslim Mind, writes, ‘If Reilly is right, as he surely is … this failure … is the effect of an act of cultural and intellectual suicide, which occurred eight centuries ago.’ And herein lies the problem of the Golden Age thesis, for although it appears to be complimentary, in fact, it turns Islam into a bit-player in the Western narrative of progress.
This narrative has been so powerful for so long that educated Muslims have completely bought into it, accepting the idea that Islam has become a tributary feeding into the mainstream of modern civilisation. Its value is now judged purely in terms of what Europe received from it. However, I shall argue that the Golden Age thesis shuts out the understanding of what actually happened, and has caused great confusion in the Muslim mind. Practically everything we know about Islam has been projected through the lens of progress, which serves only to distort and disfigure its true nature, and draw the Muslims into a state of deepening crisis.
The multiple and escalating crises that encompass us are of a scale that goes beyond anything that humanity has ever faced. Scientists are having to resort to biblical terms such as ‘apocalypse’ and ‘Armageddon’ in their attempts to communicate the imminent dangers threatening us. But the modern world doggedly continues along its trajectory, because it knows no other way. So much has been invested in the construction of this artificial world. Like a cancer, it is growing on a host that is dying; it only knows how to grow and will go on growing until its host can no longer support it. Modern man is trapped in a system that is failing. Unable to see beyond the walls that imprison him, he clings on in the vain hope that somehow the multiplying crises will be solved by the very science and technology that is causing the destruction in the first place.
The theory of progress has run its course and as Adam Curtis says at the end of his thought-provoking documentary Bitter Lake, ‘What is needed is a new story and one that we can believe in’.
MĪZĀN AND THE PERSPECTIVE
OF BALANCE
In looking for a new story, a narrative which can make more sense of our past and the situation in which we now find ourselves, a criterion needs to be found in place of that of progress, and I believe this to be the criterion of balance. Few would argue with the idea that humanity is out of balance with the natural world and that this disequilibrium has now reached a critical stage. Balance is manifested in many ways within cultures and civilisations, and if things are out of balance, sooner or later they fall apart. In pre-modern cultures, this balance has been understood to include the balance between the heavenly, human and earthly dimensions of existence. The principle of balance was at the heart of both Confucian China and Islam, and explains the stability and longevity of their civilisations.
In this comparative study of Islam and the West, I shall draw on the Islamic articulation of the concept of balance, represented by the Arabic term mīzān, which can be translated as balance, justice, measure, harmony or, indeed, weighing scales. It is a term which contains a spiritual dimension that is not conveyed by our secular understanding of balance. In what follows, I shall use the two words mīzān and balance interchangeably, with an awareness of the enhanced meaning contained in the Arabic.
The primacy of mīzān and some dimensions of its meaning are presented in the 55th chapter or sura of the Qur’an, Al-Rahmān (The All-Merciful):
He raised the heavens and set up everything in balance (mīzān) so that you would not exceed the balance (mīzān). Therefore, maintain just measure and do not transgress the balance (mīzān). (Qur’an 55:7-9)
Throughout the following chapters, three fundamental triads, in which the maintenance of balance is essential, will be woven into the fabric of the narrative as it unfolds.
The first is what I have called the ‘ontological triad’. Before modernity, all civilisations believed in a sacred origin for their worlds, and in the relationship that had to be maintained between the unseen, the human and the material realms. Christianity and Islam shared an understanding of these realms. We shall see that Islamic civilisation retained the balance and hierarchy within these ontological levels, remaining within the confines of the triad. In the West, however, the collapse of Christendom eventually led to a loss of belief in, and knowledge of, the spiritual realm. This loss of relationship with the unseen made it impossible for ethics and morality to be objectively rooted, or for the integrity of nature to be fully recognized outside of human use and exploitation. We shall see how the breakdown of the hierarchy and balance required within the ontological triad has led to our age of crises.
The second formulation is what
I have defined as the ‘vocational triad’. The roles of scholars and priests, warriors and rulers, merchants and craftsmen are archetypal, and the relationship between them helps define the character of civilisations. We shall see how in Islam a state of balance, interdependence and fluidity was established between the vocations, creating a stable and sustainable civilisation.
A very different unfolding took place in the West. For a thousand years, Christianity provided a spiritual culture that was intense and single-minded in its vertical aspiration and overwhelmingly dominated by the priest – the Gothic cathedral is the perfect manifestation of this heavenly quest. With the Renaissance, the warrior hero replaced the saint at the apex of society, humanism was born and monarchs became absolute, with the classical palace replacing the Gothic cathedral. The French and American revolutions against the tyranny of monarchs and the fanaticism of the churches, and the Industrial Revolution, brought the merchant, craftsman and natural philosopher into power, and the machine world we now inhabit was their creation. The West has proceeded from intense spirituality through humanism to the all-encompassing materiality that now surrounds us. We shall see how each vocation in the West created its own world, and how, what I call the ‘open-plan brain’ of the modern, contains all three worlds, somehow co-existing together, but in a permanent state of conflict and contradiction.
