Rethinking Islam & the West

by Ahmed Keeler

The early success of Islam opened up a vast world for merchant activity. Wealth poured into the community, and the scholars were faced with the danger of worldliness overcoming the umma or Islamic community. Many of the early works of scholarship address issues relating to commerce and how it should be practised in the light of Islam, and a significant portion of the sharia is devoted to defining and regulating the role of the merchant. Many hadith were cited:

  May God’s mercy be on he who is lenient in his buying, his selling and in recalling his debts. (Bukhārī)

  Give the labourer his wage, even before his sweat dries. (Ibn Mājah)

  Whoever grants one who has fallen upon hard times respite for a debt, or waives it for him, God will shelter him beneath His shade. (Muslim)

  In China and Christendom, the merchant inhabited a lowly and even despised position in society. However, in Islam the virtuous merchant was held in high regard.

  The truthful, honest merchant shall be with the prophets, the righteous and the martyrs on the Day of Judgement. (Tirmidhi)

  The pious merchant became the cornerstone of Islamic civilisation. The markets were adjacent to the mosques, and whereas today, when walking through a Middle Eastern bazaar, pop music blares out of loudspeakers, in pre-modern times one would hear the murmuring of the Qur’an being recited. At the time of prayer, the market would go quiet, and if a famous scholar visited the city, traders would close their shops to attend his discourses.

  Unlike the West where business is competitive, in Islam it was a collaborative endeavour. The markets were grouped according to their trades. The first sale of the day was believed to hold particular blessing. If, when a trader had already made a sale, another customer came to his stall and he noticed that a fellow trader was yet to make his first sale, he would direct the customer to his colleague’s stall. If a trader fell on hard times, the other traders would club together to put him back on his feet. As the civilisation developed, these practices were formalised within guilds, which also encompassed the crafts.

  The guilds were corporate bodies of merchants and craftsmen which regulated entry into trades, the equal treatment of guild members, the opening of shops, and the quality of work and products. The guilds also arbitrated disputes between members, and ensured prices were proportionate. As the novice was being trained in a trade or craft, he would be taught the moral and ethical codes of his profession. The guilds would often have a patron saint and initiation ceremonies, and thus imbued everyday work with an imprint of the sacred.

  The importance in Islam of charity cannot be overstated and the distribution of surplus wealth by the merchant community contributed greatly to the creation of a caring and integrated society. The Qurʾan is replete with exhortations regarding charity:

  They ask you what they should spend. Say: ‘Whatever you spend of good is for parents and kinsmen, orphans, the needy, and wayfarers. And all the good that you do, God knows it well.’ (Qurʾan, 2:215)

  There are also many hadiths relating to charity:

  The Prophet Muhammad, blessings and peace be upon him, said: ‘Charity is prescribed for each descendant of Adam every day the sun rises.’ He was then asked: ‘Of what should we give charity each day?’ The Prophet answered: ‘The doors of goodness are many: enjoining good, forbidding evil, removing harm from the road, listening to the deaf, leading the blind, guiding one to the object of his need, hurrying with the strength of one’s legs to one in sorrow who is asking for help, and supporting the feeble with the strength of one’s arms - all these are charity prescribed for you.’ (Bukhārī, Muslim)

  When a person dies, his good works are cut off, all but three: ongoing charity, knowledge that others benefit from, and a righteous child who prays for him. (Muslim)

  Ongoing charity became institutionalised in the waqf or charitable endowment. The origin and acknowledged proof text for the waqf, alongside the last hadith cited above, is a narration which recounts how the Prophet directed ʿUmar ibn al-Khattāb to make some land he had acquired at Khaybar into a waqf, and made certain conditions pertaining to it, amongst which were that it was not to be sold, or inherited, or given as a gift; and that whoever was guardian over it could eat from it and feed a friend, but could not accumulate personal wealth from it. These principles formed the basis of an institution that would come to represent as much as half of the wealth of Islamic societies.

  The merchants of Islam, deeply imbued with the knowledge and love of their religion, carried Islam as far as China in the East and present-day Nigeria in the West. Many of these merchants settled, becoming part of communities, and through their interactions with local people, settlements grew into cities and ancient cities were transformed as the civilisation took root. Dār al-Islām expanded through trade and was brought back to its centre through the pilgrimage to Mecca.

  THE WEST

  In Christendom, as we noted above, the mer-chant held a lowly place in the hierarchy. Most trade was local, with the Italian and Jewish merchants mainly responsible for long-distance trade, as they were connected into the Afro-Eurasian network. With the collapse of Christendom, the power of the merchant class rose. Jacob Fugger (d. 1525) was a German banker and business man who took full advantage of the changing times and is reputed to have become the richest man who has ever lived. He convinced Pope Leo X, who was from the Medici family of bankers, to lift the ban on usury. Charging interest was considered a sin in Christianity, Islam and Judaism. The Pope now indicated that interest was only usury if the loan was made ‘without labour, cost or risk’. In his book, The Richest Man Who Ever Lived, the veteran journalist Greg Steinmetz states, ‘Leo’s decree was a breakthrough for capitalism. Debt financing accelerated. The modern economy was on its way.’ The Dutch set up the first national bank and the other European nations followed. The merchants followed in the wake of the European conquerors, and the Dutch, English, French and other European nations set up trading companies, the proto corporations of today, covering all the territories they were engaged with. The stage was set for the act that would bring the merchant centre stage and usher in the Modern World. Natural philosophers had imagined the world as a machine, but it was the merchants and craftsmen who turned this idea into a reality.

  Auguste Comte taught that the scientific method is the only guarantor of knowledge and that it had replaced metaphysics in man’s social evolution. The study of human society and the human being moved across to the sciences, where the individual was examined and experimented upon, as though he or she were an animal composed of machine parts. The sovereignty of the individual, combined with his new animal status, prepared the human being to be the perfect subject for a world now ruled by the merchant.

  But it took time for this commercial world to fully emerge. In Great Britain, throughout the 19th century, the new industries were simply replacing the old crafts. A revival of Christianity provided the moral teaching for society, and a classical education continued to civilise the Englishman. It was in the United States that the modern world was fully manifested. New business corporations emerged that took complete control over the material realm, providing everything that the human being needed, and then going on to produce whatever the human being could possibly desire. To comply with this new commercial society, the human being was renamed; whereas in Christendom people were Christians, and in our civilised world they aspired to be civilised human beings, in this brave new world they were redefined as consumers. The new corporations not only provided the traditional needs of housing, food and clothing, but moved into the areas of entertainment, recreation and education and became the conveyors of a new morality, with the influence of Church and a classical education dying away.

  Whereas with the Renaissance, the classics and humanities had replaced the Bible and religion at the centre of the university curriculum, now the classics and humanities have been displaced by the sciences and business studies. The pr
incipal goal has now become innovation and entrepreneurship; you have to create something new and you have to be able to sell it. In England, higher education is now under the Ministry of Business and Innovation. This ever-changing, increasingly complex material culture requires an industrial-scale educational system to provide the skills and disciplines to support it, and children are being co-opted into the system at an earlier and earlier age.

  The financial district has replaced the cathedral at the centre of our cities, where the banks take pride of place, soaring ever upwards in their skyscrapers. Without the transformation in banking, the modern world would not have been possible. However, it was to be within the modern system that banking would mutate and become a world in itself, creating money out of thin air and in ways that are becoming more and more difficult to comprehend – banking has morphed into a weird kind of materialistic mysticism. The holy of holies of the modern system is the stock market. If it goes up, it’s heaven, and if it goes down, it’s hell; growth is everything. Today, in order for the modern system to keep growing, it is having to go deeper and deeper into debt. After many financial crises, some economists are predicting that the system cannot survive.

  Commerce has restructured our way of life, which is now divided between work and leisure. Work is highly organized, disciplined and takes up most of our time. Leisure belongs to us, we have earned it and can spend it as we wish. We can become a football fan, follow our favourite band every weekend, watch movies or play video games as much as we like. We can answer the call of the travel agent to visit some new paradise resort during our short breaks from the work place - our holidays, which in Christendom were holy days. Paradise is now on earth, until it is spoilt by too many visitors. We can go and observe our fellow creatures living in reserves, removed from their disappearing habitats and cut off from us. We can go and study any number of dead and dying cultures and civilisations in our museums, eat food from anywhere in the world and, if religiously inclined, worship any way we like. This is our right, but it belongs to our private world of leisure and has nothing to do with the work place. The centres where we meet and celebrate our togetherness are no longer the places of worship, they are the shopping malls.

  The modern system, however, faces a major problem in turning the human being into a consumer: humanity is created for the long duration. In normal times, most people would remain in their places of birth throughout their lives, deeply attached to their particular environments. They would live in their extended families and communities from the cradle to the grave, forging deep and lasting relationships. What were called heirlooms, meaning treasured possessions handed down through generations, meant that nothing was thrown away, everything was mended until it was worn out. Through their religion and way of life, people were part of the natural cycles and rhythms of day and week, month and year.

  But to create the consumer, the long duration had to be supplanted by the short duration. The short duration, with that rush of adrenalin which accompanies excitement, a surprise arrival, an anticipated event, a shock or fleeing from danger, has to become the norm so that the individual will always crave the new experience and sensation. The heirloom must be replaced by the disposable product to keep the machines running. All restraints must be lifted from the individual so that pure desire can be released and the perfect consumer created.

  The modern way of life has produced an environment that has turned night into day and shattered communities and the extended family, reducing the basis of society to the nuclear family. The nuclear family is highly unstable and often ends with the single parent family. However, it is the change that is taking place to childhood that is most radical.

  Childhood is a great mystery. Up until the age of around seven, children live in their own worlds. Neuroscientists have noticed that at this time a change takes place in the brain. Traditionally it was after the age of seven that the child began to be educated. It is amazing how little we can remember of our early childhood, and this is for a very good reason. We are spiritual beings and when we arrive in this world, we have our senses and perceive everything directly through them. We start our lives with pure imaginations and live in the moment. Children playing together can conjure up anything, they can turn a tree trunk into a magnificent carriage and a stick into a sword, they can become pirates or princes. In normal environments children would be able to roam, with older children leading the younger. As children grew, they would pass through the stages of being led and becoming leader, and experience the joys, frustrations and miseries of interacting with their peers. Games would be full of laughter and crying, tragedy, adventure and comedy. The community would provide the boundaries for their roaming and would only intervene when things got out of hand. This roaming, communal childhood allowed children to grow naturally and develop their own imaginations and personalities, and to form friendships that would last a lifetime.

  But the modern cult requires us to be transformed into consumers and this can only be achieved if childhood is re-engineered. The child must be conditioned to live in the short duration, and to achieve this a consumer childhood has to be invented. So, marketeers created their version of childhood. Plastic toys in garish colours, leaving nothing to the imagination, are placed before the child. The child is excited by this apparition, plays with it for a while and then gets bored. To keep the child happy, the toy is replaced by another and then another, and so it goes on until the child develops an addictive personality. The imagination is further assailed by films and games that completely hypnotize the child. Robbed of his/her own imagination, the child becomes dependent on an external source, and a dialysis of the imagination takes over. And now the Kantian nightmare kicks in. The child is immersed and surrounded by the images and ideology of the sovereignty of the individual, and is being taught from an early age that he or she must think for himself or herself, yet without any personal development having been achieved nor any objective criteria attained.

  Prematurely wrenched out of childhood with their identities malformed, the children become self-obsessed and regard the world with the eyes of consumers; everything now becomes a matter of personal choice. By the time of reaching the next major transition in the teenage years, the child rebels. Deprived of roaming and the formation of proper relationships in their own world of childhood, the transitioning children now attempt to create their own society separate from the adults, just when the relationship between the adult and the child is most important in drawing the child into adulthood. What has followed is brilliantly described in Robert Bly’s Sibling Society. Instead of a vertical social structure where the different stages of life are linked, it turns into a layered horizontal society, where each generation is forever trapped in an arrested adolescence.

  The hegemony of the merchant has turned human society into an appetite that can never be satisfied and is literally devouring the world.

  5

  ART & THE ENVIRONMENT

  ISLAM

  Al-Ghazālī refers to the wisdom of the craftsman, and it is through the elevation of the senses that craftsmen participated in the synthesis of knowledge. Just as the sharia enshrined the way of life for the Muslim, the craftsmen fashioned the environment in which the Islamic way of life could be lived.The sharia and the Islamic city came into being organically and in parallel. New settlements were formed by the Arab armies, which were stationed outside the great centres of population, and these settlements grew into cities, the most famous being Kufa, Kairouan and Fustat. The most important building in the city was the great mosque, adjacent to which were the markets and then the various neighbourhoods. Each neighbourhood had its mosque and public baths. Institutes of learning grew up around the mosques, while around the markets, workshops, warehouses and hostels for travelling merchants were located.

  The city was like a beehive, with narrow lanes connecting the various parts. It was an environment in which the exterior was
simple and the interior of mosques and homes full of light and beauty, mirroring the ideal for the believer of living a simple outer life and a rich inner life. Shoes were removed on entering the mosque and the home, creating a clear demarcation between the bustle of the exterior world and the peace and tranquillity of the inner sanctum of the family, and of the community at prayer.

  This model of the city transformed the existing historic centres and spread across Afro-Eurasia as Dār al-Islām expanded. Today, it can still be experienced in what remains of the traditional cities of Islam.

  Although the formation of Islamic art took time, the fundamental principles of Islamic architecture were already manifest in the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, built within sixty years of the death of the Prophet. The Umayyad Caliph ʿAbd al-Malik received from the Byzantine Emperor the gift of hundreds of craftsmen who constructed this building, the first to fully express the Islamic aesthetic. The late architectural model maker, Kim Allen, in his work on the Dome of the Rock explained how in its geometry it contains perfect balance, which had not been realised in preceding Byzantine edifices. This balance between the vertical and the horizontal would become a feature of the mosque, in contrast to the Gothic cathedral with its accent on the vertical. However, the decoration of the Dome of the Rock that we see today is much later. The Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, built a few years after the Dome of the Rock, still displays mosaics of scenes drawn from nature, which were completed at the time.