Book Excerpt: The tragic illusion of an Islamic State by Tarek Fatah

I AM AN INDIAN BORN IN PAKISTAN; a Punjabi born in Islam; an immigrant in Canada with a Muslim consciousness, grounded in a Marxist youth. I am one of Salman Rushdie’s many Midnight’s Children: we were snatched from the cradle of a great civilization and made permanent refugees, sent in search of an oasis that turned out to be a mirage.

* I am in pain, a living witness to how dreams of hope and enlightenment can be turned into a nightmare of despair and failure. Promises made to the children of my generation that were never meant to be kept. Today, the result is a Muslim society lost in the sands of Sinai with no Moses to lead us out, held hostage by hateful pretenders of piety. Our problems are further compounded by a collective denial of the fact that the pain we suffer is caused mostly by self inflicted wounds, and is not entirely the result of some Zionist conspiracy hatched with the West.

I write as a Muslim whose ancestors were Hindu. My religion, Islam, is rooted in Judaism, while my Punjabi culture is tied to that of the Sikhs. Yet I am told by Islamists that without shedding this multifaceted heritage, if not outrightly rejecting it, I cannot be considered a true Muslim.

Of all the ingredients that make up my complex identity, being Canadian has had the most profound effect on my thinking. It is Canada that propels me to swim upstream to imitate with humility the giants who have ventured into uncharted waters before me. Men like Louis-Joseph Papineau, Tommy Douglas, Pierre Trudeau, and Norman Bethune; women like Agnes Macphail, Rosemary Brown and Nellie McClung.

In this book I attempt to draw a distinction between Islamists and Muslims. What Islamists seek and what Muslims desire are two separate objectives, sometimes overlapping, but clearly distinct. While the former seek an “Islamic State,” the latter merely desires a “state of Islam.” One state requires a theocracy, the other a state of spirituality.

Islam—my religion—offers a universality best reflected in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, where for thousands of years pilgrims have circumambulated the Ka’aba in the image of planets revolving around the Sun, walking around what they believe is the epicentre of their world. I have sat through many nights perched on the upper floors of the Ka’aba, watching as tens of thousands of people spun rings around the black cube, oblivious that they were mimicking the behaviour of sub-atomic particles of matter. Or perhaps a reflection of the millions of galaxies that swing around an invisible centre, in a whirlpool of limitless emptiness.

Men and women have long trodden the sacred ground in a way that symbolizes the endless motion that gives life to this universe. The simple fact that countless fellow humans have walked this path and millions more will do so in the future, makes the Ka’aba a holy place; one’s mere presence becoming an act of worship. It is one of the few places in the world where humanity sheds its pomp, class, colour, and comfort to submit.

Twice I have done the pilgrimage known as the hajj, once emulating my wife’s strict conservative Fatimide Shia custom and again, four years later, in my mother’s more relaxed Sunni traditions. On both occasions it was the sight of the human multitude, stripped to their bare necessities, that made me recognize the universality of my faith.

Chasing a Mirage is a cry from my heart to my co-religionists, my Muslim sisters and brothers. It is a plea to them to remove their blindfolds, once and for all; to free themselves from the shackles of conformity that have stunted their development for so long.

In this book, I try to demonstrate that from the earliest annals of Islamic history, there have been two streams of Islamic practice, both running concurrently and parallel, but in opposite directions, leading to conflicting outcomes. From the moment the Prophet of Islam died in 632 CE, some Muslims took the path of strengthening the state of Islam, while others embarked on the establishment of the Islamic State.

The phrase “state of Islam” defines the condition of a Muslim in how he or she imbibes the values of Islam to govern personal life and uses Ka’aba: Islam’s holiest place. It is a cuboidal building inside a mosque.

In contrast, the “Islamic State” is a political entity: a state, caliphate, sultanate, kingdom, or country that uses Islam as a tool to govern society and control its citizenry. At times, these two objectives overlap each other, but most often, they clash. Islamists obsessed with the establishment of the Islamic State have ridden roughshod over Quranic principles and the Prophet’s message of equality.

However, Muslims who have striven to achieve a state of Islam have invariably stepped away from using Islam to chase political power, opting instead for intellectual and pious pursuits. These were the people responsible for what is glorious about our medieval heritage and Islam’s contributions to human civilization.

This book is an appeal to those of my co-religionists who are chasing the mirage of an Islamic State. I hope they can reflect on the futility of their endeavour and instead focus on achieving the state of Islam. Islamists working for the establishment of an Islamic State are headed in the wrong direction.

I hope to convince my fellow Muslims that clinging to mythologies of the past is the formula for a fiasco. I would hope they stand up to the merchants of segregation who have fed us with myths and got us addicted to a forced sense of victimhood. Conventional wisdom in the Muslim world dictates that to move forward, we need to link to our past. Fair enough, but in doing so, we have all but given up on the future, labelling modernity itself as the enemy.

This attitude is best reflected in the 19 January, 1992, issue of the now defunct Islamabad newspaper The Muslim. It published an editorial cartoon that even today depicts the dilemma facing much of the Muslim world. If the cartoon reflected the situation of Muslims in South Asia, their Arab cousins were doing no better. Ten years later, in 2002, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) released a scathing report slamming the Muslim countries for oppressing women, subjugating citizens, and failing to provide adequate education.

The report, written by distinguished Arab intellectuals and presented by Rima Khalaf Hunaidi, the former deputy prime minister of Jordan, accused the Arabs of squandering oil wealth and gave them a failing grade on virtually every measurable human index from education to economy, development, and democracy. Hunaidi suggested that only Arabs can address what she called “some very scary signals,” and she summed up by concluding: “The three main deficits are freedom, gender and knowledge.”

Reaction to the UNDP report was predictable. Soon after it appeared in a Canadian newspaper column titled “Tough Report Says Arab World Stuck in Dark Ages,” a prominent Egyptian Canadian responded by accusing the newspaper of running a “racist” headline. Instead of reflecting on the report and worrying about its findings, the writer went on the defensive, making the outlandish claim that “there is more freedom of the press in Egypt today than in Canada.” It is this inability to face the truth that has become systemic among Muslim opinion leaders. This attitude is cause for serious concern. For it is far more difficult to acknowledge our mistakes than to blame them on a foreign conspiracy.

This book is aimed at my fellow Muslims with the hope that they will be willing to read and reflect on the challenges we all face. It is an attempt to speak the unspeakable, to wash some dirty linen in public, to say to my brothers and sisters in Islam that we are standing naked in the middle of the town square and the whole world is watching. If we do not cleanse ourselves with truth, the stench of our lies will drive us all mad.

The book is also aimed at the ordinary, well-meaning, yet naive non Muslims of Europe and North America, who are bewildered as they face a community that seemingly refuses to integrate or assimilate as part of Western society, yet wishes to stay in their midst. Liberal and left-leaning Europeans and North Americans may be troubled with the in-your-face defi ance of radical Islamist youth, but it seems they are infatuated by the apparently anti-establishment stance. This book may help these liberals understand that the anti-Americanism of the radical Islamists has little to do with the anti-imperialism of Mark Twain. In fact, the anti-Americanism of the Islamist is not about the United States, but reflects their contempt for the liberal social democratic society we have built and its emphasis on liberty and freedom of the individual itself. My hope is that Chasing a Mirage may also reach the neo-conservative proponents of the so-called war on terrorism. I hope to make them realize that their warmongering has been the best thing that happened to the Islamist proponents of a worldwide jihad.

I hope non-Muslims realize that deep inside the soul of all Muslims lives a Rumi, an Averroes, and a Muhammad Ali. Equity and social justice run through every fibre and gene of the Muslim psyche. Poetry, song, and dance are as much a part of our culture as piety, modesty, and charity. Challenging authority, even the existence of God himself, has been part of our heritage, and some Muslims have even lived to tell that tale. For instance, take these lines from 19th-century India’s giant Muslim poet Mirza Ghalib (in today’s Islamic world, he would be in hiding):

Hum ko maaloom hai janat ki haqeeqat lekin, Dil ke behelane ko Ghalib ye khayaal accha hai. [Of course I know there is no such thing as Paradise, but, to fool oneself, one needs such pleasant thoughts Ghalib.>

A century earlier, another towering Muslim figure and the foremost name in Urdu poetry, Mir Taqi Mir, had openly embraced all religions, not just Islam:

Mir ke deeno mazhab ko poochte kya ho, unne to Kashka khencha, dehr mey baitha, kab ka tark Islam kiya. [Why bother asking of Mir what his creed or religion be? He wears vermillion, sits in the temple, And has long renounced Islam.>

I write in the same tradition. I hope my provocative invocations may trigger a spark, an iskra, that may lead us to do a serious self-examination about the direction in which we are heading. Can we end the catastrophic lack of honesty that so many of us have become accustomed to? It is my dream that Muslims, including my naysayers—and trust me, there are plenty of them—will read this book and attempt to answer a few questions in the privacy of their solitudes, when they need not be on the defensive and have no fear of being judged.

The book is an attempt to differentiate between the Islamic State and the state of Islam, and the best way to demonstrate the difference between these two concepts is to note that today, Muslims of Pakistan live in an Islamic State while Muslims of India live in a state of Islam. The 150 million Muslims of India, despite being deeply religious, are for the better part known to have few links or inclinations towards the goals of international terrorism.

On the other hand, the 150 million Muslims of Pakistan have become the recruiting grounds for Al-Qaeda, not just on its own territory, but among its diaspora as well. Muslims need to reflect on this dilemma.

Perhaps we need to pay heed to the words of the founder of the Sikh faith, Guru Nanak, who in the 16th century, while addressing his Muslim friends, wrote: Make mercy your Mosque, Faith your Prayer Mat, what is just and lawful your Qu’ran, Modesty your Circumcision, and civility your Fast. So shall you be a Muslim. Make right conduct your Ka’aba, Truth your Pir,* and good deeds your Kalma and prayers.

Tarek Fatah Toronto, Canada