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Here I paste an extract from a book written way back in 1994 , when Islamic terrorism was not the problem it is now . It is an extract from his ( Girilal Jain's ) book ( The Hindu Phenomenon ) .
I would like the members of 'poly to tell me whether it was correct , and whether it was prophetic , considering the time in which it was written . It is frighteningly close to what has actually happened .
This perspective is that Muslim power and therefore civilization have been on the retreat all over the world, including India, that this retreat has accounted for all movements we have witnessed in the Muslim world in the last two centuries, and that instead of helping check the retreat, theses movements have promoted a ghetto psychology among Muslim. To put it differently, what has generally been regarded as Muslim aggressiveness and separatism, I treat as isolationism and opting out. I am in this essay, not concerned with the nature of Muslim conquest and rule.
To grasp the validity of this approach, it is necessary that we give up what may be called the frog-in-the-well approach to history. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru railed against this narrow approach but not to much avail. Indeed, in respect of the Hindu-Muslim civilizational encounter, he too suffered from the same handicap. Thus we discuss Mohammed bin Quasim's invasion of Sind in the eighth century more or less independently of the expansion of Arab Islam as far as North Africa and the Iberian peninsula in the west, with Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt and Palestine thrown in, and Transoxania in the north, with the once mighty Iran, Medina, Khurasan and Sistan included in it. And more often than not we fail to take note of the fact that while Akbar Muslim armies cut through Christian and Zoroastrian lands like knife through butter, in southern and eastern Afghanistan, the region of Zamindawar (land of justice-gicers) and Kabul, the Arabs were effectively opposed for more than two centuries, from A.D. 643 to 870 by the indigenous rulers, the Zunbils and the related Kabulshahs. Though with Makran and Baluchistan and much of Sind, this area can be said to belongs to a cultural and political frontier zone between India and Persia, in the persis, in the period in question the Zunbils and their kinsmen, the Kabulshahs, ruled over a predominantly Indian rather than Persian realm. Arab geographers commonly speak of the king of Al- Hind who bore the title of Zunbil. (Zun was a Shaivite God.) Andre Wink has detailed an equally prolonged resistance on the Markran coast in his Al-Hind : The marking of the Indo-Islamic World.
Similarly, we discus Babar's conquest of parts of North India without reference to the larger Turkish upsurge, culmination in the Ottoman empire, which, at its height, included present-day Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, islands of eastern Mediterranean, parts of Hungary and Russia, Iraq,Suria, Palestine, the Caucasus, Egypt, north Africa (as far west as Algeria) and part of Arabia. This lopsided and parochial view of history was designed, perhaps deliberately, by British historians to inculcate in us a deep sense of inferiority. But whether deliberate or not, the effort succeeded remarkably well. Many educated Indians have accepted that everything worthwhile in India, including Sanskrit, has come from outside and that Indians have never been able to resist foreign invasions and occupations. Nirad Chaughuri's Continent of Circe is perhaps the best-known expression of the British-promoted view of us a degenerate people.
This gap between fact and history, as generally written and taught, is however, not my interest right now. I wish to emphasize that by the eighth century, Muslims had acquired from Spain to India "a core position from where they were able to link the two major economic units of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean....Muslims dominated all important maritime and caravan trade routes with the exception only of the northern trans-Eurasian silk route....the Arab caliphate from the eighth to the eleventh century achieved an unquestioned economic supremacy in the world....in monetary terms the result of the Muslim conquest was...a unified currency based on the gold dinar and the silver dirham.... Possession was taken of all important gold-producing and gold-collection areas...."
This economic supremacy provided so powerful an underpinning for the Muslim ummah (universal community of believers) and, therefore, civilization that they could survive all internal upheavals, including the Shia-Sunni divide; the decline of the Abbasid caliphate from the tenth century onwards, culminating in the sack of Baghdad in 1258 by the Mongols; the upsurge of Turks so much so that they can be said to have dominated the Islamic enterprise from the tenth century to the abolition of the caliphate in 1924. (The Safavid rulers of Iran too were Turkic and so were the Ghaznavids in Kabul.)
It follows not only that, to be fully effective, the challenge to Muslim dominance in that vast area had, in the final analysis, to be maritime but also that the ummah and Muslim civilization would find it difficult to survive in a meaningful sense the loss of control of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. The Ottoman empire doubtless provided a second powerful underpinning. But its fate too was linked in no small way to the correlation of forces on the high seas.
Mediterranean Europe began to stir in the eleventh century. The crusades, beginning towards the end of the century, were an expression of that upsurge though they took a religious form. But the crusaders were first absorbed in the Muslim population and civilization and then beaten back. So, it was not before the end of the fifteenth century when Vasco da Gama discovered a new route to India via the Cape of Good Hope (our of Muslim control) and landed in India (in 1498), that a serious challenge to Muslim power can be said to have arisen. Though this challenge took around three centuries to mature and get consolidated, the impact on the fortunes of the Turkish empire was evident by the late sixteenth century, when the Dutch and the British were able to completely close the old international trade routes through the Middle East. As a result, the prosperity of the Arab provinces declined. The import of vast quantity of precious metals from the Americas following Spanish conquest and loot of that continent and the conversion of this gold and silver into currency also played havoc with the Turkish economy. Globalization of the world economy is, after all not a twentieth century phenomenon!
This is a long and complicated story. The details, however significant and fascinating, like the retreat of the Turks from the gate of Vienna following defeat at the hands of the Hapsburfs in 1688, or Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, exactly three centuries after Vasco da Gama's voyage to India, need not detain us. What is material for our purpose is the steady erosion in Muslim control of the Mediterranean-Indian Ocean trade, the decline of the Ottoman empire and with that the replacement of the Islamic by the European civilization as the dominating reality on the world scene. The dismemberment of the Ottoman empire at the end of the First World War and the subsequent Turkish decision to abolish the caliphate in 1924 can be said to have completed the process. The two developments marked, in a fundamental sense, the closure of the era that opened with the establishment by the Prophet of the first Muslim state in Medina. However biter and devastating the struggles within it and however painful the setbacks such as the sack of Baghdad in 1258 by the Mongols, the ummah had been in control of its fortunes from Mohammed's Medina period till then.
Since the beginning of the eighteenth century, Muslim thinkers and men of action have tried to inaugurate a new era in their history. Their failure to do so is obvious. At various places, beginning with the seat of Ottoman power in Anatolia itself, and at various times, beginning possibly with Shah Waliullah in Delhi at the beginning of the eighteenth century, they have tried different strategies - modernization of the armed forces and administration, Western-style education, reinterpretation of the Koran and return to pristine Islam, Western ideologies from liberalism to Marxism via fascism, pan- Islamism and pan-Arabism. Nothing has worked. (For details see David Pryce-Jones, The Closed Circle).
The reason for this world-wide failure are many and complex. Among the most important is the nature of Islam itself. Very early in its history, Islam closed itself on itself. By insisting on the finality of Mohammed's revelation and the immutability of both the Koran and the Sunnah, Islam ensured that there could be no place in it for self-renewal and there has been no self-renewal in Islam as its students would accept.
To begin with there was a lot of free debate in Islam. The presence of Mtazilites and Kharijites, 4 the rise of major philosophers such as Ibn Sina of Sufi orders should help clinch the issue. As a result of Greek, Persian and Indian influences and the consequent growth of philosophy and sciences, early Islam, in fact, produced and sustained an intelligentsia which, in the exercise of free thought, took little account of the literal interpretation of the Koran. Sunni orthodoxy, though formulated early in the Islamic enterprise, took centuries to prevail. But once it did, in the thirteenth- fourteenth centuries partly as a result of the work of Ibn Tamiyya, it has reigned supreme.
Surprising though it may seem, the Western impact on Muslim societies has only strengthened the hold of orthodox Islam. In order to appreciate this point, it is necessary to recall that under the cover of a single terminology, two distinct religious styles have persisted among Muslims. As the well-known sociologist and Islamicist, Ernest Gellner, has put it : "Islam traditionally was divided into a high form,-the urban- based, strict,unitarian, nomocratic, puritan and scripturalist islam of the scholars; and a lower form, the cult of the personality addicted, ecstatic, ritualistic, questionably literate, unpuritanical and rustic Islam of the dervishes and the marabouts."
It would be an exaggeration to suggest that the two traditions have always been at war with one another. For a variety of reasons, Sufi Islam has generally been at a disadvantages and has had to accommodate itself to orthodox Islam. Most Sufis, for instance, have acknowledged that the Shariat is immutable and binding on them as ordinary Muslims. Revivalist movements from time to time such as the Wahhabis have reinforced these disadvantage; Wahhabis fought bitterly against the saint cult which is the core of Sufi Islam. Even so, till recent times there had not existed a social base for a permanent victory of orthodox Islam over Sufi Islam.
Unlike earlier times, however, the colonial and the post- colonial states have been sufficiently strong to destroy the rural self-administration units or tribes that provided the base for the personalized, ecstatic, questionably orthodox,low Islam and thus provided the base for a definitive, permanent victory of orthodox Islam over the other. This, Gellner argues, is the great reformation that has taken place in Islam in the last 100 years and in some ways made its hold on believers even stronger than before.
Neither the colonial nor the post-colonial state need have set out deliberately to weaken rural or tribal societies. That is the unavoidable logic of modernization by way of growth of large urban centres, the decline of rural communities and tribes economic and political, if not in numerical, terms, and the spread of education, transportation and means of communication. Attempts to promote economic development, access to enormous resources byway of oil revenues, especially since the early seventies, remittances by emigrants to oil-rich Gulf states, and foreign aid were also bound to reinforce this logic.
The ascendancy of high Islam also accounts for the failure of attempts at secularization in the Muslim world. As Gellner has put it, the presence of this genuinely indigenous tradition has helped Muslim escape the dilemma which has haunted many other Third World societies: the dilemma of whether to idealize and emulate the West or whether to idealize local folk traditions and indulge in some form of populism. They have had no need to do either because their own high variant has had dignity in international terms.
Not everyone will agree with this assessment. Some Muslims have sought to emulate the West. Turkey,since the Tanzimat movement in the late nineteenth century, is one example and so is Egypt which was virtually an autonomous province of the Ottoman empire since about the same time. That these attempts failed is, in fact, a critical issue, but that cannot be dealt with here. Broadly speaking, the assessment is valid. Turkey and Egypt too continue to struggle to contain the tide of Muslim revivalism and fundamentalism.
There is another aspect of the Western impact which deserves attention. Millions of those who have been uprooted from the countryside and pushed into crowded slums and/or have found themselves left out of the benefits of modernization and economic development have sought and found solace in Islam. For them the language of Islam has become the means of coping with moral anxiety, social disequilibrium, cultural imbalance, ideological restlessness and problems of identity produced by the economic transformation of the post- independence period.
The other major cause of the Muslim failure to move ahead is the ummah is. This is particularly so because most non-Muslim, especially Hindus, have no idea what this community of believers means to Muslims and how it has managed to survive the rise and fall of dynasties in the past,endless intra-Muslim wars, the presence of around 50 independent Muslim states, the failure of pan-Islamism and other efforts to establish a coordinating centre.
To being with, we should note,as Professor Francis Robinson has pointed out in his essay Islam and Muslim Separatism 6 that the Muslim era does not being with the birth of Mohammed, as the Christian era does with the birth of Christ, or with the first revelation of the Koran in Mecca, but with the hijra (migration) of the Prophet and Muslims to Yathrib (Medina) whereby the Muslim community was first constituted. This was to be no ordinary community. It was to be a charismatic community. That is why Mohammed could declare: "My community will never agree or error." That is why it was to function on the basis of ijma (consensus of the Muslim community or scholars as a basic for a legal decision) and suppress dissent. That is why this ijma was to play a critical role in the development and enforcement of the Shariat.
The well-known five pillars of Islam - bearing witness to the unity of Allah and finally of Mohammed's Prophethood, prayers with special emphasis on collective prayers every Friday with the face always turned towards the Kaaba, zakat (charity) for purposes of the community, fasting during the month of Ramadan and Haj (pilgrimage) to Mecca - continuously reinforce this sense of the community. Much of this is familiar to all those who know anything about Islam. But Professor Robinson underscores a few points which deserve attention.
First, the last act of the Friday prayer itself commemorates the community as the Muslim turns to his neighbour on either side in performing the salaam. Secondly, no one who has lived with Muslims in the month of Ramadan can fail to see the powerful sense of community generate in the joint experience of fasting. Thirdly, the performance of the Haj represents the ultimate celebration of the community; for all pilgrims don two white sheet, the ihram, in recognition of the equality of all Muslims before Allah, and as they live for the first 13 days of the month on the plain of Arafat, they experience the reality of the community as never before despite differences of language and culture.
In addition, the use of the Arabic script has helped create Islamic languages out of non-islamic ones, the transformation of Hindavi (or Hindi) into Urdu in India being a case in point. Similarly, Muslims use the same decorative patterns all over the world and segregate their women in the same way. Then there is the classical literature which has been carried wherever Muslims have gone and transmitted from one generation to another. This has produced a common cultural heritage which has defined being swamped by the most dramatic differences of environment, and of pre-Islamic culture as, say, between India and Arabia. The Muslim personality is a reality despite regional and ethnic differences.
In view of the rise and fall of a number of Muslim dynas- ties, it is tempting to dismiss the ummah as a myth. This temptation must be resisted. Despite the absence of central political control since the Abbasid caliphate, the ummah has been a potent reality and it remains so today. There has been no period in Muslim history when ideas and movements arising in one corner have not reverberated throughout the Muslim world. Non-Arab and non-Persian thinkers have written in Arabic and Persian precisely because they have seen themselves as part of the larger Islamic community of which these have been the languages of discourse and because they have sought influence throughout the Muslim world. Iqbal, for instance, wrote much of his poetry in Persian in British India in this century, though Persian had long creased to be the language of discourse in this country. As for ideas and movements, if the Wahhabi influence emanating from Mecca dominated the Muslim mind in much of the nineteenth century, Maulanaal-Mawdidi in this century can be said to have fathered what is now called Islamic fundamentalism.
Continued below . . . .
I would like the members of 'poly to tell me whether it was correct , and whether it was prophetic , considering the time in which it was written . It is frighteningly close to what has actually happened .
This perspective is that Muslim power and therefore civilization have been on the retreat all over the world, including India, that this retreat has accounted for all movements we have witnessed in the Muslim world in the last two centuries, and that instead of helping check the retreat, theses movements have promoted a ghetto psychology among Muslim. To put it differently, what has generally been regarded as Muslim aggressiveness and separatism, I treat as isolationism and opting out. I am in this essay, not concerned with the nature of Muslim conquest and rule.
To grasp the validity of this approach, it is necessary that we give up what may be called the frog-in-the-well approach to history. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru railed against this narrow approach but not to much avail. Indeed, in respect of the Hindu-Muslim civilizational encounter, he too suffered from the same handicap. Thus we discuss Mohammed bin Quasim's invasion of Sind in the eighth century more or less independently of the expansion of Arab Islam as far as North Africa and the Iberian peninsula in the west, with Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt and Palestine thrown in, and Transoxania in the north, with the once mighty Iran, Medina, Khurasan and Sistan included in it. And more often than not we fail to take note of the fact that while Akbar Muslim armies cut through Christian and Zoroastrian lands like knife through butter, in southern and eastern Afghanistan, the region of Zamindawar (land of justice-gicers) and Kabul, the Arabs were effectively opposed for more than two centuries, from A.D. 643 to 870 by the indigenous rulers, the Zunbils and the related Kabulshahs. Though with Makran and Baluchistan and much of Sind, this area can be said to belongs to a cultural and political frontier zone between India and Persia, in the persis, in the period in question the Zunbils and their kinsmen, the Kabulshahs, ruled over a predominantly Indian rather than Persian realm. Arab geographers commonly speak of the king of Al- Hind who bore the title of Zunbil. (Zun was a Shaivite God.) Andre Wink has detailed an equally prolonged resistance on the Markran coast in his Al-Hind : The marking of the Indo-Islamic World.
Similarly, we discus Babar's conquest of parts of North India without reference to the larger Turkish upsurge, culmination in the Ottoman empire, which, at its height, included present-day Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, islands of eastern Mediterranean, parts of Hungary and Russia, Iraq,Suria, Palestine, the Caucasus, Egypt, north Africa (as far west as Algeria) and part of Arabia. This lopsided and parochial view of history was designed, perhaps deliberately, by British historians to inculcate in us a deep sense of inferiority. But whether deliberate or not, the effort succeeded remarkably well. Many educated Indians have accepted that everything worthwhile in India, including Sanskrit, has come from outside and that Indians have never been able to resist foreign invasions and occupations. Nirad Chaughuri's Continent of Circe is perhaps the best-known expression of the British-promoted view of us a degenerate people.
This gap between fact and history, as generally written and taught, is however, not my interest right now. I wish to emphasize that by the eighth century, Muslims had acquired from Spain to India "a core position from where they were able to link the two major economic units of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean....Muslims dominated all important maritime and caravan trade routes with the exception only of the northern trans-Eurasian silk route....the Arab caliphate from the eighth to the eleventh century achieved an unquestioned economic supremacy in the world....in monetary terms the result of the Muslim conquest was...a unified currency based on the gold dinar and the silver dirham.... Possession was taken of all important gold-producing and gold-collection areas...."
This economic supremacy provided so powerful an underpinning for the Muslim ummah (universal community of believers) and, therefore, civilization that they could survive all internal upheavals, including the Shia-Sunni divide; the decline of the Abbasid caliphate from the tenth century onwards, culminating in the sack of Baghdad in 1258 by the Mongols; the upsurge of Turks so much so that they can be said to have dominated the Islamic enterprise from the tenth century to the abolition of the caliphate in 1924. (The Safavid rulers of Iran too were Turkic and so were the Ghaznavids in Kabul.)
It follows not only that, to be fully effective, the challenge to Muslim dominance in that vast area had, in the final analysis, to be maritime but also that the ummah and Muslim civilization would find it difficult to survive in a meaningful sense the loss of control of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. The Ottoman empire doubtless provided a second powerful underpinning. But its fate too was linked in no small way to the correlation of forces on the high seas.
Mediterranean Europe began to stir in the eleventh century. The crusades, beginning towards the end of the century, were an expression of that upsurge though they took a religious form. But the crusaders were first absorbed in the Muslim population and civilization and then beaten back. So, it was not before the end of the fifteenth century when Vasco da Gama discovered a new route to India via the Cape of Good Hope (our of Muslim control) and landed in India (in 1498), that a serious challenge to Muslim power can be said to have arisen. Though this challenge took around three centuries to mature and get consolidated, the impact on the fortunes of the Turkish empire was evident by the late sixteenth century, when the Dutch and the British were able to completely close the old international trade routes through the Middle East. As a result, the prosperity of the Arab provinces declined. The import of vast quantity of precious metals from the Americas following Spanish conquest and loot of that continent and the conversion of this gold and silver into currency also played havoc with the Turkish economy. Globalization of the world economy is, after all not a twentieth century phenomenon!
This is a long and complicated story. The details, however significant and fascinating, like the retreat of the Turks from the gate of Vienna following defeat at the hands of the Hapsburfs in 1688, or Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, exactly three centuries after Vasco da Gama's voyage to India, need not detain us. What is material for our purpose is the steady erosion in Muslim control of the Mediterranean-Indian Ocean trade, the decline of the Ottoman empire and with that the replacement of the Islamic by the European civilization as the dominating reality on the world scene. The dismemberment of the Ottoman empire at the end of the First World War and the subsequent Turkish decision to abolish the caliphate in 1924 can be said to have completed the process. The two developments marked, in a fundamental sense, the closure of the era that opened with the establishment by the Prophet of the first Muslim state in Medina. However biter and devastating the struggles within it and however painful the setbacks such as the sack of Baghdad in 1258 by the Mongols, the ummah had been in control of its fortunes from Mohammed's Medina period till then.
Since the beginning of the eighteenth century, Muslim thinkers and men of action have tried to inaugurate a new era in their history. Their failure to do so is obvious. At various places, beginning with the seat of Ottoman power in Anatolia itself, and at various times, beginning possibly with Shah Waliullah in Delhi at the beginning of the eighteenth century, they have tried different strategies - modernization of the armed forces and administration, Western-style education, reinterpretation of the Koran and return to pristine Islam, Western ideologies from liberalism to Marxism via fascism, pan- Islamism and pan-Arabism. Nothing has worked. (For details see David Pryce-Jones, The Closed Circle).
The reason for this world-wide failure are many and complex. Among the most important is the nature of Islam itself. Very early in its history, Islam closed itself on itself. By insisting on the finality of Mohammed's revelation and the immutability of both the Koran and the Sunnah, Islam ensured that there could be no place in it for self-renewal and there has been no self-renewal in Islam as its students would accept.
To begin with there was a lot of free debate in Islam. The presence of Mtazilites and Kharijites, 4 the rise of major philosophers such as Ibn Sina of Sufi orders should help clinch the issue. As a result of Greek, Persian and Indian influences and the consequent growth of philosophy and sciences, early Islam, in fact, produced and sustained an intelligentsia which, in the exercise of free thought, took little account of the literal interpretation of the Koran. Sunni orthodoxy, though formulated early in the Islamic enterprise, took centuries to prevail. But once it did, in the thirteenth- fourteenth centuries partly as a result of the work of Ibn Tamiyya, it has reigned supreme.
Surprising though it may seem, the Western impact on Muslim societies has only strengthened the hold of orthodox Islam. In order to appreciate this point, it is necessary to recall that under the cover of a single terminology, two distinct religious styles have persisted among Muslims. As the well-known sociologist and Islamicist, Ernest Gellner, has put it : "Islam traditionally was divided into a high form,-the urban- based, strict,unitarian, nomocratic, puritan and scripturalist islam of the scholars; and a lower form, the cult of the personality addicted, ecstatic, ritualistic, questionably literate, unpuritanical and rustic Islam of the dervishes and the marabouts."
It would be an exaggeration to suggest that the two traditions have always been at war with one another. For a variety of reasons, Sufi Islam has generally been at a disadvantages and has had to accommodate itself to orthodox Islam. Most Sufis, for instance, have acknowledged that the Shariat is immutable and binding on them as ordinary Muslims. Revivalist movements from time to time such as the Wahhabis have reinforced these disadvantage; Wahhabis fought bitterly against the saint cult which is the core of Sufi Islam. Even so, till recent times there had not existed a social base for a permanent victory of orthodox Islam over Sufi Islam.
Unlike earlier times, however, the colonial and the post- colonial states have been sufficiently strong to destroy the rural self-administration units or tribes that provided the base for the personalized, ecstatic, questionably orthodox,low Islam and thus provided the base for a definitive, permanent victory of orthodox Islam over the other. This, Gellner argues, is the great reformation that has taken place in Islam in the last 100 years and in some ways made its hold on believers even stronger than before.
Neither the colonial nor the post-colonial state need have set out deliberately to weaken rural or tribal societies. That is the unavoidable logic of modernization by way of growth of large urban centres, the decline of rural communities and tribes economic and political, if not in numerical, terms, and the spread of education, transportation and means of communication. Attempts to promote economic development, access to enormous resources byway of oil revenues, especially since the early seventies, remittances by emigrants to oil-rich Gulf states, and foreign aid were also bound to reinforce this logic.
The ascendancy of high Islam also accounts for the failure of attempts at secularization in the Muslim world. As Gellner has put it, the presence of this genuinely indigenous tradition has helped Muslim escape the dilemma which has haunted many other Third World societies: the dilemma of whether to idealize and emulate the West or whether to idealize local folk traditions and indulge in some form of populism. They have had no need to do either because their own high variant has had dignity in international terms.
Not everyone will agree with this assessment. Some Muslims have sought to emulate the West. Turkey,since the Tanzimat movement in the late nineteenth century, is one example and so is Egypt which was virtually an autonomous province of the Ottoman empire since about the same time. That these attempts failed is, in fact, a critical issue, but that cannot be dealt with here. Broadly speaking, the assessment is valid. Turkey and Egypt too continue to struggle to contain the tide of Muslim revivalism and fundamentalism.
There is another aspect of the Western impact which deserves attention. Millions of those who have been uprooted from the countryside and pushed into crowded slums and/or have found themselves left out of the benefits of modernization and economic development have sought and found solace in Islam. For them the language of Islam has become the means of coping with moral anxiety, social disequilibrium, cultural imbalance, ideological restlessness and problems of identity produced by the economic transformation of the post- independence period.
The other major cause of the Muslim failure to move ahead is the ummah is. This is particularly so because most non-Muslim, especially Hindus, have no idea what this community of believers means to Muslims and how it has managed to survive the rise and fall of dynasties in the past,endless intra-Muslim wars, the presence of around 50 independent Muslim states, the failure of pan-Islamism and other efforts to establish a coordinating centre.
To being with, we should note,as Professor Francis Robinson has pointed out in his essay Islam and Muslim Separatism 6 that the Muslim era does not being with the birth of Mohammed, as the Christian era does with the birth of Christ, or with the first revelation of the Koran in Mecca, but with the hijra (migration) of the Prophet and Muslims to Yathrib (Medina) whereby the Muslim community was first constituted. This was to be no ordinary community. It was to be a charismatic community. That is why Mohammed could declare: "My community will never agree or error." That is why it was to function on the basis of ijma (consensus of the Muslim community or scholars as a basic for a legal decision) and suppress dissent. That is why this ijma was to play a critical role in the development and enforcement of the Shariat.
The well-known five pillars of Islam - bearing witness to the unity of Allah and finally of Mohammed's Prophethood, prayers with special emphasis on collective prayers every Friday with the face always turned towards the Kaaba, zakat (charity) for purposes of the community, fasting during the month of Ramadan and Haj (pilgrimage) to Mecca - continuously reinforce this sense of the community. Much of this is familiar to all those who know anything about Islam. But Professor Robinson underscores a few points which deserve attention.
First, the last act of the Friday prayer itself commemorates the community as the Muslim turns to his neighbour on either side in performing the salaam. Secondly, no one who has lived with Muslims in the month of Ramadan can fail to see the powerful sense of community generate in the joint experience of fasting. Thirdly, the performance of the Haj represents the ultimate celebration of the community; for all pilgrims don two white sheet, the ihram, in recognition of the equality of all Muslims before Allah, and as they live for the first 13 days of the month on the plain of Arafat, they experience the reality of the community as never before despite differences of language and culture.
In addition, the use of the Arabic script has helped create Islamic languages out of non-islamic ones, the transformation of Hindavi (or Hindi) into Urdu in India being a case in point. Similarly, Muslims use the same decorative patterns all over the world and segregate their women in the same way. Then there is the classical literature which has been carried wherever Muslims have gone and transmitted from one generation to another. This has produced a common cultural heritage which has defined being swamped by the most dramatic differences of environment, and of pre-Islamic culture as, say, between India and Arabia. The Muslim personality is a reality despite regional and ethnic differences.
In view of the rise and fall of a number of Muslim dynas- ties, it is tempting to dismiss the ummah as a myth. This temptation must be resisted. Despite the absence of central political control since the Abbasid caliphate, the ummah has been a potent reality and it remains so today. There has been no period in Muslim history when ideas and movements arising in one corner have not reverberated throughout the Muslim world. Non-Arab and non-Persian thinkers have written in Arabic and Persian precisely because they have seen themselves as part of the larger Islamic community of which these have been the languages of discourse and because they have sought influence throughout the Muslim world. Iqbal, for instance, wrote much of his poetry in Persian in British India in this century, though Persian had long creased to be the language of discourse in this country. As for ideas and movements, if the Wahhabi influence emanating from Mecca dominated the Muslim mind in much of the nineteenth century, Maulanaal-Mawdidi in this century can be said to have fathered what is now called Islamic fundamentalism.
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