THE CRISIS IN ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION
by Ali A. Allawi
Yale University Press, 320 pages, $33.50
*
LOST IN THE SACRED
Why the Muslim World Stood Still
by Dan Diner
Princeton University press, 214 pages, $35.95
***
The Muslim world seems to be caught up in a crisis that shows no end in sight. If there is a single image that reflects this ongoing catastrophe, it is captured in the haunting eyes of a dying Neda Soltani, the 24-year-old woman shot dead on the streets of Tehran.
Since Bernard Lewis's tome What Went Wrong, much has been written on this subject. Now, two books shed new light on the fall and decline of Muslim civilization. Both authors, Ali Allawi, an Iraqi politician-academic who teaches in the U.S., and Dan Diner, a Jewish professor of modern history in Germany, not only study the decline, but also look into the reasons why attempts to resuscitate the Ummah have failed.
Until the 15th century, bloodshed and oppression were not an exclusive domain of the Muslim world. The rest of humanity, from India to China, from Africa to Europe, lived through similar travails. However, after the Reformation, Renaissance and Enlightenment, Europe slowly started on the long road to democracy, freedom, liberty and secularism, with religion and race separated from state and politics, at least in spirit if not in practice.
However, in the Muslim world, time seems to have stood still for the past five centuries. The once glorious civilizations that flourished in Baghdad, Cordoba and Delhi now seem to me mere myths that sustain the ossified existence of a billion people, trapped in the past and seemingly unable to break loose from chains of conformity intertwined with superstition and a contempt for joy itself.
Diner's Lost in the Sacred relies on the findings of the 2002 United Nations Arab Human Development Report (ADHR) that painted a very bleak picture of the Arab world. The fact that Arab sociologists, political scientists and scholars compiled the report gave it tremendous credibility. However, in Diner's words, "the ADHR holds a mirror up to the Arab world. The image it shows is not appealing, and stomaching it is no easy task." No wonder the document barely made waves in the Arab world, with one Canadian Arab professor suggesting the report was racist.
Diner compares ADHR with another document from the 19th century, a diary by an Egyptian scholar that did make waves and for a time gave hope that the Muslim world might finally open its arms and eyes to the revolution of ideas and innovations taking hold in Europe.
This was the diary compiled by an imam of Al-Azhar University, Rifaah al-Tantawi (1801-1873), who acted as a spiritual adviser to a group of Egyptian scholars studying in Paris. The scholars had been sent to Paris by the Egyptian pasha Mehmed Ali to study the modernization sweeping Europe.
El-Tantawi's diary, asking for change in the ossified Muslim world, was printed by the Egyptian government and made compulsory reading for all civil servants.
Diner points out that both the 19th-century diary and the 21st-century ADHR report asked for massive change in the way the Muslim world, specially Arab society, conducts itself. The difference between then and now is that, while the 19th-century documents was widely distributed by the government and read by scholars and politicians in earnest as a recognition that something was rotten in the kingdom of Islam, its 21st-century counterpart was ridiculed as irrelevant by the Islamists and dictators of the Arab world.
Diner suggests that "two postures informing such discourse are at loggerheads. One claims that the lamentable state of the region is a result of the religion and the culture of Islam impeding modernity. The other blames Western domination - if it admits that there is a crisis at all."
