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1. Pervasive Sense of Brotherhood and
Unity
When outsiders first look at Islam,
their attention may be attracted by its radical monotheism or by its
comprehensive legal system, or even by the life and teaching of Islam’s mystics,
the Sufis. Yet people who have lived in a Muslim country and become familiar
with its Muslim and non-Muslim inhabitants, are often struck by the central
place the ideal of brotherhood and sisterhood occupies in Muslim life. A strong
bond of solidarity binds together the Muslim believers. Each believer has a
proud sense of belonging to one translational community marked by an identical,
prescribed faith and law, by a common age-old history and by one sacred destiny.
The Muslim sense of belonging to one
community is so significant that Muslims are sometimes defined as the people who
wish to live inside the Muslim Ummah. (Ummah is the Arabic word used to refer to
the community of the believers). Moreover, as the Muslims themselves stress
again and again, the axiom ‘Render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God
what belongs to God!’ is utterly un-Islamic if it is taken to mean a separation
of the religious and political domains. The Islamic sense of community and of
the solidarity of all believers is both political and religious at the same
time. Islam, in other words, claims to be not only a system of faith and worship
but also a society, a community which determines for every one of its members
his/her way of life.
According to the Islamic understanding,
worship, family relations, economics, politics and other aspects of life, should
ideally be governed by one system. This system should be directly derived from
or, at least, shaped and animated by, the Sharī‘ah. The Sharī‘ah is the Islamic
legal system elaborated by Muslim jurists through the centuries and is based on
the foundation sources of Islam, Qur’ān and Hadīth.
Islam has succeed in creating a sense of
solidarity and brotherhood among all Muslims. An individual Muslim may be
ignorant of certain Islamic beliefs and practices. Some Muslims may even be
critical of certain aspects of Islam. However, they will hardly ever lose the
sense of fellowship with every other Muslim in the world, and very rarely will
they be prepared to cut their ties with the Muslim community, the Ummah of the
Prophet (sws). It is this community which guarantees to each of its sincere
members welfare (Falāh) in this life and the next.
The Ummah can be described as the
community of believers who profess God’s unity (Tawhīd), follow the guidance of
the Qur’ān and the Prophet (sws) and pray with their faces towards the Qiblah.
2. The New Ummah as constituted by the
Qur’ān and the Ministry of Muhammad
Historically, the solidarity of the
Ummah based on the Pophethood of Muhammad (sws), was the fruit of Islam’s
crucial event. This, of course, is the Hijrah, the Muslims’ departure from
Makkah to Madīnah in 622 which, significantly, marks the starting point of the
Muslim calendar. The Muslim calendar does not begin with either Muhammad’s
birthday or with the first incidence of the Qur’ānic revelation and one
humanity. The Ummah thus was not exclusive in membership like a tribe but open
to all who confessed the truth and final faith. This openness, however, went
together with a commitment to overcome, by a comprehensive effort that included
preaching as well as military action, the conspiracy of the Makkans and, later,
of other resistant groups.
The story of how Muhammad (sws)
consolidated the fortunes of the new Ummah in Madīnah, how the new Ummah under
his leadership defeated the tribe of the Quraysh of Makkah and, finally, how he
extended the Ummah over the vast Arab peninsula, has remained throughout the
Islamic centuries powerfully alive in the hearts and minds of the Muslims. This
story continually inspires believers to commit themselves to the welfare of the
Ummah. With the surrender of Makkah to the faith and rule of the Prophet and his
Ummah, Islam became a state in which faith was united pervasively with political
power. The military surrender of the Makkans went together with the eradication
from within its walls of any traces of idolatry. Makkah set the precedent for
the eventual total religio-political submission of all Arabia to the faith of
the Prophet (sws) and of Arabia’s incorporation into the Ummah.
The Qur’ān contains a number of
important texts concerning this theme, especially Sūrah 3, verse 100-110. The
Muslims are all brothers, a striking statement in the light of the previous
common tribal warfare:
Hold on firmly together to the rope
of God, and be not divided among yourselves, and remember the favours God
bestowed on you when you were one another’s foe and He reconciled your hearts,
and you turned into brethren through his grace. You had stood on the edge of a
pit of fire and He saved you from it, thus revealing to You His clear signs that
you may find the right way perchance. (3:100-103)
A famous Hadīth, too, teaches that the
Muslim is brother of the Muslim. This brotherhood is committed as ‘a band of
peaple’ to ‘inviting to all that is good’ to ‘enjoining what is right and
forbidding what is wrong’ (3:104). But surely the most celebrated verse in this
context is:
Of all the communities raised among
men you are the best, enjoining the good, forbidding the wrong, and believing in
God. If the people of the Book had come to believe it was best for them; but
only some believe, and transgressors are many. (3:110)
This affirmation is one of the
constantly recurring themes of all present-day Muslim proclamations in sermons,
conferences and debates. It is written in big letters on the wall of the
assembly hall of the Arab League in Cairo. It has a temporal as well as a
spiritual meaning. This community, in which all believers must form one
brotherhood, is open to all human and transcends racial distinctions from the
moment the person enters Islam. As far as historical reality is concerned,
present and past tensions in the community prove that racial opposition has been
and continues to be a potent fact. One example of this is the opposition of
converted persons to the predominance of Arabs in the period of early caliphal
history. Another, more recent example, is the struggle of the Arabs to rid
themselves of Ottoman Turkish domination in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Without tensions of this kind, the Muslim world of today would be
united. But it remains true all the same that the teaching of Islam condemns
such racial particularism. The dream of a total realisation of brotherhood and
unity continues to haunt the imagination of the preachers and politicians as
well as of ordinary people in the Muslim world.
Shortly after reminding the Muslim
believers of the fact that they are brothers and asking them to establish
concord between themselves, the Qur’ān raises the question of division by races
and tribes:
The faithful are surely brothers, so
restore friendship among your brothers; and fear God that you may be favoured.
(49:10)
O men, We created you from male and
female, and formed you into nations and tribes that you may recognise each
other. He who has more integrity has indeed greater honour with God. (49:13)
Nobility should therefore be based on
pity, integrity and righteousness alone. In this sense, the Muslim believer
regards himself and his co-religionists as superior to non-Muslims because, as a
Muslim, he belongs to the most favoured and the final religious community
established by God on earth.
3. The Ummah Corresponds to Human Nature
The idea and realisation of the Ummah
prescribed in the Qur’ān and established by the ministry of Prophet (sws) is in
fact fundamental to the human condition. A famous Tradition says: ‘Every child
is born Muslim – it is his parents who make him a Jew or a Christian or a Sabean’.
Every human being is created to find fulfilment in submitting to God’s will
within a community. The Arabic word Ummah is seen to be closely related to the
word for mother, Umm. In other words: as we are not physically able to care for
ourselves for years after birth and rely completely on the human community,
similarly we can survive as religious beings only in a community. Islam – which
is essentially submission to God’s righteous will – corresponds most perfectly
to humanity’s truest nature:
When your Lord brings forth from
their loins the offspring of the children of Adam, He makes them witness over
themselves, [and asks]: ‘Am I not your Lord?’ ‘Indeed’ they reply.’ We bear
witness,’ Lest you say on the Day of Resurrection: ‘We were not aware of this’.
(7:172)
Throughout history, there have been
persons who have discovered and lived out this primordial relationship with God
implanted deep within themselves, helped by a grateful contemplation of God’s
signs in the universe and in the events of human history. Abraham (sws) is the
outstanding example of this:
Abraham was certainly a model of
faith, obedient to God and upright, and no idolater, Grateful to Him for his
favours; so He chose him and guided him to the path that is straight, And gave
him what is good in the world, and in the Hereafter he will be among the
righteous and the good. (16:120-23)
Abraham (sws), in pursuing his
insight, had to break with his community. On the one hand prophetic preaching
seeks to remove individuals from communal settings which are contrary to God’s
will, on the other hand, it calls individuals into a community which submits to
God. In this way, it restores its members to their full natural state – as
individuals in a community which is truly submissive to God. This is the true
fulfilment of their human personhood (cf 3:104-110) as cited above. This
religious perspective explains why politics and government are perceived as
integral parts of the Islamic religious experience. It also helps us to
understand the full significance of the organisation of the Muslim community at
Madīnah. Here Muhammad and his followers take on the responsibilities of setting
up a model communal life. Here begins the struggle to create a new, final,
potentially universal, socio-religious order, the ‘house’ of submission to God
and of exemplary social justice (Dāru’l-Islam; Dāru’l-‘Adl)
4. The Community Dimension of the
Prescribed Practices of Islam
Membership of the Ummah is acquired by
pronouncing before two witnesses the Shahādah, the profession of faith. In this
way, the Muslim becomes subject (Mukallaf) to the Community’s rights and
obligations. Membership of the Ummah implies faith, and faith issues in witness.
Shahīd is the term for the person who witnesses to the faith, if necessary, by
giving his/her life in martyrdom. The Shahādah is in fact the deliberate renewal
of the primordial covenant which God has made with all human kind. (see 7:172
above)
The profession of faith as well as the
other four ‘pillars’ of Islam, besides being personal religious duties, have a
social dimension. They manifest and strengthen the bond of unity and solidarity
of all the believers.
The liturgical prayer (Salāh) is not
only an individual obligation but it must be said in congregation if a
sufficient number of Muslims are present. In principle, all Muslims are
enjoined to perform the ritual prayer together. Every day Muslims individually
and in congregation, and every Friday noon in large Muslim congregations, the
Muslims of the entire world, in concentric circles as it were, turn their faces
toward the Ka‘bah at Makkah. Hence Muslims designate themselves as ‘the People
of the Qiblah.’
The legal alms tax (Zakāh), likewise,
has a community dimension. If properly implemented, that institution is a
powerful instrument for realising social justice and making the Ummah the ‘abode
of justice’ (Dāru’l-‘Adl).
The practice of the liturgical fast (Sawm)
of Ramadān, far from being left to the individual conscience, is controlled
effectively by the public authorities. Any Muslim who is caught eating, drinking
or smoking in public, will be taken to task publicity. In a Muslim country with
laws to this effect, he is like to the arrested by the police. The annual
celebration of the month of Ramadān, culminating in the feast of the Breaking of
the Fast, renews and intensifies the sense of the corporate responsibility of
Islam and its power in this world.
But the most impressive liturgical
celebration as well as realisation of the Ummah as such is the pilgrimage of
Makkah (Hajj). It brings together from every part of the globe an immense
diversity of Muslims who, in spite of vast differences of culture and language,
experience themselves as forming a community. All of them profess and live the
same faith, conform to the details of one law and are inspired by the same
symbols and formulae of the one sacred language of Arabic.
5. The Ummah within the Wider Human
Community
For better or worse, everywhere on the
globe, increasingly, the world is experienced as interdependent and pluralistic.
How far does the Ummah in our day know itself called to contribute to the
construction not only of its own sectional world but, together with others and
in the spirit of dialogue and spiritual emulation, also of the common universe
with the aim of achieving a maximum of global justice and harmony?
Different individuals and groups in the
Muslim community give very different, at times diametrically opposed, answers to
this question. This is so because significantly divergent answers are given as
to which are to be considered the essential elements of the religion (Dīn) of
Islam and what are the adequate means to promote these in the conditions of the
contemporary world. We confine ourselves here to a succinct outline of the
answer which the well-known Tunisian Mohammed Talbi has given to our question.
His position, or at least the basic tenor of it, would certainly be shared by
many Muslim individuals and groups anywhere in the world, especially where they
live in minority situations. The answers of the conservative and of the Islamist
sectors of contemporary Muslims societies do not need to be stated here. At the
present time they probably are the most powerful and eloquent sectors of Muslims
society everywhere secular media. Hence they are rather known, even if not
always correctly understood, as to their roots and motives.
The community-state is no more and can
never be again. In this pluralistic world of ours, it is necessary now to work
together with others on the basis of full equality and respect. The believers if
faced with several political communities, both within and without national
borders. These communities bring together people whose outlook is different
ideologically, spiritually, socially, economically and professionally. They are
united by a programme, certain immediate ends to be achieved. As long as he or
she is discerning in his choice, in the spirit of true ijtihad the Muslim can
belong to the political community of her or his choice. Tensions are to be
expected but why should they harm a Muslim in his or her essential loyalties?
Then there are religious communities
outside the Muslim Ummah to whom the Muslim individual and the Muslim Ummah
relate. If we conceive of them in concentric circles around the Muslim Ummah,
the first would be the one of the spiritual family of Abraham, ‘the people of
the Scripture.’ This circle is surrounded by a much wider one. ‘It can be
called,’ Muhammad Talbi writes, ‘the community of God’s service, rescinding from
the way in which He is worshipped. It is the community of those who pray with a
pure and sincere heart’ (Mohammad Talbi, ‘A community of Communities: The Right
to be different and the Paths to harmony’ Encounter (Rome), No. 77, Aug/Sept
1981, p. 10).
Prayer and truly selflessly loving
service and sacrifice are a common language uniting all who stretch out towards
the mysterious Beyond. Much in the wider circle of religions fosters such an
outlook and action.
Since God has sent countless messengers
throughout history and has not deprived any people of a guide and warner (Q.
40:78; 10:47; 13:7 etc.) and does not punish without giving due warning first
(which penetrates a multitude of religious beliefs and inspires many a faith
community throughout the world’ (Talbi, ibid).
Simultaneously and viewed from the same
perspective, the Muslim believers have the task to lay bare depravation,
corruption and hypocrisy that affect religions as any other aspect of life in
the world and not rarely even are promoted under the cover of institutional
religions.
The spiritual attitude demanded of the
Muslim believer as witness of God in a pluralistic and questioning world,
Mohammad Talbi states, is one of listening to God who is near to each person. It
is an attitude of respect for each person’s loyalties and of harmony with all
who are striving for what is true, good and beautiful. In the words of Sūrah
2:186:
When my servants ask you about Me,
[say to them]: ‘I am near to them, and I reply to the call of the one who
invokes Me. So, let them listen to Me, and believe in Me, so that they may find
the right way’.
(Courtesy:
Encounter No. 25, May 1998)
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