Islamic Faith in An Age of Realism

by Thomas J. O'Shaughnessy, S.J.

Renewal from within is not a new phenomenon in Islam. Such risings have occurred periodically from the time of Mohammed through thirteen succeeding centuries, but they have always been movements terminating in a revitalized faith and a new access of political influence. The last of these resurrections from obscurity to power culminated in the Turkish domination of southeastern Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Islam stood at the last redoubt of a Europe torn with dissension. Barely then was Christendom in the person of Sobieski, able to muster sufficient strength to turn the Moslem legions back from Vienna and thus to change future world history to what we know.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a slow paralysis crept over Islam; its material culture, inherited from the ancient empires it had overcome, slowly retrograded while that of Western Europe prospered, drawing new impetus from the Industrial Revolution. Yet Islamic political power was shattered only at the close of World War I, when Turkish greatness was reduced to a shadow of its former self. As a religious force, however, Islamism has not ceased even today to be a dominant influence in the lives of most of its two hundred and sixty million adherents.

Modern Islam faces another revolt, but now a religious revolt, whose issue, though still in doubt, must in the end be one of the main two that face every world religion in modern times: a "this-worldly" or an "other-worldly" faith. The first is a totalitarian thing, incarnated today in Communism and Nazism; in the ultimate analysis the second means an Islamism reformed, and in the reform essentially changed, or Christianity; not the doctrinally dead Christianity of Protestantism, but the "otherworldly" religion of the future, Catholicism. This new revolt will decisively settle the future faith of Islam, just as it has decisively and finally settled the eventual fate of Protestantism, which met in the last century only some of the opposition and criticism to which Islamism is now being subjected.

Until 1910 the world of Islam was scarcely touched by the magic wand or, as some of its leaders have since preferred to think, the blight of the modern material civilization of the West. After World War I, however, the partitioning of the old Turkish Empire and the mandating of most of its former territories to European powers, especially Britain and France, brought about a complete overturn of the old order. The influences of Western civilization, modern education and European Liberalism began slowly to permeate the static civilization of the Near and Middle East, with results typified by Turkey's consequent severance with her Islamic past.

It is hardly possible to exaggerate the profound influence exerted on Moslem peoples by the spread of European nationalism and of the cynical dog-eat-dog attitude of Occidental business methods, and especially by those most powerful and inescapable propagandizers, the screen, the radio and the newspaper. For the first time Moslem women, veiled and unemancipated, saw and envied the freedom and equality of women in Europe and America. For the first time the leisured male of the timeless East was jolted out of his faineance by object lessons in Occidental efficiency pictured for him on the screen and, closer to hand, in the Europeans who now began to exploit in increasing numbers the oil wealth of Turkey's old empire. Higher standards of living and better medical care introduced by the "guardian" powers forced reluctant consent from those still unwilling to admit any superiority in the "infidel." The multiplying of schools, too, and the consequent growth in literacy insured the still wider spread and deeper influence of Western methods and ideas. In brief, the screen with its vividness and realism, the newspaper with its world-wide telegraphic coverage and the ubiquitous radio impressed vividly on the Moslem the conviction of Western material superiority and of his own unimportance amidst Europe's pushing about of pawns on the board of international power politics.

One almost immediate effect of all this was the rise in many of religious skepticism and a consequent falling off in external religious observance. Conscious of their backwardness, writers and politicians gave free outlet to desires for modernization and social reform.

In Turkey these desires found ardent advocates in the nationalist party controlled by Kemal Ataturk. Reform and modernization to this group, which gained political control in 1922, meant the unification of all Turks by an appeal to patriotism and national spirit couched in the jargon that has since become so familiar with the advent of Nazism: "race consciousness" (certainly a ridiculous concept for a people of so mixed an origin as the Turks), a conviction of their "mission" and their "destiny." More important still, this reform involved the complete secularization of the nation, brought about by eradicating the old Mohammedan legal system in its entirety and by substituting the codes of various Christian nations of Europe. Laws were introduced against the privileged status that Mohammedanism as a religious and social system had until now enjoyed in every department of life. The abolishment of the Sultanate in 1922, the adoption of the Latin alphabet, of the Gregorian calendar, of European clothing for all, the prohibiting of the veil for women and of any distinctive garb for religious authorities were only some of the innovations that startled the Mohammedan world then, but that have since been imitated by Iran and, in a lesser degree, by Egypt and Afghanistan.

Despite this evident laxity in religious observance, however, the common people and even the upper classes almost universally retained a sentimental attachment to the faith of Mohammed, which was still identified in the minds of all with the greatest periods in their history. Many there were too who, though willing to concede to the West superiority in the things of this "baser world," still considered it far their inferior in the matter of religion. The old conservatism, the self-satisfied attitude of religious superiority and the wild fanaticism associated "with Islamism in the West were still to be found almost universally among the poor and unlettered, due especially to that characteristic pride which everything in Mohammedism seems designed to foster. Socially, in theory at least, Islam stands for an absolute equality of all Moslems and their absolute superiority to all non-Moslems. To this is joined an ignorance that to Occidentals is astounding. The Moslem is literally a man of one book, the Koran, and even that, with its innumerable contradictions and plagiarisms, remains unknown to the mass, of whom but a fraction of less than ten per cent are literate.

Naturally then, we ask: Can Islam maintain its footing amid the rapidly growing indifference and agnosticism of its educated classes? Ultimately, religious skepticism must penetrate to the masses of the people from above, just as the paganization of France's peasantry began with the work of her so-called Free Thinkers of the eighteenth century. And this process has already passed far beyond its initial stages in the Mohammedan world of today.

The attack has been directed not only against Mohammedanism as a religion, but also as a social institution. In its being attacked as a religion, of course, Mohammedanism does not stand alone. In the last few decades, peoples whose culture is Christian in its origins at least, if not in practice, have seen their youth exposed to a campaign carried on against God, religion and morality, sometimes open and sometimes ineffectively concealed, but always deadly. Now the youth of the Mohammedan world, less prepared spiritually and mentally than the youth of Christian lands, are face to face with the same forces of evil. Secularism and the outlawing of all religious knowledge in education are producing the same general effects as they are in the United States, effects aggravated, however, in the less inured youth of backward lands.

After three decades of such association with the West, Islam today finds itself torn by conflicting loyalties to a newly born nationalism based on race theories and to the old Islamic internationalism.

Yet the political and, indirectly, religious influences dividing and destroying traditional Islamism are dwarfed by the less apparent ravages of Modernism which has had such ill effects on Protestantism and orthodox Judaism. Teachings like the evolution of dogma, the complete divorce of religion from social life, the setting up of utility, instead of man's very nature as a basic apology for religion are deadly to Mohammedanism. Orthodox Moslem doctrine has ever tended to go to unreasonable lengths in making the Koran, in an orgy of anthropomorphism, the physical and uncreated word of God, revealed in God's language, Arabic, and of which not a letter could be changed without sacrilege. Conservative Mohammedanism, too, recognizes no distinction between the religious and secular spheres but, as an absolute theocracy, demands full rights and loyal recognition of those rights in both. Finally, Islamism, born in seventh century desert Arabia and adapted to the conditions of that time, but certainly not to modern life, can speak for itself least of all perhaps on the ground of utility.

Hence the Moslem of today is divided in sentiment between a dying devotion to the religion of the Prophet and a desire for his country's progress and social reform, which can come only with the bursting asunder of the bonds of the outdated social system with which that religion has saddled him.

Faced with the problem of modernizing itself, the Islamic world is gradually casting off the moorings of the past and seeking new harbors. It may drift in one of two main directions as has been seen: to a totalitarianism that strives to realize its heaven on earth, leading ultimately to secularism and materialism, or to an "other-worldly" faith, to be found in a reformed and transformed Islamism or, as we hope, in Christianity. Turkey and, to a lesser extent, Iran have adopted the first alternative and are well on the road to a complete secularization with an emasculated Islam, shorn of its power, merely tolerated as a kind of nominal state religion. Egypt and Moslem India have sought with doubtful success to reform traditional Islamism.

This attempt to bring Islamism up to date has taken on various guises but one of the most striking is the idealizing of Mohammed, the "illiterate prophet," to use his own words, into a kind of man of the future. The great emphasis of Islamic biographers in the past has been on his alleged prophetic and divinely inspired office. In their accounts we discover too the patriot anxious to unite his factious people and sincere in his desire to destroy paganism in Arabia. Yet, at the same time, there appear the outlines of the incongruous: Mohammed the camel driver, shrewd, lustful, and unscrupulous in making Allah's cause justify any means taken to advance it. Progressive Moslems, educated in Europe or America, realized that this traditional portrait must be relieved of its crudeness if it were to retain the admiration of a people rapidly becoming modernized with all that that word implies of ability to detect incongruities and character flaws. Mohammed then, has been painted by contemporary Moslem liberals as an ideal of the human race; his sanction of slavery, easy divorce and polygamy, his overstepping in this matter of the lax law he himself had laid down for his followers, his use of the sword to propagate Islamism, have all been shadowed out of the main picture, while the virtues of Christ our Lord, that most attract even those who illogically deny His divinity, are substituted in their stead.

Another manifestation of this attempt to bring Islam into line with modern needs is the increasing emphasis on a principle, which would allow agreement on religious policy by a certain group of competent leaders to replace literal interpretation of the Koran and the Hadith, or traditional sayings ascribed to Mohammed and his contemporaries, as a source of positive legislation.

Beholding this gradual revolution within Islam, one may well ask: Can Islamism reform and remain what it has been in the past? Can it retain the intransigence that has made it great and which is an essential quality of any lasting system of religious belief? We have seen Protestantism compromise with Modernism and the results are evident today. Will Islamism follow the same course in combating the attack to which doctrinal Protestantism has already succumbed?

There are those who look for a resurgence of Islam and for a renewal of Islamic power, at least in the religious sphere. There are important reasons which, taken by themselves, would seem to indicate the survival of Mohammedanism as a world religion for an indefinite future. Islam as yet has not lost among the masses of its adherents the simple ancestral doctrine containing so many truths plagiarized from Judaism and Christianity. Certainly it has not lost in faith to the extent that the masses in many so-called Christian countries have in abandoning all religion. Belief is still strong in the untaught multitudes of the large cities of the Near East, the warlike mountaineers of Iran, the fellaheen of Egypt and the nomads of North Africa and Saudi Arabia. Nor has there been any serious decline of the proselytizing zeal that won Islamism such conquests in its early beginnings. Even today the great educational center of Islam, the Al Azhar University in Cairo, continues to form students from all parts of the Moslem world and to send them back to their native countries there to revivify and intensify the pride and zeal that characterize the Moslem fanatic.

Especially in missionary lands must a resurgence of Islam be feared. Islam presents the great truths of Judaism and Christianity in a synthesized and simple form to the pagan masses of Asia and Africa who are easily convinced of the real superiority of Moslem belief to their own idolatry. The principal tenets of Mohammedanism can be explained by any Moslem in a few minutes. Once the proselyte pronounces the brief Mohammedan formula of belief, without any further instruction or probation and without any other religious ceremony, he is as much a Moslem as his instructor. If, in the future, he abandons Islamism, he is theoretically liable to capital punishment for apostasy.

Needless to say, the well-known license Mohammedanism permits in regard to marriage is an additional attraction for the prospective convert. This aspect, however, should not be overemphasized so as to exclude the real element of sacrifice whose presence is psychologically calculated to attract the outsider. It would be a mistake to believe one becomes a Moslem to enjoy greater liberty; indeed if this were the object it would be more easily attained by adopting no religion.

In almost all mission territory, from the Philippines to the Atlantic, Mohammedanism is a potential or real and sometimes a successful rival to Christianity. It may be that the scene of Islam's revival may lie in lands yet unpenetrated by the faith of Christ or of Mohammed. Certainly Moslems in mission lands are today making every effort to realize this aim.

On the other hand, signs pointing to the real present and future decline of Islam as a religious force are, it seems, even more in evidence than those indicating its future rise to new life. Modernism has attacked the core of its religious belief; liberalism and kindred sociopolitical creeds question its right to exist as a social system; nationalism has destroyed the once cosmopolitan character of Islamism. The tendency in every Mohammedan land is increasingly toward modern efficiency, which often refuses to fit the primitive social mold of Islam, with disastrous consequences for the latter. Modern communications and an increasing literacy too are breaking down ancient prejudices and bigotry. Today the number of Mohammedans who sincerely seek the truth in religious matters is greater than it has ever been in the past. Undoubtedly one reason for this is the felt necessity of seeking beyond the Koran to pursue a religious ideal above the mediocre.

Mohammedan power reached its zenith five hundred years after Mohammed, in the eleventh century, when its tide covered much of Europe. Despite its several returns to power and its partial conquests since, its decline really dates from that time. Today that decline continues but now with pace quickened by the fatal drugs of Modernism and rationalism. Still, its leaders seem as determined as ever to yield no ground and to come to no agreement with Christianity. Whatever be the ending, religion's stage of the future has years since been set; its scenes and actors are in the main already fixed. And traditional dogmatic Islamism's part thereon is to be a minor one.

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