Al-Qalam 
By Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool
Having spoken in the last column of the genocide perpetrated by the Israeli regime on the Palestinian people and the way in which South Africa leads the pushback in the International Court of Justice, the question now is whether the ferment in the Muslim psyche can translate into the theological and intellectual wherewithal for a new reality for the Muslim Ummah (global community)?
The Ummah has reached the end of an era. We are at a moment of crisis, a moment of decision. Historically, Islam threatened those who wanted to preserve the known, with all its inadequacy or perversity, and who found solace in inertia. Now, we need to reflect on whether it is our own attachment to that which we know, our own comfort in our historical inheritance, or our inertia which disables us from responding to our challenges. Muslims are facing a moment of transition.
As we navigate this transition, there is the temptation to turn back and make tradition and orthodoxy our refuge, to believe that maybe we need not interact with the world as it is, but to construct a world in our mind that is immune to the growing uncertainty, insecurity, and hostility. We must take from orthodoxy – that great repository of knowledge and experience – what we need, what is useful, but we would also need to scrutinise it as we grapple with matters like whether Sharia necessarily is a means for inertia, enforcing only the known, or whether it has the foundations for giving momentum and leadership to the regenerative agenda in the complex world we live in.
There will, of course, be those who will try to convince us that the path we must take necessarily involves meeting the extremism of colonialism, occupation and Islamophobia with an extremism of our own. They will suggest that we have sanctions to meet hostility with hostility, to engage with intolerance towards the ‘other’, to unleash a generation of ‘martyrs’, and to foment war and violence until we have established Islam and secured the Ummah. This blowback is understandable but has often been undirected and un-strategic and created, in the main, more setbacks for the Muslim World, as Muslims have largely been in the eye of the geo-political storm since World War II.
Unless we are able to find a consistent, values-based response to the ferment in the global Muslim Community, unless we are able to bring calm to the Muslim soul, and unless we are able to provide new intellectual and theological resources to the next generations of Muslims, we are not going to have the possibility of regenerating the pax Islamica underpinned by its presence as Civilisation, not simply as State. This requires skilful leadership that must be developed and brought together where there is sufficient headroom to conceptualise the task at hand. The Muslim experience, especially over the last 70 years, of external threats (colonialism, occupation, and support for dictatorship, proxy wars, and the War on Terror) and internal nihilism (fundamentalism, extremism, intellectual stagnation, and the attendant distortion of Islam) may well warrant a moment of respite from both sources of aggression.
Like the early Muslims, under the leadership of the Prophet Muhammad (S), needed a strategic pause occasioned by the Hijra from which the City-State of Medina was conceptualized, today’s global community needs to have sufficient peace, a heightened capacity to absorb hostility, but enough headroom to think its way out of the cul de sac. Are we at a moment where this is possible? How do we move to a more nuanced, clear, and consistent understanding of what is happening in the Muslim World and even beyond? What are our complementary objectives in such a fractious and fragmented Muslim world?
We need to relieve the restlessness in the Muslim World by managing and transforming the unsustainable while ensuring that the undesirable do not fill the vacuum that may emerge in the transition.
The restless are the multitudes, browbeaten by decades of despotism, yearning for freedom without permissiveness, conflicted about whether democracy is Islamic, and acutely feeling the absence of human rights. They constituted the forces for change in the Muslim World and constituted the ‘Street’ in the Arab Uprisings. They cross the fault lines of Islamist and Secularist, Sunni and Shia, Wahabi and Sufi. Their common trait is that they are dislocated from power, suffer under authoritarianism, struggle for freedom and human rights, and carry the burden of economic exclusion. They have begun to lose their fear and to imagine a better life but live in surveillance states.
The unsustainable are the representatives of the status quo, the ancient regimes. They take the form of authoritarian monarchs, single-party states, military dictatorships – in and out of uniform – minority regimes, and governments that are unsustainable by virtue of not being inclusive, consultative, representative, frugal, and caring. They realise their increasing vulnerability and unpopularity: they tweak constitutions, invoke religion, rehearse gestures, fortify their surveillance and harness every fault line in Muslim society to ensure that the forces for change are fragmented and incoherent. But their unsustainability lies in the beginnings of a popular awakening, the ubiquity of new and old forms of media, the availability of knowledge and information, and the new sources of energy that are driving an economic revolution that requires skilled workers, new technologies, competitive markets, efficiencies and innovation.
The undesirable are those who peddle ideologies of certitude in the face of an ever-changing world, imposing certainty in the face of doubt, reasserting the fundamentals, and living by single and literal interpretations of truth, regardless of how improbable they may be. We could have co-existed with them if they were obscure and obscurantist. They become undesirable because they are dangerous. They do not believe they can co-exist with any other ideology, belief, or paradigm. They are necessarily intolerant because their sense of righteousness and correctness is exclusive – only they are right and, therefore, only they have the right to exist. All else must convert, conform, or perish. There may well be many who are as absolute but are harmless. This is their inert form. They wait for the conditions under which they are activated by acquiring some form of power. They thrive in moments of transition, where leadership vacuums emerge when society is confused and when people look for anchors in a changing world.
They feed off justifiable anger, historical injustice, profound emasculation, deep-rooted yearnings, and a daily sense of alienation.
Is the Global Muslim Community – the Ummah – at a moment of healing? It does not appear so with the naked eye, but magnified by television and social media, it shows us a world where healing is not imminent. The massacre of Palestinians, the mobilisation of Islamophobia and the repression of big minorities, intra-Muslim intolerance, and the growing Muslim refugee communities. The unsustainable have returned to gain a second wind, and the struggles of the restless have been pushed back. Repression and fear stalk the lands again.
The unsustainable cite the undesirable as their raison d’etre. The undesirable cite the restless as their cause celebre’. The restless seek relief from both. And the world looks on, retreating into their interests. This is the conundrum that we must unravel and, from its ingredients, rehabilitate the Pax Islamica.
