Islam in the new millinium Part 16

Islam in the New Millennium

Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad

Opening

In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.

May the peace, mercy, and blessings of Allah be upon you.

Introduction

You'll be horrified to learn that the organizers actually asked me to speak for two and a half hours. I think if I threatened to do that, this room would rapidly empty. What I want to do is at least summarize some of the points that I was trying to make in an article that was posted almost a couple of years ago now on the Internet.

On the Internet, a couple of years ago, I posted an article under the title, Islam of the New Millennium, and I've been asked to say a few words about it. And, inshallah, there'll be a chance to have a few questions on the subject before we break, as we must, for Asr prayer later on.

But before we ask questions, perhaps, if you'll permit me, I'll just try and summarize what I try to say in that article.

The Millennium and Islamic Calendar

First of all, the obvious point that I make is that the millennium, this great fever that seems to be gripping the world at the moment, is, properly speaking, no concern of ours, because we operate according to a very different and much more significant calendar.

Regrettably, however, almost every Muslim state nowadays seems to be planning a celebration of some kind or another, partly because the Muslim world, by and large, with a few honourable exceptions, uses the Anno Domini calendar. I remember when I first went to Cairo 20 years ago now, I suppose, I was amazed to see on the portico of the Egyptian museum an inscription commemorating the foundation of the museum, I suppose in the 1870s, by the Khadir Ismail, the Muslim ruler of Egypt at the time. And he uses Anno Domini - "in the year of our Lord" - referring to Sayyidina Isa, alayhi salam.

And this precedent seems to have become very widespread, but, properly speaking to us, the millennium really makes no difference whatsoever. The year 2000 is, in fact, going to begin during the present Hijri year, which is, of course, 1420, a year of no particular significance.

So, should we be worrying about the millennium at all? Is it a question for Muslims?

Theological Considerations about Predicting the Future

Perhaps the second reservation, a rather more difficult one to handle, is the one about whether we should be anticipating or second-guessing the future at all. What I want to do for the rest of this talk is to speculate, hopefully not too wildly, about the directions in which Islam may take following the great anniversary, using the millennium as a convenient way of talking about the future that we can anticipate as an ummah.

Nonetheless, as Sunni Muslims, we do have a theological question that needs to be answered here. Can we actually do this in a halal way? Is it permissible to talk about the future at all? After all, Allah is:

(Alam al-ghuyub - the all-knower of the unseen).

The future is an open book only to the:

(al-qadr al-'alim - the omniscient determiner of events).

And it may well be, even, that although the year 2000 seems to be just around the corner, the world itself may draw to a close even before then, because Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is perfectly capable of stopping all of the clocks before then. It may even be that our species itself, as a kind of ironic manifestation of the divine justice, may be an instrument in this.

One recalls, for instance, President Kennedy's real hesitations when he heard the advice of his head of the Strategic Bombing Force to go ahead and launch a pre-emptive massive nuclear strike against the Russians at the time of the Cuban crisis, and he decided on balance against this. But there have been occasions in recent history when it did look as if, perhaps, the world wouldn't make it to the year 2000.

But as Muslims, we know, taking our cue from the hadith of Jibreel, alayhi salam, that even the Rasul, alayhi salatu salam, didn't know when the end of time would come. He said:

The one questioned knows no more of it than the questioner.

(Sahih al-Bukhari Hadith 50)

Islam as an Eschatological Community

Nonetheless, you don't have to read much in the Qur'an to realize that we are an eschatological community. We are concerned with the end time. Islam is to be the religion of the end time.

But as the Qur'an puts it:

The very heavens are pregnant with it - the imminent conclusion.

And partly triggered by this Qur'anic warning, millennial expectations have not been particularly unusual in Islamic history.

Historical Millennial Expectations in Islam

When the first Islamic millennium came around, the year 1000 of the Hijri calendar, there was a good deal of apocalyptic expectation in the air in a number of Muslim countries. So much so that Imam al-Suyuti, who lived in Egypt at that time, actually felt obliged to study the issue and to find out if there was any indication in the hadith as to whether that millennium should be significant.

And he wrote a little book called:

Al-Keshf an-Mujawwazat Hadihil Ummatil Alf

which means something like "a proof or a disclosure that this ummah will survive the millennium."

And he concludes that in fact on the basis of the enormous body of hadith known to him that there is no evidence to suggest that the ummah will end at the first millennium of Islam. But it is interesting to reflect, and rather soberingly I think, for our purposes, that writing 500 years ago, 400 years ago, he said that the great signs which will usher in the day of judgement will appear in the 15th Islamic century. That's his conclusion on the basis of the hadith that he accessed.

But of course all of these conjurings with necessarily very elliptical hadiths were coloured by the Imam's awareness that only Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala knows the future and only prophets are able to prophesy. However, it doesn't mean that we cannot extrapolate or speculate about the possible futures of the ummah.

The Need for Reflection on Current Trends

Why is it useful to reflect on present trends and to think about where they might be leading us? Well, because I think in the first instance whatever else we might disagree about, just about every Muslim nowadays acknowledges that the ummah's response to modernity has often been a pretty feeble, unsuccessful one.

Faced with the triumph of the West, we have generally not been able to calculate which changes are inevitable and which ones simply have to be resisted. Not a new choice of course, although for our

generation the choice is more sharp I think than it's ever been before because the gulf is widening constantly between any religious perspective on the world and world history, and the modern consensual secular western view.

Historical Example: The Ottoman Empire

But for instance in the 18th and the early 19th century we find the Ottoman Empire, the Khilafah, losing a series of disastrous wars against the Russians. And the main reason was that the Russians were, since the reforms of Peter the Great, militarily and technologically streets ahead of the Muslim armies.

Large sections of the Ulema and the very traditional Janissary core, the Yenikeriler, the backbone of the Ottoman army at that time, resisted any attempt to introduce technology or European methods of organization into the armed forces.

Conclusion

[Note: The document appears to continue beyond what was provided in the transcript. This represents the first part of the lecture as given in the source material.]

And Allah knows best.

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This lecture discusses the theological and practical considerations for Muslims regarding millennial expectations and the challenges of modernity, emphasizing the need for careful discernment between necessary adaptations and principles that must be preserved.