WITH the rare exception of India and China on its eastern peripheries the ‘heart of the earth’, ie, Rome and Persia, was riddled with wars and was profusely bleeding. Conditions in Europe were also far from satisfactory when, to suture the world social fabric, Islam emerged onto the scene of history in Arabia.

Human history had come full circle. Judaism and Christianity were either addressing human problems on a limited basis or igniting sectarian wars, while old tribal sanctions were fast losing their sheen, and hence were unable to address the malaise. The times were fraught with tragedy when, in the words of Shah Waliullah, Islam appeared as a moral necessity for destroying the corrupt socioeconomic structures of Persia and Byzantium to build anew.

Amidst profound chaos, a man disenchanted with the human plight would occasionally go to a cave in Hira to get respite from the tragedy around him in the excessively mercantile Makkah — a city of stark socioeconomic disparities, which had relegated the disenfranchised segments of society to a diminutive existence. Then, a window opened from the ghayb (Unseen) which brought new life into this desert city, and indeed far beyond its environs. The entire Quran dawned on the heart of the Prophet (PBUH) and settled right and wrong with wisdom from God.

The religious experience of the Prophet emerged as a symbiosis of monotheism and socioeconomic justice. So lucid and vivid was Hazrat Muhammad’s first address to his community that the religio-political and mercantile elites took it as a warning. Pointing to the socioeconomic thrust of his message, H.A.R Gibb writes that the darker side to the prosperity of Makkah, ie socioeconomic inequality, was one of the deep inner causes of the Holy Prophet’s unease, which instead of turning into a movement for social revolution, was transformed into a religious movement under the impact of a vivid and immediate experience of a unique God.

Islam appeared as a moral necessity.

Gibb’s remark reflects the West’s obsession with the so-called duality of spiritual and material, which he pasted onto Islam. Otherwise, to the Quran, from the very beginning monotheism and social justice organically include each other; the rejection of one implies the negation of the other. This was what became the moral social order demonstrated by the first monotheism-based ‘republic’ of Madinah.

Later, dictatorship, orthodoxy and Sufi-theosophy challenged the purpose of Islam as a social proposition and focused more on ritualism in religion, substituting its collectivism and snatching its moral initiative. Social justice is neither a one-off principle nor does it have Judaic-Christian or Muslim traits; it is directly proportional to the intellectual, scientific, and moral cognition of man as an ever-developing phenomenon. The 19th-century reformer Jamaluddin Afghani also arrived at the same conclusion that socioeconomic reforms, instead of materialistic metaphysics or the mediaeval idea of religion, should be based on monotheistic principles.

He propelled into action an illustrious class of intellectuals who produced a vast literature on Islamic social justice, but on the realm of policy goals and directives this initiative fell prey to Marxism. There was an attempt to graft communist policies onto religion. Thus, Islamic socialism co-evolved with communism, its fate tied up with its surrogate mother — Marxism — and with the fall of Soviet Russia, Islamic socialism turned out to be a damp squib.

The pristine Islam planted socioeconomic egalitarianism in the fertile soil of monotheism, which proved to be a seedbed of socioeconomic equality and human egalitarianism, while communism sowed economic egalitarianism in the barren soil of materialism, and soon withered away. In the Pakistani context, Iqbal inspired by Afghani’s thought dreamed of a land free of the master-slave relationship; Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan committed allegiance to Islamic socialism and Z.A. Bhutto swept to power on the tide of Islamic socialism. History depicts the clergy and secular elite as Siamese twins indulged in a cut-throat war, but on removal of the thin veneer of hypocrisy both are found to be bedfellows. On this plane, Iqbal rejected orthodoxy and termed secularism positively harmful for mankind.

Deep down, the orthodoxy’s ‘minimal’ Islam accepts secularism. Modernism and its spin-offs have rendered our planet unliveable for the lowly, hence the golden ‘best community’ of the Quran is duty-bound to formulate Islam as a social proposition of socioeconomic justice and translate it into reality to prove that Islam can best resolve the socioeconomic and political crises of man.

The writer is an academician.

Published in Dawn, July 5th, 2024