Modern 'Muslim' Intellectuals

Modern 'Muslim' intellectuals almost do not exist. I have heard one PhD Muslim intellectual guy saying that ice cream was invented by the people of Saladdin. (It was possibly shaved ice from the mountains). But this was during a talk that had nothing to do with ice cream. The problem with the 'modern' Muslim intellectuals is that they feel they are duty bound, on account of their faith, to defend the stories they heard as children from the ostat and the madrassah people, as the absolute truth, written in stone. Even stories about Saladdin inventing ice cream.  So was it 'Islamic' ice cream as well?

Hence they deny their common sense and they deny the 'modern' education and schooling that they are so proud of. Many of them earned their PhD's from Western universities where research, criticism, being able to use logic, showing evidence and using the scientific method are the basic building blocks of intellectual development. But when it comes to Islam, all their "Western" learning and all their PhDs just fly out the window. They become no different from 'sekolah pondok' graduates except that they now have a Western or 'secular' PhD behind their name.  

But for the past few decades,  the "Muslim" intellectuals have had to adopt an even newer behavioural pattern.  They have had to bury their head in the sand - like the proverbial ostrich.  

This peculiar behaviour is now showing an increasing pattern among the 'Muslim' intellectuals and there is a good reason for it. The reason is the rise in modern Western scholarship about Islam. For the past 40 years (since the Oil Crisis of 1973) Islam has become a subject of much discussion and study in the West.  And since 9-11, 'Islam' related titles have also made it to the New York Times best seller lists.  That shows just how popular the subject of 'Islam' has become in the West. Books and writings about Islam are becoming quite the runaway train. Once again, the 'Muslims' particularly in the Islamic countries have little or no part in this. They just cannot keep up with the Western intellectual method. They cannot answer basic questions, they cannot rebut simple research discoveries, they cannot even provide proof for the things they have been screaming about for generations.

True to the robust Western intellectual method, Western scholars are focusing their microscopic scrutiny of Islam and Islamic history. They are studying it, asking all the "what, where, when, who, why, how" questions, criticising, researching, looking for evidence, proving or disproving and debating the subject of Islam with the pitbull type perseverance for which they are well known. Once they bite on a subject of interest, they will not give up until all their questions are answered. 

This is where the modern Muslim intellectual has to cut and run and bury their head in the sand.  They want to be like the sekolah pondok and the madrassah ostat who dismiss ALL Western scholarship on Islam with a simple 'Orientalist, Zionist, Jewish conspiracy, CIA, enemies of Islam, Christian plot'  type of answer.  We really cannot expect the ostat sekolah pondok, ostat madrassah or ostat Al Azhar to  say anything more intelligent than this. In most instances these are the limits of their training and their intellect. 

But surely the modern 'Muslim' intellectual who has his PhD and who populates the IKIMs, the IISTACs, the Universities and the various 'Islamic' institutions can do much better than that. The Western interest in Islam is only just starting to accelerate. Now is the time to answer the West - one by one. Blaming the 'Zionist conspiracy, Western conspiracy, Christian conspiracy' etc is just not an option anymore.

The traditional 'ostrich burying its head in the sand' version of the religion has solved this problem from a long time ago. They just do not interact with any views that are different from the tempurung under which they sit. To them whatever their tok guru, ostat or shaykh tells them is the absolute truth. Everything else is false. That is life under the tempurung.  Thus does satan keep the gullible locked up under the tempurung. 

But what about the modern Muslim intellectual? The Muslim intellectual with the PhD? They cannot hide under the tempurung - that spot is already taken by the ostat and the tok guru. I think many of them have opted to bury their head in the sand instead.  

Many have adopted an elegant silence towards the new Western scholarship on Islam that is being churned out by the truckload. Just bury your head in the sand and hopefully all these new questions the Western researchers are asking will somehow magically go away.

Or one fellow somewhere will give some simple, flimsy and stupid answer and the rest of the Muslim intellectuals will then echo that one fellow. 'Oh Professor Azami has already answered that point'. Sorry folks, Professsor Azami has not answered anything. 

Here is a list of names of older Western scholars (19th century and early 20th century) who have stirred up plenty of mud in Islamic history. First the names : 

1. Ernest Renan - 19th century German scholar
2. Julius Wellhausen - 19th century German scholar
3. Gustav Weil - 19th century German, "Muhammad the Prophet, His Life and Teachings"
4. William Muir - 19th century British scholar
5. Aloys Springer - 19th century Austrian scholar
6. Ignaz Goldziher - 19th century Hungarian scholar
7. Joseph Scaht - 20th century German scholar

How did the Muslim world react to their research and writings on Islam? Simple. In Malaysia some of their books are banned. Problem solved. Katak bawah tempurung sekali lagi.  

Instead of organising intellectual discussion of their works, reading and criticising their books intellectually we took the easier option - just crawl under the tempurung. Club of Doom. Now their books are available on the Internet, sometimes for free in PDF format. You can download into your I Phone, I Pad, Tablet or laptop. 

Then there is a new breed of modern Western scholar who studies Islam using the tools and scientific methods of modern historical study. Here are some names :

1. John Wansborough 1928 - 2002 American scholar
2. Patricia Crone - Denmark, 1945 - present, Oxford University scholar. 
3. Michael Cook - Scottish, 1940 - present, Princeton University
4. Ibn Warraq
5. Christopher Luxenberg
6. Gunter Luling
7. Volker Popp
8. Robert Spencer
9. Johannes Jansen 1942 - present, Netherlands.

Many of these people have researched and raised interesting new questions about Islamic history.  Unfortunately some of them have received death threats. So to protect their own safety, they are forced to write using 'pseudonyms'. Ibn Warraq and Christopher Luxenberg are not their real names.

Now I will give you just three examples of how they think and research their subject.

Patricia Crone in her 1987 book "Meccan Trade and the Rise of islam"  establishes that historical records show that well into the time of the Prophet, Mecca was not a center of trade at all. Her view is that the numerous stories of Mecca as a center of trade came about later and were possibly embellished (added on). How do the Muslim scholars answer Patricia Crone? You cannot just call her a Zionist conspirator. 

Robert Spencer raises the issue of coins minted by the earliest Muslim caliphs. These coins are still found in the museums. In Syria, around 686 AD or 50 years after the Prophet, coins were minted which had a picture of a man on one side, the word 'muhammad' in arabic on the other side and the cross (sometimes found on both sides).  These are interesting observations. Why mint a coin with the cross and the word 'muhammad' on them? Robert Spencer suggests an answer. You can search Robert Spencer on Yahoo or Google.

Johannes Jansen a professor of Islamic Studies at Utrecht in the Netherlands has studied calendars and dates in Islamic history. 

Islamic history says that before 629 AD, the Arabs used the old lunar calendar which had 354 days, eleven days short of a 365 day solar year. To catch up with the solar year, every three years the Arabs added a month to their calendar. This was an Arab leap year. 

In 629 AD, just three years before the Prophet is said to have died, the Arabs dropped this practise of adding a month once every three years. The Arab calendar became what it is today, completely lunar and completely unable to tell the time of year. There were no more "leap years". No more adding an extra month every three years.

Considering that by 629 AD the Prophet had already been a Prophet for 19 years, the Prophet must have lived through six 'leap years" where an extra leap month was added to the calendar every third year. 

Now, written records of the Prophet's life first appeared about 200 years after his death, in the 9th century AD. Although they were written 200 years after the Prophet, there are supposedly detailed records of almost every day of the Prophet's life as a Prophet. And in the case of writers like Imam Tabari, who also wrote in the 9th century, almost every event he writes about (from 200 years earlier) is recorded with the day, month and year it happened. 

However there is absolutely no record about what happened to those six "leap months" from the 19 years of the Prophet's mission. Where did they go? 

Its like this folks - we have the leap year system too. Every four years the month of February has an extra day added, to make it 29 days. This is called a 'leap year'. This year 2012 is a "leap year" and February has 29 days this year.

Imagine now that PAS takes over Putrajaya and they make a fatwa that from 2013 onwards we will not have leap years anymore in Malaysia. No more February 29.  Ok fine.  Then PAS commissions a historian to rewrite the history of Malaysia from 1957 to 2012. But in their rewritten history book, they do not mention all the "February 29s" that existed in history from 1957 till 2012. (There must be about 13 of them). They completely leave it out. About thirteen February 29s have been wiped out from history. How can that be historically correct?

According to Prof Johannes Jansen, in the case of the Muslim chroniclers who wrote history 200 years after the Prophet died, they have wiped out at least six whole months from the Prophet's mission. 

Hence Prof Johannes Jansen of Utrecht University in the Netherlands holds the view that much of the history that was written 200 years after the Prophet's death was actually "invented".  People just sat at the table and wrote stuff that they heard so and so tell them from so and so who heard it from so and so and so on. They are not historically correct. 

The question is how do the modern Muslim intellectuals answer questions like this? By burying their head in the sand? Hello Mr Modern Muslim intellectual? What say you?

Well not all modern Muslim intellectuals have buried their head in the sand. One fellow, a professor of Law at the University of California has reacted to the modern historical approach with "fury". He calls this historical method 'bigotry". He has called some of these Western historians 'pitiful, inane and intellectual bores'.  That is his answer. Period. He has become quite a vicious 'katak bawah tempurung'.