The Moslem World's Struggle to Modernize

April 1965 coincides roughly with Dhu-al-Hijja in the year 1384 A.H. (after the hegira). It is the last month of Islam's lunar calendar, and the season to perform the hajj, the pilgrimage to the holy places of Mecca that for devout Moslems is both spiritual duty and lifetime dream. More than 1,200,000 pilgrims entered Mecca to carry out the prayers and ablutions of Islam's most sacred ritual (see following color pictures of last year's hajj). Luckily, this year there were no outbreaks of typhoid or cholera like those that have sometimes turned the hajj into a pilgrimage of death rather than spiritual rebirth.

The pilgrims came from all over the world. The King and Queen of Malaysia chartered a plane for the hajj; from the U.S. came the widow of Malcolm X. Also on hand was a group of Senegalese who in January began a 3,400-mile walk across the African desert to the Red Sea. At Jeddah on the Red Sea, gateway to Mecca and starting point for the pilgrimage, hajj flights landed every ten minutes round the clock at an airport that normally sees only a dozen commercial flights a day. In and near Jeddah's harbor, more than 100 pilgrim-bearing steamers anchored among hundreds of bobbing, high-pooped dhows.

Hajj Before Trial. Not all who wanted to make the hajj this year could do so. Egypt's President Nasser, who made the pilgrimage himself in 1955, allowed only 17,000 hajj passports for his people; there were fist fights in Cairo as devout Moslems elbowed their way into queues to get the necessary documentation. In Jordan, airline space to Jeddah was at such a premium that one group of rich pilgrims flew to London, caught a BOAC flight to Dhahran near the Persian Gulf, then chartered a bus to cross 780 miles of desert.

Some, of course, came to prey as well as pray. Sixty Nigerian Moslems were arrested for smuggling kola nuts, an illegal stimulant, into Saudi Arabia; police thoughtfully escorted the offenders through the hajj ritual, then brought them back to Jeddah for prosecution.

The number and variety of pilgrims on this year's hajj were living proof of the fervor that burns within the youngest of the world's universal faiths, second in size only to Christianity. According to Islam's mission-minded Ahmadiyya movement, there are 647 million Moslems around the world; less partial statisticians lower the figure to a still impressive 465 million. Today, 35 countries in Africa and Asia have Moslem majorities. In much of West Africa, Islam now gains converts at a 9-to-l ratio over Christianity.

A Way of Life. What explains the prosperity of Islam? One reason, certainly, is its simplicity. Islam has neither hierarchy nor organization: its creed is a simple affirmation that there is no god but God, and Mohammed is his prophet. Undemanding in doctrine, Islam calls upon its adherents, if they wish to be rewarded at the Last Judgment, to praise God five times a day while kneeling toward Mecca, fast during the holy month of Ramadan, abstain from alcohol and pork, give alms, and, if possible, make the hajj. Man's sexual nature is amply served by Islam, which permits four wives--providing they are treated equally--and unlimited concubines.

Another factor is its reputation for egalitarianism and tolerance. While Christianity in Africa suffers the stigma of being the white man's religion, Islam can boast that it has neither caste nor color bar; to the valid charge that it was Arab traders who sold the black man into slavery, there is the valid answer that it was white Christians who bought him. Islam, moreover, is monolithic: the differences between its principal sects --Sunnite and Shiite--are far less than those between Paul Tillich and a Pentecostal preacher, and acrimony stops at the prayer rug. On Friday, Islam's sabbath, Moslems of all sects gather in the same mosque, just as Indonesians and Malaysians set aside political quarrels to kneel side by side on the hajj. Above all, Islam, which is Arabic for submission, is something more than a religion. Culture and ideology as well as faith, it is a way of life in which human activities should conform to the divine will of God, as made known to the world by a remarkable man and a remarkable book.

Flight from Polytheism. God's chief prophet was born about A.D. 570, the illiterate orphaned son of a Meccan merchant. Mohammed grew up to be a desert trader and thereby earned a tidy fortune. In his 40th year, according to Islamic tradition, he had a vision of the Angel Gabriel, who told him that there was only one God. In polytheistic Mecca, which earned a substantial income from pilgrims who came to worship at the shrines of some 360 deities, Mohammed's monotheism was an unwelcome message, and in 622 he was forced to make his hegira, or flight, to Medina. There he expanded his doctrine of God into a code of law, through a number of revelations that were compiled after his death as the Koran (meaning discourse). To devout Moslems, the Koran is the infallible, unchangeable word of God. To nonbelievers, it is one of the world's most puzzling sacred books, a disorganized collection of poetic desert wisdom and spiritual law interspersed with odd gleanings from the Old and New Testaments. Islam believes that Mohammed was the last in a line of prophets that extends from Abraham through Jesus. His revelations from God thus superseded those of Judaism and Christianity. Like the Jews, Mohammed shunned pork as unclean flesh, and he paraphrased many stories from the Hebrew Bible--Noah and the Ark, Joseph and his brothers--in the Koran. Although the idea of Christ as God's son was blasphemy to Mohammed, he accepted Jesus' virgin birth and ascension to heaven as divine truths.

By the time of his death in 632, Mohammed's Islam was well established as the faith of Arabia. Within a century its sway extended from Spain to India. Medieval Islam was one of history's great civilizations, something grander by far than what is implied in the fairytale world of The Arabian Nights. In the first half of the 10th century, wrote the late Harvard Science Historian George Sarton, "the main task of mankind was accomplished by Moslems. The greatest philosopher, Al Farabi, was a Moslem. The greatest mathematicians, Abu Kamil and Ibrahim ibn Sinan, were Moslems. The greatest geographer and encyclopedist, Al Masudi, was a Moslem." From Islamic civilization came the rediscovery of Aristotle, the first scientific astronomy and medicine since the Greeks, the sinuous architecture of Spain's Alhambra and India's Taj Mahal.

Sick Man of Europe. The torch of Islamic empire-building passed in time from Arab to Seljuk to Mongol to Ottoman Turk. All the while, Islam was intellectually withdrawing from engagement with alien thought, under the influence of the mystical Sufis, and the orthodox ulama (scholars) who saw all wisdom in the Koran and Moslem tradition. By the 19th century, Islam was enfeebled in body as well as spirit; lands once ruled by Saladin and Suleiman the Magnificent became European protectorates; Turkey, resident of the impotent caliphs, was the "sick man of Europe."

But even in the midst of decay the seeds of rebirth took root. As early as 1744 the fierce Wahhabi movement began preaching the need for a strict return to Islamic practice, and its doctrine slowly spread through the lands of the faith. Sharply countering Moslem fatalism, the 19th century philosopher Al Afghani preached ijtihad (self-exertion), urging Islam to adapt to the currents of change in the modern world. India's Ahmadiyya movement helped revive Islam's long-dormant lust for converts. Twentieth century nationalism gradually brought independence, and a new spirit of confidence, to Islamic countries of Africa and Asia.

Inner Weakness. But many orientalists see a basic ambiguity in Islam's position, and feel that outward expansion is matched by inner weakness. One such weakness is that Moslem devotion, outside of rural areas where social pressure to conform runs strong, is often little more than skin-deep. Morocco still fines men caught smoking during Ramadan, and Malaya's Moslem courts zealously crack down on khalwat (close association of the sexes). Saudi Arabia has neither alcohol nor movies, but even here faith is succumbing to the influences of modernism: this year Jeddah will have a TV station.

Elsewhere in Islam, some pillars of the faith are crumbling. In Algeria and Tunisia, few town dwellers bother to stop work or play for the five-time ritual of daily prayer. In the cities of Westernized Syria and Lebanon, a majority of Moslems drink, and the percentage of those who fast through Ramadan is on the decline. In much of Africa, as British Orientalist J. Spencer Trimingham points out, "Islam and the pagan underlayer have blended"--leading to a mixture of Allah-worship and animism that would scandalize the learned sheiks of Cairo.

Indifference to many of Islam's traditional practices and customs seems prevalent among college-educated Moslems of Africa and the Middle East, for whom heaven is more likely to be a well-paying job with an oil company than a houri-filled paradise. For hundreds of years Moslem women have had to endure the restrictions of purdah--seclusion and heavy veiling. The liberated young ladies of Lebanon, long freed from purdah, now wear bikinis on the beaches of Beirut, dance the watusi at discotheques, and even marry Christians. "The young intelligentsia are fighting to modernize," says Dr. Regis Blachere of Paris' Institute of Islamic Studies. "They would like Islam to be an ethic without the limitations of practices in contradiction to modern life."

Physics at Al Azhar. Within Islam there is a definite modernizing mood. Although the faith has traditionally opposed birth control almost as fiercely as Roman Catholicism, many ulama now justify it on the ground that the Koran allows leniency in the case of suffering. Far from being a static, otherworldly faith, say contemporary Arab philosophers, Islam encourages man to knowledge of the universe through science. But progress is slow. A rigidly fundamentalist approach to doctrine and discipline dominates Islam outside the cities. Moreover, it was only last year that physics, medicine and engineering courses were introduced at Islam's best-known university, Al Azhar in Cairo. In West Africa, Moslem grammar schools do little more than teach children enough Arabic to read the Koran; when one group of Moslem women in Nigeria last year set up a Western-style secondary school, they had to hire as teachers two Christians and a Jew.

The strength of Islam in many cases depends upon imponderable factors of history that are subject to profound change. For black Africa, one of Islam's chief lures is its tolerance of polygamy--a practice sure to wither away with the tribal structure that made it necessary, as it has in much of the Middle East. In the Arab world, the faith that created empires is subsidized by Presidents and dictators partly because it can provide spiritual justification for political ambitions. Egypt, for example, funnels vast sums of money into the propaganda outlets of the Supreme Islamic Council, which praises Nasser almost as much as God. But favors given could be favors withheld when they no longer fulfill a national purpose. Islamic nation-states increasingly take their ideas and institutions--such as penal codes and constitutions--from the secular experience of the East and West, rather than the Shariah (religious law).

One French orientalist cynically concludes that "Islam, as a faith and a law, can no longer exist in modern civilization." Yet the continuing lure of the hajj for all Moslems, from fellah to philosopher, makes it clear that the spirit of Mohammed's faith is not so easily stilled. Far more likely than slow extinction is that Islam will gradually undergo the same kind of transition that Christianity went through, as the concept of Christendom fell before secularization. In time, Islam may lose its overtones of an ideology governing all of life--as Christianity did in the Middle Ages--to become, stripped down and freshened, simply one of man's many ways of encountering the mystery of God.

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