A huge Iranian crowd chants, Death to America.
Many in the West see in this image Islam's rejection of the modern world.
Yet compare Iran with other Muslim nations and a different picture emerges.
Each has its own way of struggling with modernity.
Modernity is not bad, but some parts of it should be questioned.
We are not saying that all cultures should be the same.
What we say is that we have to maintain our relation with God.
We should not forget our Creator.
This
is the Jantar Mantar in Delhi, a giant astronomical observatory built by Muslim engineers for
the first time.
But the Jantar Mantar was out of date even before it was built.
In the West, Galileo had developed the astronomical telescope more than a hundred years before.
Isaac Newton had long ago published his work on the laws of gravity.
The construction was based on early observatories in Damascus, Isfahan and Samarkand.
For the Maharaja and his Muslim overlord in the declining years of the Mughal Empire,
it was a nostalgic symbol of the great period of Islam which at once exerted such a profound
influence on the world.
It was the period ruled by the two central Quranic sects of Adl and Ehsan, balance and
justice and virtue and compassion, a time when Islamic scholarship, science and power
went hand in hand.
It was the time of the integrated activities in the global society.
The political activity, the legal activity, the theological activity, the scientific activity,
the administrative activity, all was linked together.
The result was a consistent worldview which strongly influenced all the other cultures
of its day.
Muslim scholarship contributed to the arts of government, of war, of mathematics, of
astronomy.
The star maps we still use today preserve a permanent record of those times.
Al-Qaeda, Mizar, Aliyyut.
So many stars have Arabic names.
The Quran itself tells Muslims to study the heavens, but today it is no longer an Islamic
sky.
The satellites up there are for me a symbol of a foreign technology over which Muslims
have little control.
Then after the 11th and 12th century, so many events came from inside the societies, but
also from outside, that all these integrated forces have been slowly disintegrated.
From the 11th to the 13th centuries, two massive attacks fractured the Arab world.
In the west, the Crusades and the reconquest of Spain.
In the east, the savage onslaught by the Mongols under Changiz Khan.
The great centers of Muslim culture were destroyed or reduced to slavery.
The Mongols left behind them a landscape of death.
This is a very sad place.
The central mosque of the original city of Samarkand stood here.
When Changiz Khan attacked the city, the citizens sought refuge in the courtyard.
It was to no avail.
The city was destroyed, the mosque burned with all the people inside it.
No one has lived here ever again.
As long as a group of people feel insecure in their environment, they develop always
what we may call a system of securities because they feel threatened from outside.
And then they develop what they call orthodoxy, either a political orthodoxy, secularized
political orthodoxy, and we know what it means, or a so-called religious orthodoxy.
The Arab world responded to the Mongol onslaught by withdrawing into orthodoxy and conservatism.
Yet the Muslim vision was not destroyed.
The barbarian conquerors were soon absorbed, and they in turn raised Islamic culture to
new heights, their confidence and pride clearly visible here in Samarkand.
The Muslims must look back over their shoulders and first get to know their own identity in
the sense that their ancestors in various countries were the great developers of scientific
disciplines and modern disciplines.
There was no dichotomy seen either by the prophet or these latter-day developers between
science and religion.
Religion provides for enough empiricism for adoption and reinterpretation and development.
That's number one.
They should look back over shoulders and acquaint themselves with the true nature of Islamic
learning, which is open.
In earlier times, Islam had led the world for nearly 700 years, but the Mongol Empire,
which sprang from the ashes of Genghis Khan's conquest, had a briefer flowering.
Central Asia soon sank back into civil strife and economic disorder.
The nostalgic folklore replaced intellectual progress.
And as Muslim power faded here, as also in Turkey, Iran and India, a new idea had taken
grip of the West.
Muslims found it difficult to come to terms with the notion we may call it modernity.
The conflict has been studied by Iranian-born philosopher Syed Hussain Nasr.
There are many people who believe modernity is what the Western world does, no matter
what.
I have a more precise philosophical definition for modernity.
I believe if modernity means anything, it means the coming to being after the European
Middle Ages of a world view based essentially on the terrestrial human being, cut off from
both the divine order and perhaps the rest of the natural order, using his own reason
in order to discover things and making himself or herself as the fundamental basic value
in all of life.
Muslims can never accept that man is the measure of all things.
That principle was brought to the Far East by the forces of European colonialism.
Indonesia has the world's largest Sunni Muslim population, as many as in the whole of the
Middle East.
Its 150 million Muslims divide into two schools, the Orthodox and the more liberal and eclectic
influenced by Buddhism and Hinduism.
A woman on a motor scooter wearing a Muslim head covering is a rare sight elsewhere in
the Islamic world.
During the conflict that exists between the two schools, the government of Indonesia has
thrown all its energies into economic development.
Today Indonesia shares in the technological success of the Pacific nations.
Aircraft design and construction are flourishing.
Indonesia builds planes under license for export and even supplies parts for American
military craft.
But many Muslims would say that there has been far too much emphasis here on economic
progress and not nearly enough on Islam.
Now after two generations of economic growth, new groups are entering the workforce including
many devout Muslims.
The government has had to accommodate their faith and has even subtly encouraged it.
Islam is taught in schools along with the nationalist ideology.
Evidence of Indonesia's response to Islam is the mosque taking shape in the factory
grounds.
Evidence of Indonesia's technical prowess is this locally designed transport and surveillance
plane.
Sweden has recently ordered 24 of these craft.
But the conflict between faith and modernity in Indonesia continues.
Many Muslims are unwilling to come to terms with the compromises needed by an increasingly
non-Islamic technological society.
Allu Siafroni has chosen not to participate in Indonesia's industrial society, preferring
a life of piety.
His wife has made the same choice.
She is a Christian convert to Islam.
Allu makes his living carving passages from the Quran.
Islam came late to Indonesia and not by conquest but with traders and holy men.
The gentle Sufi tradition is still a very strong influence.
Deliberately
rejecting Jakarta's worldly values, Allu won't buy wood for his carvings but scavenges
from the city's rubbish tips.
The choice means a lot to him.
He prefers working old wood rather than new, just as he holds to his religious traditions
in the face of his country's modernist drive.
He likes the way of buko on his own.
The ultimate question is, what is it that makes human beings happy?
Is it the amassing of material wealth?
Is it just a long life but devoted completely to worldly ends or is it something else?
And the answer of Islam was always, it is something else.
The Quran is very explicit on this saying that the other world is better for you than
this world.
But that does not mean the denial of this world by any means.
The Islamic revolution set Iran on the opposite path from that of Indonesia.
Rather than pursuing western modernity, Ayatollah Khomeini led his country in an attempt to
restore the Islamic vision.
This gathering on the anniversary of his death is evidence of the continuing popular support
for the Ayatollah's message.
The revolution was one of the most significant events of recent Muslim history.
It opposed the West and restored Islam to centre stage.
It gave a lead to the whole Islamic world and made Muslim governments uncomfortable.
The Islamic revolution under the leadership of Imam Khomeini came to give this message.
Of course our people wanted it.
They had accepted the message before that where the new society is going is not really
the right direction.
We have lost spirit, we have lost the relation with God and I think the main cause is this.
There was no, I mean we accept that the West is going towards welfare and that's not bad.
We accept that freedoms are not bad.
We accept that many democratic institutions are very good and we are following it.
But our main stress is on the lost and ignored part of human entity.
The principle is that since God is one, the human soul is one, life should be one.
Life should not be broken into various compartments because the message of Islam emphasises so
much the doctrine of unity that compartmentalisation is really against its very ethos, the very
foundation of its belief system.
And therefore what we call the political life which also of course spills over into laws,
into the social order, must be related to the laws which govern the religion.
Election day in Tehran.
An Islamic state accepts the Western idea of democracy but with a difference.
In Islam not the people but only God can be sovereign.
Ayatollah Khomeini said that the main function of an elected parliament was to set the agenda
and to draft enabling legislation for applying established Islamic law.
But Islam supports the concept of shura, consultation, and parliamentary delegates, members of the
committee of experts, as well as the other bodies which make up Iran's government are
all elected by popular vote.
All candidates must first be approved as worthy and pious citizens by the religious council
of guardians.
The constitution of Iran is based on Shia Islam, 90% of the population is Shia.
But religious minorities are also represented.
Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians may vote for their own deputies.
Women play their part too, both at the ballot box and in the assembly.
But contrary to stereotype, they are vocal and active in public life.
The Armenian Church in Tehran.
There are communities of Armenian Christians in many Iranian cities.
In the spirit of Islam, the constitution guarantees freedom of worship to officially recognized
religions.
Western critics are inclined to blame Iran's Islamic fervour for intimidating minorities
and for violating human rights.
But I believe the problems lie in the very nature of revolutions and what inevitably
follows.
Recent western criticism of Iran has focused on Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa on Salman Rushdie.
Two million dollars is now the price on his head from an Iranian foundation.
There are many strands to this complicated and tragic affair, political, cultural, and
ideological.
But at its heart lies a confrontation between two very different value systems.
If you walk in the street in this country, in the United States, and start cursing God
and Christ, people just will look at you, won't even look at you, they'll pass you
by, that's your own private affair.
But if you say to someone that your nose is very big or you curse at them, you could get
sued for a hundred thousand dollars.
Because what is most important is the individual's right.
The rights of God and Christ don't really matter.
Now in the Islamic world, as in many other traditional civilizations, and as in Christianity
and Judaism before the blight of secularization set in, the highest value is God, is the sacred.
Because it is that which gives value to human life itself.
And human rights come after that, not that there are no human rights, but one gains human
rights by virtue of accepting God's sovereignty, because we receive our existence from God.
We don't give existence to God, God gives existence to us.
If you don't accept that point of view, then of course you're outside of the religious
world view.
In that world, to desecrate the sacred is the most grievous sin, it's the worst thing
that you can do.
And what happened in the Salman Rushdie affair is that the right of an individual to desecrate
the sacred history of a civilization went counter to the right of that civilization
to defend its sacred history.
And as far as the Western intelligence is concerned, it's very important for it to
accept the fact that if it believes in human freedom, other civilizations also have the
freedom to be themselves.
The Muslim world finds the West's attitude to the Rushdie affair hypocritical, uproar
on behalf of a single British writer citing international law, silence over the broken
and ignored UN resolutions on Kashmir, Palestine and Bosnia, and violation of human rights
there.
All Muslims are Bhor Rushdie's book, but many authorities have different views on the fatwa.
Allah's Zahra in Cairo is one of the most respected and influential centers of Muslim
learning, for many years the head of Al-Azhar was Mufti Tantawi.
On the surface, Iran's political situation now seems calm and ordered after the chaos
of revolution, but underneath a struggle continues between the pragmatists who wish
to normalize relations with the West and the idealists who wish to maintain a hard line.
In a Shia state, political protests must take a radically different form from that elsewhere.
The processions on the anniversary of the martyrdom of the Prophet's grandson Imam
Hussein are a demonstration of sorrow at a monstrous injustice and remorse that the
Muslim community allowed it to happen.
But one can read into these public demonstrations more than just a religious meaning.
The processions are at the same time a protest against all injustice and all bad government.
Muslims in power in Iran observe them with very personal interest.
Iran's importance is that as an economic and regional power, it sees itself as the champion
of Islam.
Its challenge is to find a balance between religious fervor and living as part of the
community of nations.
On the surface, Indonesia and Iran seem to have little, if anything, in common, except
popular adherence to Islam.
Both have taken apparently opposed roots.
Indonesia, in its drive towards modernity, Iran in its passion for pure Islam.
What needs to be emphasized in both societies are the Muslim ideals of Adl and Ehsan, balance
and compassion, balance between religion and the world, compassion for the weak and the
poor.
It is those Islamic values that we are striving for today here in my own country, Pakistan.
Islam was established in 1947 as a state for Muslims.
Pakistanis see events since then as having vindicated the desire of the founding fathers
to create a homeland safe from the dangers of Hindu reaction.
In a country founded for Muslims, Islam naturally plays a major role.
It is the factor which brings together our many ethnic groups.
The search for balance between Islam and modernity had to begin with urgent action to bring the
country into the 20th century.
A whole new infrastructure was needed.
New roads, new communication systems, new hospitals and schools.
The number of universities and colleges multiplied twentyfold.
Pakistan, now a country of 110 million Muslims, mostly Sunnis, has the highest income per
capita in South Asia.
Foreign investment continues to be sought.
The country remains a parliamentary democracy in spite of a number of episodes of martial
law and military rule.
But a healthy democracy needs a literate population and Pakistan's struggle to raise literacy
levels has met with less success.
Modernity means coping with English and Urdu as well as all the commonly spoken languages
and that means mastering both Latin and Arabic scripts.
The foundations of Pakistan's Islamic culture are in the Quran so all children should ideally
learn to read Arabic.
They begin their education by memorizing the Quran, the source of their faith.
Yet for too many of the next generation this is all the education they will get.
Islamic culture and Muslim ethics underlie Pakistan's social attitudes.
The Sharia, the law of Islam, has been part of Muslim life for over a thousand years.
Here as everywhere in the Muslim world it provides the ideal of fairness and justice.
The Sharia's criminal law, the hadood, with punishments often criticized in the West as
draconian are accepted as the necessary foundation of society.
I was walking in the poorest streets in Cairo just three weeks ago and I felt much safer
than walking on El Street at 12 o'clock at night, one of the best areas in Washington
and Northwest.
And though it's not just a question of poverty, it's a question of something else.
And what the hadood tried to do is to try to preserve the social order which is based
on the structure of the family and the rights of human beings to their own property.
Those are the two fundamental principles without which chaos ensues and instead of five people
having their hands cut off, a thousand people are shot to death, if you put those pictures
together on the screen of a television and then say, all right now which is worse, I
think everyone will agree that as far as human rights is concerned you should try to maximize
human welfare and the right of the individual is therefore not absolute.
Balancing Islam and modernity means combining the structures of the modern state with the
moral principles of the faith.
Notations from the Quran adorn the wall of the upper chamber of parliament, the Senate.
One thing is very clear that Islamic society is not a dictatorial society.
An Islamic society is based on the moral values as given by the Quran and those values are
the values of democracy, peace, harmony, justice, equality, non-discrimination.
These are all the values of an Islamic society and it is these values which we try to build
into our system.
For most ordinary people like those buying and selling in the bazaar, harmonizing Pakistan's
legal system with Islamic law is a natural and desirable development, a way of combating
corruption and injustice.
We have liberated Pakistan on the basis of Islam and we have Islam in our hearts.
We want the Islamic system to be completely nullified.
We are Muslims and the Islamic system is nullified.
When Islam comes, when there are Islamic teachings, many crimes will be finished.
We will understand whether this should be done or not.
Whatever is seen as bad in society or society, the main reason for that is that we have moved
away from our real Islamic traditions.
Our interest is that our Islamic law should be presented to the Muslims in a complete way,
both pro-Gandhi and practical.
We do have this paradox where people do respond to the Islamic message, the Islamic slogan
and it does become a language of protest.
But there is something which then makes them stop short of voting for religious parties
which actually advocate the establishment of an Islamic state.
I think part of the explanation for that may lie in the fact that the kind of Islam, austere
Islam that these religious parties espouse, is the kind of Islam that ordinary people
do not relate to.
It seems plain that what ordinary Pakistanis want is a synthesis of the best practice of
the West with the basic morality of Islam, though some conflicts may be difficult to
resolve.
For example, Islam is categorical in its ban on usury, lending money at interest.
But it is not yet clear whether the prohibition can be applied to modern banking methods.
Very recently we had the Federal Sharia Court, which is the court which is charged with giving
decisions on whether a particular piece of legislation is in accordance with Islam or
not.
They have called upon the government to ban and prohibit interest from all financial transactions.
Now this has put the government in a severe dilemma.
It obviously does not wish to proceed to carry out this court judgement because it knows
that to prohibit interest is to throw the entire banking and financial system into complete
disarray.
At the same time, it has itself created a trap because the religious parties are now
crying and shouting that if you do not implement this judgement, that shows that you are not
sincere about implementing Islamisation.
Solving this problem is important to Pakistan's further development.
In the end, it may be an issue over which the country's economic future will stand
or fall.
But the argument is not all one-sided.
There are ways to make investment worthwhile without charging interest.
Arrangements for sharing profit and loss have a long history in Islam.
There was no such thing as a capital system a few hundred years ago.
All the businesses were running.
If it ends today, we will continue to run despite that.
There will be some difference and trouble, but that is not the case.
Ordinary trading may hardly have changed since the days of the Prophet's own rule in Medina,
which Muslims looked to for the principles by which to run their lives.
But at the time of the first Muslim community, there were no banks, no financial markets,
no stocks and shares.
Since then, national economies have undergone radical transformation.
To solve the problem of bank interest, Islam's principles will need to be reinterpreted.
That process, well established in Muslim thought, is called ijtihad.
But it will need all of Islam's resources of wisdom and balance to come to a conclusion
that is both moral and practical for today's world.
I think we have to find some balanced way, which is Allah under Islam also.
Islam always appreciated the balanced thought, the balanced deed, always.
So we have to, if we are a Muslim country, we have to find a balanced way.
We cannot leave the world.
The difficulties of finding a balanced way are compounded by having to deal with the
legacies of history.
A social worker is on her way to see Rifaat Iqbal, who was arrested and imprisoned for
eight months on a trumped up charge of adultery.
In Islamic law, adultery is a criminal offence and so it is in Pakistan.
But part of our legal system is a leftover from our British colonial past.
Its courts here still use Victorian English.
In this confusion, not surprisingly, it is the uneducated and the poor who suffer.
And is adultery only for women?
Only women do it?
Most of the women in jail, as I have already told you, most of the women are involved in
adultery cases in jail.
So aren't there any men with them?
Are there any men?
Didn't any man do it?
Didn't any woman do it alone?
As far as Hudood laws are concerned, the groups who are opposing them, they have a fear that
when the question of implementing these laws arise, it won't be implemented fairly.
And only the poor people and people who have no authority, they are the ones who will suffer
with them.
This is the fear of those groups who are opposing.
But the religious groups who are actually supporting it, they argue that they can clean
the whole society.
Islam has given equal status to women and men.
There is no
inferiority complex between men and women.
It is ordinary people who suffer most from the juxtaposition of Islamic law with the British
judicial process.
Lower courts often impose the penalties of the Hadood, which are then overturned on appeal.
Rifaat Iqbal's case was finally heard after nine months and her conviction quashed, for
Islam lays down strict social conditions without which punishments may not be imposed.
Nobody can claim that in Pakistan everybody go to bed with full stomach.
Nobody can claim that.
This is the basic requirement under the Islamic law.
Can any president or any prime minister or any member parliament or any person who has
certain kind of authority can claim all peoples are equally fed in Pakistan, all peoples have
been treated equally?
Nobody can claim that.
No one.
So under the Islamic laws you have to treat each and every person of that country of that
land equally.
If you look at the constitution of Pakistan, the minorities have been granted their rights.
Similarly the women have been granted their rights.
Similarly all citizens have been granted their rights.
In practice, if certain rights are violated or if some communities feel that their rights
are not being protected then perhaps the reason for that is that our enforcement machinery
is not strong enough at the moment or that the people are not educated enough to have
their rights enforced.
Pakistan has still some way to go before it fulfills all the ideals of the founding fathers
but personally I think it is a considerable achievement that it has survived at all.
Three traditions merged in the making of Pakistan, our religion Islam, the South Asian culture
which we share with our Indian neighbours and the British institutions which we inherited
from the colonial period.
All three were represented by the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, known as
Qaedazum, the father of the nation.
This is the Qaedazum.
Qaedazum born 1876, died 1948.
The Jinnah Museum shows the reverence Pakistanis feel for the father of their nation.
It tells his story in full, his training as a lawyer in London's Lincoln's Inn, the momentous
events leading to the creation of Pakistan and his tragic early death before he could
lead the nation he helped to found through the difficulties it would face as an independent
state.
The Qaeda had a titanic struggle against both the British government and the Indian Congress
in his drive to create a Muslim homeland.
He had to search for the balance between the British inheritance and our South Asian culture,
between the needs of Islam and those of a modern nation.
As a Pakistani, I am proud that many of the ideals on which my country was founded have
been retained.
I am proud that after the death of the last military dictator, elections were not postponed.
And I am proud of the balance we have so far achieved between modernity and Islam.
But I am also keenly aware of the progress that we have yet to make.
That progress will now be the task of the next generation, and it will be the responsibility
of Pakistan's education system to prepare the young men and women of tomorrow to find
the balance and compassion, the Adal and Ehsan, for the future.
I am on my way to Burn Hall, up in the hills of the North West frontier, the school which
I myself attended more than 30 years ago.
It will be interesting to see how much has altered since the distant days when it was
run by Catholic priests.
Hello, Father, how are you?
Nice to see you, Father.
How are you?
Nice to see you.
Wonderful.
After so many years, Father.
Yes.
How many years has it been?
Well, I don't know.
When did you leave?
1959.
Yeah, I left in 1974.
Father, the old emblem is still there, to what heights can I not rise?
That's right, yes.
So what changes do you see since your time in the 1950s?
Well, change I don't know, but one thing I have seen, if it isn't to very great heights.
Now, remember, subscription is the only way to get a job.
Remember, subscription is the ending.
This is the ending, the letter.
It already strikes me as quite extraordinary that so little seems to have moved on.
Now, when it is a friend letter, you can say yours.
The English class seems much the same as when I sat in this room as a pupil.
Now, there are different ways of writing it.
Either you write your sincere or sincerely yours or sincerely or caudally or you say
as ever.
Father, this used to be my desk.
This was my own childhood that I was seeing and not without a feeling of nostalgia.
At first sight, it might seem that this school, like so many in the ex-colonial world, is
purposely shutting out the massive changes that Pakistan has brought into being over
the last 30 years.
But in reality, great Islamization has indeed taken place.
The school houses are no longer called after Catholic saints.
There are prayers five times a day in the school mosque.
Burn Hall was built on the principles and with the values of the British public school.
But those principles and values belong to another culture, another world and another
time.
Many do not reflect our own traditions and our own beliefs.
As I sit at my old desk, I ask myself, how can we recreate the integrated society of
Islam's earlier days?
The time when politics, religion, science and administration were all inspired by the
same Islamic ideals.
We need to rebuild our education systems.
We need to find a way of solving the problems of human rights, of law and order, of the
entitlements of women and minorities, of the gaps between rich and poor.
We need to emphasize the Islamic ideals of balance and compassion, adl and ehsan.
These are the problems of many of today's Muslim societies which are struggling with
modernity.
Any great constitution, like Islam is, has to have two features.
One, it has to have some basic things which cannot change.
If they change, that constitution is not that.
For example, if democracy gives up its important feature of tolerance, it is no longer democracy.
Islam also has these fundamentals of iman or whatever.
Belief in a single God, belief in Wahi and in the prophet and so on.
There is a structure of belief.
If that changes, a Muslim is no longer a Muslim.
But then every great constitution has to have a method of change.
If it does not do that, then it cannot fulfill its claim, substantial its claims to be relevant
for all ages and all spaces.
Islam's strength lies in ijtihad, creative interpretation.
I believe Islam has the resources to achieve change without losing its own heart and soul.