Muslim Woman

And We have created you all from one breath of life, says the Quran. But the perception of life as an organic unity is a slow achievement which depends for its growth on a people’s entry into the main current of world events. This opportunity was brought to Islam by the rapid development of a vast empire. No doubt Christianity  long before Islam brought the message of equality to mankind but Christian Rome did not rise to the full apprehension of the idea of humanity as a single organism. As Flint rightly says, No Christian writer and still less of course, any other in the Roman Empire can be credited with having had more than a general and abstract conception of human unity. And since the days of Rome the idea does not seem to have gained much in depth and rootage in Europe. On the other hand the growth of territorial nationalism, with its emphasis on what is called national characteristics which has tended rather to kill the broad human element in the art and literature of Europe, it was quite otherwise with Islam. Here the idea was neither a concept of philosophy nor a dream of poetry. As a social movement the aim of Islam was to make the idea a living factor in the Muslim’s daily life and thus silently and imperceptibly to carry it towards fuller fruition.

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There was a time when Muslims were the masters of the earth, controller of the destiny but today they are on a path of continuous decline. Their Condition is horrible, they face miserable poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition, disease and sickness. There is a feeling of helplessness, hopelessness and frustration among the Muslims. They are just living, for the sake of living without any sense of direction. Neither the rulers nor the intellectuals of this nation have any plan for this huge mass of suffering humanity. It is really painful to see them suffer despite the best lands, resources and vast number. It is very important for those who are concerned about the future of the muslim unity to ponder about as to what is the cause of Muslim decline? What if anything can be done to end this misery?

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As a cultural movement Islam rejects the old static view of the universe, and reaches a dynamic view. As an emotional system of unification it recognizes the worth of the individual as such, and rejects blood-relationship as a basis of human unity. Blood relationship is earth-rooted ness. The search for a purely psychological foundation of human unity becomes possible only with the perception that all human life is spiritual in its origin. Such a perception is creative of fresh loyalties without any ceremonial to keep them alive, and makes it possible for man to emancipate himself from the earth. Christianity which had originally appeared as a monastic order was tried by Constantine as a system of unification. Its failure to work as such a system drove the Emperor Julian to return to the old gods of Rome on which he attempted to put philosophical interpretations. A modern historian of civilization has thus depicted the state of the civilized world about the time when Islam appeared on the stage of History: It seemed then that the great civilization that it had taken four thousand years to construct was on the verge of disintegration, and that mankind was likely to return to that condition of barbarism where every tribe and sect was against the next, and law and order were unknown . . . The old tribal sanctions had lost their power. Hence the old imperial methods would no longer operate. The new sanctions created by Christianity were working division and destruction instead of unity and order. It was a time fraught with tragedy. Civilization, like a gigantic tree whose foliage had overarched the world and whose branches had borne the golden fruits of art and science and literature, stood tottering, its trunk no longer alive with the flowing sap of devotion and reverence, but rotted to the core, riven by the storms of war, and held together only by the cords of ancient customs and laws, that might snap at any moment. Was there any emotional culture that could be brought in, to gather mankind once more into unity and to save civilization? This culture must be something of a new type, for the old sanctions and ceremonials were dead, and to build up others of the same kind would be the work of centuries.