Islam: Past, Present, and Future

By Rev. Bassam M. Madany

Back in October 2002, a group of journalists from a national newspaper were discussing
Islam and Islamic terrorism at their weekly television program. The participants
struggled hard to be fair and objective, especially in the light of the critical remarks that
had been made recently by two well-known Christian ministers. As I watched, I could not
help noticing why those journalists were having a very hard time dealing with the subject.
Their difficulty arose from the fact that their discussion exhibited a lack of a basic
knowledge of Islam, its history, and its worldview. There is nothing more urgent these
days than acquiring an objective understanding of this world religion.

Here is a brief overview of Islam: Past, Present, and Future

At the outset, I register my indebtedness to two scholars of the Middle East, both of
Princeton University. Philip Hitti, a Lebanese-American, has the distinction of starting
the Near Eastern Studies Department at Princeton about 75 years ago. One of his books,
Islam: A Way of Life has three parts: Islam the Religion, Islam the State, and Islam
the Culture. (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1970) Professor Hitti approached our subject
objectively taking into account that Islam began as a monotheistic faith, and developed
into a world empire that lasted until 1918. The second scholar is the British Bernard
Lewis who taught at Princeton University, after teaching for several decades at his alma
mater, the University of London, England. Professor Lewis, who is now in his nineties,
is a prolific writer and a frequent speaker on radio and television, especially since the
events of September 11, 2001. I quote from his book, Race and Slavery in the Middle
East: An Historical Enquiry, (New York: OUP, 1990) where he explained the several
meanings of the word ‘Islam.’

“There is a distinction that it is important to make in any discussion of Islam. The

word ‘Islam’ is used with at least three different meanings, and much
misunderstanding can arise from the failure to distinguish between them. In the first
place, Islam means the religion taught by the Prophet Muhammad and embodied in
the Muslim revelation known as the Qur'an. In the second place, Islam is the
subsequent development of this religion through tradition and through the work of the
great Muslim jurists and theologians. In this sense, it includes the mighty structure of
the Shari’a, the holy law of Islam, and the great corpus of Islamic dogmatic theology.
In the third meaning, Islam is the counterpart not of Christianity but rather of
Christendom. In this sense Islam means not what Muslims believed or were expected to
believe but what they actually did, in other words, Islamic civilization as known to us
in history.” P. 20

I will now elucidate and illustrate the words of the two Princeton scholars. As a theistic
faith, Islam is intimately connected with the life of Muhammad, its founder. Born in
Mecca, western Arabia, in 570 A.D., he worked early in his adult life, as a merchant for a
wealthy widow Khadija, whom he married when he was 25. His travels took him to
Palestine and Syria, where he became aware of the various Christian groups that lived
there. When he was forty, Muhammad had an experience in a cave outside Mecca. He
believed that the one true God, Allah, spoke to him through the angel Gabriel. These
revelations that ‘descended’ on him proclaimed the basic principles of Islam, an Arabic
word that means, “surrender to Allah.” Muhammad preached that Allah called him to be
his final Messenger, first of all to the Arabs, and also to all mankind.

The leaders of Mecca did not welcome Muhammad’s teachings. A few believed his
message. His wife and his cousin Ali were among his first converts. Persecution arose as
the young prophet was threatening the status quo. He was forced to leave for a northern
city, which came to be known as Medina. The year was 622 A.D. It became Year One in
the Muslim lunar calendar, known as A.H., an abbreviation for Anno Hejira, the Latinized
form of the Arabic, al-Hijra, i.e., the migration to Medina.

Within a few years after his arrival in Medina, Muhammad had become the ruler of this
city-state, and from this base, he challenged his Meccan foes by raiding their caravans.
By 630, most of the Arabian Peninsula acknowledged his primacy, accepting him both as
Prophet and Statesman. He entered Mecca triumphantly, destroyed the many idols around
the Ka’aba, the Black Stone that was to become the focus for the yearly Islamic
pilgrimage to the Holy City.

Muhammad returned to Medina, the capital of the new Islamic State, having convinced
the Arab tribes that they were no longer to engage in raiding one another. They have all
become, as Muslims, members of one Umma, one family of Believers. In June, 632,
Muhammad died after a brief of illness. The leadership among the Muslims in Medina
faced a tremendous challenge: who was to rule and guide the Muslims, now that the
inspired Messenger of Allah was no longer with them? Soon they inaugurated a new
institution, the Caliphate, and the person that was to lead it, would be known as the
Caliph, a Western equivalent of the Arabic, Khalifa, i.e., the Successor. The Caliph or
Successor, it must be noted, was not of Muhammad as Prophet, but only as leader of the
new Umma of Islam.

The first four caliphs that ruled Islam are called, in Islamic historiography, the “Rightly
Guided Caliphs.” This designation implies, for Muslims, that the years that stretched
from 632 to 661 constituted the Golden Age of Islam. The conquests of the world began
almost immediately after the death of Muhammad. The Arab armies burst out of Arabia
and conquered the Persian Empire, as well as two important provinces of the Byzantine
Empire, Syria (including Palestine) and Egypt.

The three decades of the “Rightly Guided Caliphs” were not that golden. The first caliph
died in 634. The two that followed him, were assassinated, one after ten years of rule, and
the other within twelve years after his accession to the caliphate. The fourth one, Ali, did
not receive the blessing of the entire Muslim leadership in Medina. His rule lasted only
five years. The Khawarej, a fanatical Islamic group, assassinated him in 661. They
became the prototype of the radical Islamic movements throughout history. The religious
unity of Islam ended. The followers of Ali, known in Arabic as “Shi’at ‘Ali” came to be

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known simply as the Shi’ites. They constituted the opposition party within Islam. The
majority of the Muslims, who sided with Mu’awiya, the opponent of Ali, became known
as Sunnis. Their leader came from a wealthy Meccan clan, known as the Umayyads. He
moved the capital of the growing Islamic empire from Medina to Damascus, Syria

The Umayyads continued the Islamic conquests. By 710, their armies had crossed the
narrow strait that separates North Africa from Europe, and began a Muslim presence in
Spain that lasted until 1492! At one time, the Muslim armies crossed the Pyrenees, and
invaded France, until Charles Martel stopped them in 732 at the Battle of Tours, near
Poitiers, in southern France.

At this point, I must address the status of the conquered people within the growing
Islamic Empire. The people of Persia were mostly Zoroastrian. Before too long, most of
them converted to the faith of their conquerors. By the 16th century, Persia adopted the
Shi’ite version of Islam, and continues to this day to be the only state, within the vast
Islamic world, that adheres to this branch of the Muslim faith. As for Christians and Jews
who formed the majority of the people of Syria and Egypt, they were allowed to remain
in their old faiths. However, they were subjected to some stringent laws as to the
expression of their respective religions. After centuries of ‘Dhimmitude,’ the so-called
‘protection’ granted to them by the Islamic state, both Christians and Jews became
minorities in their original homelands.

The Umayyad Dynasty came to an abrupt end in 750. Every member of the ruling family,
except a teenager, was massacred. The new dynasty that came to power is known as the
Abbasid Caliphate. The capital was moved from Damascus, Syria, to Baghdad, in
Mesopotamia. The founding father of the Abbasids is known in Arabic as “As-Saffah,”
the Butcher! Unlike the Umayyads, the Abbasids presided not so much over a growing
empire, but encouraged the flowering of a great culture in Baghdad. The House of
Wisdom, a cultural center, was initiated where scholars undertook the translation of great
works from Greek, Aramaic and Indian; many of them were Christian. This is the Golden
Age of Islam. Great advances were made in the sciences, such as in mathematics,
chemistry, astronomy, and medicine. There was a relatively free atmosphere for
philosophical and theological discussions. It was in this period of their history, that
Muslims developed the Four Orthodox Schools for the interpretation of their Sacred Law,
the Shari’a. Most of the theological discussions centered on the doctrine of the Word of
Allah, the Qur’an, Anthropomorphism, and the subject of Predestination and human
responsibility.

The greatness of the Abbasids was not to last. Within a little over a century after the
founding of their caliphate, the distant parts of the Empire began to secede. The teenager
Umayyad prince who escaped the bloodbath of 750, managed to get as far as Andalusia,
the Arabic name of Spain. There, he founded a rival center of Islam centered in the great
city of Cordoba. Its great mosque, which is now a Roman Catholic cathedral, could
accommodate 12,000 Muslim worshippers!

A cataclysmic event occurred in the middle of the 13th century, when the Mongolians

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invaded the eastern parts of the Caliphate and destroyed Baghdad. The Abbasids lost their
leadership role in Islam 500 years after they had wrested it from the Umayyads. The
Islamic world was bereft of the symbol of its unity. However, and before too long, new
converts to Islam came to the rescue. Various Turkish tribes that had come from central
Asia took over the leadership of the Muslim world. The Ottoman Turks enlarged the
territory of Islam beyond those areas conquered previously by the Arabs. In 1453, they
brought to an end the last vestige of the Byzantine Empire, when they conquered
Constantinople, and changed its name to Istanbul. The Ottomans soon claimed the title of
Caliphs, and pushed the boundaries of Islam into Eastern and Central Europe. In 1529,
twelve years after the beginning of Reformation in Germany, the Ottomans laid siege to
Vienna. At one time, such countries as Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia,
Albania, and Greece, were incorporated within the Ottoman Empire. The failure of the
second siege of Vienna in the 1680s marks the beginning of the decline and fall of the
Ottoman Islamic Caliphate.

During the 19th century, when the various European powers were expanding their
empires in Africa and Asia, the Ottomans were regarded as the “Sick man of Europe.”
Having cast their lot with Germany in World War I, the Ottomans sealed their defeat, and
the end of their centuries-old caliphate. Great Britain and France inherited many of the
territories of the defunct Turkish Empire, and ruled most of the Middle East between the
two World Wars.

Islam in our times

The average Westerner on both sides of the Atlantic, is bewildered by the accounts of the
happenings in various parts of the Muslim world. Why is there so much strife and
turmoil? Bernard Lewis deals with this subject in his latest book, “What Went Wrong?”
(New York: OUP, 2002) This is indeed a nagging question that haunts Muslims from
Indonesia to Morocco. To put it simply, the first 1000 years in the history of Islam, their
world was a center of power, culture, and enlightenment. Muslims believed that Allah
was on their side for a millennium. Why is He no longer with them today?

Having achieved their independence in the middle of the 20th century, several Muslim
countries espoused socialism as the way to catch up with the rest of the world. Socialism
proved to be a miserable solution. Add to that, Muslims could not understand why an
alien state was born in their midst; I refer to the creation of Israel in 1948. How did a few
immigrants from Europe, resist and then overcome five Arab armies in the summer of
1948? And then, after a couple of decades, came the unbelievable Arab defeat of the Six
Day War, in June 1967. Was not that terrible event a sign that God had forsaken them,
because they had first forsaken his ways by flirting with various secular ideologies?
Some Middle Eastern experts regard 1967 as the date for the resurgence of radical Islam.

The preoccupation with the Palestinian problem and the militarization of many Islamic
states during the second half of the 20th century kept Muslims from facing realistically
their real problems, such as the challenges of modernity. While the nations of the Pacific
Rim joined the ranks of the First World Club, most Islamic states stagnated. Their

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desperate societies became prey to such radical movements such as the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Hizbullah, Hamas, and
Islamic Jihad in Lebanon and Palestine, and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Two important subjects describe the plight of the Muslim nations today. One comes under
the rubric of Geography, and the other under Demography. With the exception of
Indonesia, Malaysia, and Bangladesh, the rest of the Muslim world, from Pakistan to
Morocco, lacks proper water resources. While Turkey, Syria, and Iraq share the waters of
the Tigris and the Euphrates, yet the growing demand for more irrigation points to some
serious problems in the near future. The same situation exists for the many countries that
share the Nile River. The lands west of Egypt are bereft of much needed water.

The second topic that receives scant attention by Muslim nations comes under the rubric
of Demography. According to the Population Reference Bureau of Washington, D.C.,
most of the populations in the Muslim world double ever twenty year! Such statistics are
very hard to grasp.

Islamic nations face problems of gigantic proportions. Besides the issues of geography
and demography, the Muslim world suffers from the hegemony of authoritarian and
oppressive regimes. The only exception is Turkey. The situation at the present is very
grim, what about the future?

The only way to avoid a “Clash of Civilizations” that would pit Islam against the Rest,
as forecast by late Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard University, is to appeal to
political Muslim leaders and intellectuals to jettison the exclusivist political baggage of
their tradition. Muslims must realize that the age of empire building is over and that the
Islamic past cannot be resurrected. Equally, we must remind them of the disastrous
consequences of allowing the radicals to terrorize the rest of the world. Nothing but
certain death would result from the theories and practices of such movements as the
Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria, Hizbullah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad in the
Middle East, and the Al-Qaeda cells of Osama bin Laden. The carnage they inflicted on
New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, in September 2001 will not be forgotten.
Neither what Islamist terrorists did in Spain, Britain, Bali, and lately in Mumbai, India.

That Muslims believe in their specific type of heaven and hell is part and parcel of their
religious faith. However, it must be pointed out that this component of their religion is
being used by radical Islamists to bring about death and destruction to people of other
cultures and religions. It becomes the urgent duty of moderate Muslims to speak out
against the politicizing and radicalizing of Islamic eschatology, i.e., the End Times.
Otherwise, the forecast for the future of mankind will be very grim, as nothing would
stand in the way of utopian Islamists such as Muhammad Atta, the mastermind of
9/11/01, who believed that as soon as he met death, he would be greeted by a number of
houris (celestial virgins) who would provide him with endless sexual pleasures!