Islamic Institutions Have Failed The Ummah

Islamic Institutions Have Failed The Ummah

M. Bakri Musa

Fifth of Six Parts

Religion imprisons the Malay mind. Islam in Malaysia is what those government-issued ulamas say it is. Express a different viewpoint and you risk being labelled a deviant, a murtad, and suffer the consequences.

If that is not enough of a burden, Islamic institutions in Malaysia, as in much of the Muslim world, have also failed the ummah. In part this is because they are run by Islamic Studies graduates. Their narrow training, heavy on revealed knowledge and prophetic traditions but woefully deficient in such relevant subjects as economics, management and statistics, ill prepare them for such heavy responsibilities.

This glaring deficit is obvious to all but Islamic educators.

I am fortunate to live in the West. Through the freedom afforded me, I am free to explore the vast universe of Islamic thoughts, ancient and modern, East and West, Sunni and Shiite. That enriches my understanding of this great religion and simultaneously deepens my faith. In striking contrast, in Malaysia at the International Islamic University for example, literature on Shiitism is under lock and key. If you were to even inquire, you would be reported to the Vice Chancellor and put under extra surveillance!

Islam elevated the ancient Bedouins out of its Age of Jahiliyyah (Ignorance), making them abandon their culture of female infanticide and “an eye for an eye” sense of justice. Islam as practiced and propagated in Malaysia however, is anything but that. It is but a crude instrument of a repressive government intent on imprisoning Malay minds.

Like the clergy class that gripped the Irish during the first half of the last century, the religious bureaucrats control Malay minds through their tight leash on the social, economic, educational, and other institutions. Non-Muslim Malaysians are spared this curse and stranglehold.

Malays flock to Islamic institutions; the Islamic cachet sells. Thus when these institutions fail, the consequences are enormous.

Islamic educational institutions treat the young (and old) as dustbins to be filled with dogmas instead of a knife to be sharpened. With the former, you get only what you put in, at best, and after what is lost through attrition. With the latter, there are no limits to the potential returns on your investment.

Islamic schools and colleges are intent on indoctrinating instead of educating. With Malays flocking to such institutions like maggots to rotten carcasses, no surprise that we are overrepresented in the unemployable category.

Instead of remedying the deficits of Islamic schools and colleges, Malaysia vastly expanded its Islamic establishment to cater to these graduates, turning it into nothing more than a bloated and expensive public works project. Contrast that to America where Catholic schools and colleges with their broad-based liberal education produce more than their share of the nation’s scientists, engineers and managers. The quality of those religious schools is such that they attract many non-Catholics, Muslims included.

Contemporary Muslim educators belittle “secular” knowledge, deeming it inferior to the “religious” variety. Modern liberal Western education, they sniff, is consumed with turning its products into cobs for the capitalist machinery. These Islamic educators forget that those “cobs” contribute to the greater good and the smooth running of society.

A prophetic tradition has it that a prostitute was let into Heaven because she once saved a dog dying of thirst by bringing it water. If that were so, imagine the rewards for a veterinarian! Yet these ulamas condemn Muslim veterinary students for hugging dogs.

A Muslim engineer best demonstrates his iman (faith) not by building bridges adorned with Koranic verses but by making those structures withstand floods and heavy traffic. You achieve that through understanding the properties of materials and doing your mathematics right, not by how well you recite the holy book. Likewise, a Muslim accountant would ensure that zakat funds and the savings of would-be pilgrims are invested prudently and not diverted to corrupt leaders.

This obsession with differentiating secular versus religious knowledge is a recent phenomenon, likewise the current fixation with the “Islamization” of knowledge, an equally futile exercise. Ibn Rashid and Ibn Sina discerned no such distinction; they felt no need for such “Islamization.” Those ancient Muslim scholars saw no problem in learning from and absorbing ideas from the atheistic Greeks.

On the social front, the Islamic establishment is intent on turning the ummah into a flock of sheep and they, the only approved shepherd. Their operating principle is taqlid, obedience. No surprise that our young are good at memorizing and regurgitating while utterly incapable of critical thinking or original thought.

These present-day ulamas and scholars forget that tajdid, reform or renewal, is also very much part of Islamic tradition. Tajdid gave us such luminaries as Imam Ghazali and Ibn Khaldun.

Progress depends on the ummah questioning or at least not being satisfied with the status quo, the very antithesis of taqlid which demands that one accepts if not reveres the existing order.

Another prophetic tradition predicted that the ummah would be divided into 73 sects, but the followers of only one would enter heaven, meaning, being right. The consequence of this teaching is that every Muslim believes that his sect is the only true and correct Islam, all others being ‘misled.’

If your sect has only 1 in 73 (slightly over 1 percent) chance of being right, that also means that it has a 72 out of 73 (nearly 99 percent) of being false. If we teach our young some statistics, they would learn that a 1 percent probability of being right means a near certainty of being wrong. Similarly, if the forecast says that there is a 99 percent chance of a storm, you would be stupid (or have a death wish) to venture out to sea.

Far more consequential, the first interpretation leads you to become intolerant of other viewpoints, deeming them as bida’a, adulteration of the faith; the second makes you humble and eager to learn from the other sects. The first sows discord; the second encourages learning and fosters greater understanding among the ummah.

On the economic front, Malaysia, like other Muslim countries, fails to innovate and leverage such Islamic financial instruments as waqaf (trusts), zakat (tithe), and takaful (insurance). Properly utilized these are powerful tools for the preservation, formation, and protection of capital, respectively. And capital is the lifeblood of economic development.

Consider waqaf. Large swaths of land in Klang Valley were once under waqaf. However, unlike similar trust lands in Hawaii which are imaginatively and productively managed to benefit the natives, waqaf lands in Malaysia have been exploited for the enrichment of the privileged few.

As Timur Kuran writes in his The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back The Middle East, it is this failure to innovate that retards economic development in the Middle East. The West on the other hand enhances those elements of waqaf and tawakal into the modern concept of a corporation (or limited liability company) and insurance. And with that capitalism, and the West, blossomed.

It is hard to encourage innovation among your ummah when your operating premise is taqlid, obedience to and reverence for the existing order.

Then consider the irony of the average Muslim’s attitude to wealth. Unlike other major religions, Islam does not glorify the poor. Its has no comparable “the poor shall inherit the earth” mindset. Instead Islam celebrates wealth and its acquisition. Zakat is one of the five pillars of Islam. To give zakat, mandatory for Muslims, one must first acquire wealth. That is why, unlike other religions, begging and being dependent on charity is frowned upon in Islam.

Tradition has it that a man once came begging at the mosque where the prophet was preaching. The prophet counselled the congregation not to give the man any money but instead to lend him an axe so he could go into the forest and cut some firewood to sell.

Donating money to the begging man robs him of his dignity; lending him an axe enables him to earn a living. With the former, he is dependent on society; the latter, a contributor. That does wonders to one’s self-worth. That is the essence of Islam.

An aside with current relevance, Prime Minister Najib received billions in “donations” from the Arabs. See what it does to his dignity!

Billions are collected through zakat annually but there is a glaring lack of transparency on how the funds are managed. Little goes to the poor; instead they are diverted to buying golf simulators for our “modern” Islamic bureaucrats. Consequently, the Muslim poor have to depend on the benevolence of the churches, and then risked being accused of being murtad.

Malaysia of today reminds me of Latin America of the 1960s where the churches and cathedrals were grandiose but the flock mired in abject poverty. A few blocks from the opulent crystal mosque in Kuala Trengganu are slums and dire poverty that assault one’s sensibilities. Nobody thought of using zakat to alleviate the deplorable condition, like providing potable water and sewer system so the ummah would be much healthier and thus have a fighting chance to get out of poverty.

This obscenity epitomizes the sensibilities (or more correctly, the lack of one) as well as the priorities of the Malaysian religious establishment. Its priority remains to imprison the minds of their flock.

Speech delivered at the launching by Tan Sri Rafidah Aziz of my book, Liberating The Malay Mind, on January 30, 2016, at Shah Alam.