Sense of Great Loss is Lost

Western Imperialists, when entered the Muslim world, made multiple inroads there. Their ideological, cultural and cerebral assaults were many times harder than their military incursions. After subjugating the Muslim countries, beating the brains of young Muslim generations was very first priority of their designs because they knew that getting a strong hold over a defeated community mostly depends on to what extent it is mentally overpowered. Along with their military power, they wanted to strongly impress their ideological and intellectual eminence on the minds of the Muslims. They came with their secular and alluring materialistic ideas, mainly enticing either for youth of the upper class of the society who wanted to win the favors of their new masters or those who lacked at least the basic religious knowledge and were heedless of moral and spiritual values and were easily ready to bow to the intellectual and ideological dominance of the Colonists.

Though in our traditionalist circle there were the people who firmly stood resisting but they were keeping hiding behind the thick curtains of the religious seminaries. It was nothing but only ensuring some amount of the religious practices and moral values preserved. But it was all without any deep understanding of the Western philosophies and ideologies, of which our new generations were going to be enamored.

In India, though in the poetic works of the Muslim intellectuals like Akbar Ilahabadi and Altaf Hussain Hali we find a strong remonstration and concern about how speedily the modern education and Western cultural traits were showing their influence and how largely the brains of the Muslim youths were coming under the spell of the Western civilization, but in spite of their sincerity and grief they had their eyes only on the consequences and not what actually the Western thoughts were.

It was long after when first of all the renowned philosopher and great poet Allama Muhammad Iqbal, breaking the influence of the western theories started critically reviewing them. And then from the beginning of the third decade of the 20th century to the end of the seventh decade a great number of the thinkers emerged from among the Muslim Ummah warping the texture of the Western ideas and thoughts.

The writers of the Islamic Movements were the pioneers in this field. Syed Abu al Ala Maududi and his noted team in the subcontinent and the intellectual force of Al-Ikhwanul Muslemon (Muslim Brotherhood) in Egypt and many other Arab countries successfully erected ideological barriers to block the Western intellectual foray. They came up with convincing and silencing answers to almost all the questions raised in the West about Islam and injected in young minds, wavering and doubtful about the teachings of Islam.

The West has clearly lost the charm of its thoughts and ideas which once used to be the main cause of inferiority complex of the Muslims in face of the Western ideological attack. Now, upper handedness of the Westerners is only due to their technology, economic resources and military power. Their technological superiority is no more a blessing for mankind. Its use is out of any moral limits, clashing with the traits of modesty, decency and purity. Technology is now a big tool of the industrialists for amassing more and more wealth by making man excessively habitual of hilarity and fun. Main purpose of the technological progress must have been improving the production with an effective use of the natural resources and helpful in minimizing hard manual labor. But what has happened in fact? Modern technology has adversely stood against Nature. It has caused sheer environmental crisis and has proven to be a damaging blow on natural resources which are running short day by day.

In these circumstances Muslim Ummah had to fill the ideological vacuum with fresh ideas. But unfortunately we have failed to come up with an alternate uncorrupted ideological order. Why? For last about 40 years a state of ideological impasse has occurred in the ranks of Islamic Movements. They are facing a deadlock in their thoughts. It is so long since there ascended no prominent thinkers and no remarkable literary work has been brought forth there. The culture of reading is rapidly diminishing. Most of the resources and efforts are getting exhausted in political activities. Missing of a wholesome literary feedback is resulting in moral and spiritual downfall. Triviality of the thoughts of the activists of the Islamic elements is evident from their hollow expressions on social websites, which have now replaced the profundity and deepness of the worthwhile and rich books of the great scholars. The tragedy felt much more is that sense of a great loss has been lost.

Karwan Ke Dil Se Ehsase Zian Jata Raha