English Translation

In the Name of God, the merciful and beneficent.

When I first encountered brother Wahiduddin Khan, over twenty years ago, I heard something from him which I had not heard from anyone else. He said, as I recall: responsibility for the crisis with which young Muslims now live falls upon the shoulders of the intellectuals and the scholars. I thanked him profusely for this incisive observation. Some seven years ago, I was invited to participate in a Belgian conference concerning the role of religious scholars in peace-building and democracy. I noted there crisis emerges through ideas before it arises in material reality. The calamity originates with the thinker before it can be made manifest by the politician. The world is now in crisis because scholars are in crisis. This includes all the world’s calamities: the climate crisis, the food crisis, the economic crisis, the disputes and the wars. All of these calamities have but one origin, and that is the crisis of ideas. The Messiah says in the Gospels: ‘If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!’ [Matthew 6:23].

Indeed, thinkers and scholars are the source of this crisis, equally so through the books they have written, the sermons they have given, the ideas they have publicised – and through the [matters] on which they have remained silent. So I must apologise if I offend in saying that it is a grave act of fraud and counterfeit for Muslim scholars to gather in the midst of this ongoing calamity and count themselves as saviours. It would be better for the scholars to attend [in the capacity of] those accused of a crime – for them to attend in order to repent, to undertake a radical reappraisal, to practice self-criticism, and to reconsider [their positions].

Herbert George Wells [d. 1946] remarked that as far as those personages who assembled to found the United Nations some hundred years ago were concerned, the history of humanity was no more than closed boxes of books. They had no understanding of the history of humanity and [so] it was not possible to found an institution capable of serving humanity and of curing its problems. He who is ignorant of history cannot make proper use of his reason. It suffices to regard the reality in which the Islamic world is living to recognise that we are absentees from the world [stage] and have not learned the fundamentals of human understanding. I confess to my own guilt, my own negligence, and my own responsibility [in this], and I have often repeated that I am a failed teacher. I say that if we want anything beneficial to emerge from any meeting with the [religious] scholars, then we are obliged first of all to confess to our responsibility and to our negligence, and to the fact that we have all but stood in the way of finding a solution. It is exceedingly rare to hear a single sentence from the [jurisprudential] scholars of our time which merits any admiration. They are incapable of exercising a positive influence upon their own students, let alone upon the governments [of the world].

Too long have scholars and jurists forbidden things like riding in a car on the way to the ḥajj [pilgrimage], or the use of telephones. There remain some of them who forbid women from driving, and who deny even the fundamentals of modern science. All of this reveals how far removed they are from reality. It sometimes also reveals the state of complicity of such scholars and jurists, which leads them to remain silent [concerning] corruption and oppression. They accept the privileges which are presented to them, and when they are summoned by politicians they offer [only] what [those politicians] want to hear – and not what is [truly] incumbent upon them. The jurists legitimise the overthrow of democracy and the will of the people in one place while also claiming to support legitimate governance in another land! It is this complicity which the French thinker Pierre Bourdieu has deemed to be the foundational factor underlying the situations we are in.

Today we draw from the same sources of understanding. All of the texts of Islamic jurisprudence were written after the Muslims had lost their senses and acclimatised themselves to the rule of tyrants – up to the present day. I make no distinction in this between Sunnis and Shiites and Kharijites. It is my contention that those who study Islamic law and its sciences while confining themselves to what has [already] been written concerning jurisprudence simply cannot emerge from the darkness – and cannot lead others out of it either. Those sources are among the causes of the state we are in, and they cannot rescue us from it.

Here we Arabs are, and before our eyes the Europeans unite and abolish the death sentence. They who are twenty-eight nations with twenty-four languages and [comprise] multifarious peoples. The Arab countries meanwhile speak in a single language with a single Quranic scripture – yet none can speak of unity. Whoever does so is regarded as either a traitor or insane. This is because each leader demands that he alone is leader of the Arabs, and that there must not be any [equal] partner to him. In truth, peace and nonviolence is the greatest form of jihād. Yet it is not the path of cowards, towards meekness and remaining silent and capitulating to the tyrant. On the contrary, it is the path of bearing witness to the truth and of defiant disobedience: ‘No! Do not obey him. But prostrate and draw near [to God]’ [Quran 96:19]. The path is that to creating democracy through reason and consultation – [one] which we lost in our early history. It is the path of the prophets who said: ‘and we will surely be patient against whatever harm you should cause us’ [Quran 14:12] until they persuaded humanity to the divine law of justice and beneficence.

In spite of my being pleased by your generous gesture, the reality confirms that I do not deserve it and am unable to accept it. I do apologise for relinquishing the prize, as well as for my not attending in person. I thank you for your trust, and I hope that God will bring forth from our loins a generation who will serve this religion and elevate that which God has sent through His Prophet.

Peace and the blessing and mercy of God be upon you.

Jawdat Saʿīd Muḥammad

Istanbul, 22 April 2015