Islam and the New Millennium

Abdal Hakim Murad

This essay is based on a lecture given at the Belfast Central Mosque in March 1997
Whoever is not thankful for graces
runs the risk of losing them;
and whoever is thankful,
fetters them with their own cords.
(Ibn Ata'illah, Kitab al-Hikam)
'Islam and the New Millennium' - rather a grandiose subject for an essay, and one which, for
Muslims, requires at least two caveats before we can even begin.
Firstly, the New Millennium - the Year 2000 - is not our millennium. Regrettably, most Muslim
countries nowadays use the Christian calendar devised by Pope Gregory the Great, and not a few
are planning celebrations of some kind. Many confused and secularised people in Muslim countries
are already expressing a good deal of excitement: in Turkey, there is even a weekly magazine called
Iki Bin'e Dogru (Straight to 2000). This semi-hysteria should be of little interest to us: as Muslims
we have our own calendar. The year 2000 will in fact begin during the year 1420 of the Hijra. So
why notice the occasion at all? Isn't this just another example of annoying and irrelevant Western
influence?
This point becomes still sharper when we remember that according to most modern scholars, Jesus
(a.s.) was in fact born in the year 4 B.C. Thus 1996, not 2000, marked the second millennium of his
advent. The celebrations in two years time will in fact mark an entirely meaningless date: a
postmodern festival indeed.
The second, more imponderable reservation, concerns our ability to speak reliably about the future
at all. In this paper I propose to speculate about the directions which Islam may take following the
great and much-hyped anniversary. But the theological question is a sharp one: can we do this in a
halal way? The future is in the ghayb, the Unseen; it is known only to Allah. And it may well be
that the human race will not reach the year 2000 at all. Allah is quite capable of winding the whole
show up before then. The hadith of Jibril describes how the angel came to the Prophet (Allah bless
him and give him peace) asking when the Day of Judgement would come, and he only replied, 'The
one questioned knows no more of it than the questioner.' But as the Holy Qur'an puts it, 'the very
heavens are bursting with it.' It may well be tomorrow.
Apocalyptic expectations are not new in Islamic history: they appeared, for instance, in connection
with the Islamic millennium. Imam al-Suyuti, the greatest scholar of medieval Egypt, was
concerned about the nervous expectations many Muslims had about the year 1000 of the hijra.
Would it herald the end of the world, as many thought?
Imam al-Suyuti allayed these fears by examining all the hadith he could find about the lifetime of
this Umma. He wrote a short book which he called al-Kashf an mujawazat hadhihi al-umma al-Alf
('Proof that this Umma will survive the millenium'). He concluded that there was no evidence that
the first millenium of Islam would end human history. But rather soberingly for our generation, he
speculates that the hadiths at his disposal indicate that the signs which will usher in the return of Isa
(a.s.), and the Antichrist (al-Masih al-Dajjal), are most likely to appear in the fifteenth Islamic
century; in other words, our own.
But all these speculations were submissive to the Imam's deep Islamic awareness that knowledge of

the future is with Allah; and only Prophets can prophesy.

What I shall be doing in the pages that follow, then, is not forecast, but extrapolate. Allah ta'ala is
capable of changing the course of history utterly, through some natural disaster, or a series of
disastrous wars. He can even end history for good. If that happens in the next three years, then my
forecasts will be worthless. All I am doing is, in a sense, to talk about the present, inasmuch as
present trends, uninterrupted by catastrophe, seem set to continue in the coming few years and
decades.
Why is it useful to reflect on these trends? Because I think we all recognise that the Muslims have
responded badly and largely unsuccessfully to the challenges of the twentieth century; in fact, of the
last three centuries. Faced with the triumph of the West, we have not been able to work out which
changes are inevitable, and which can be resisted.
For instance, in the early nineteenth century the Ottoman empire lost a series of disastrous wars
against Russia. The main reason was the superior discipline and equipment maintained by modern
European armies. But the ulema, and the janissary troops, resisted any change. They believed that
battles were won by faith, and that firearms and parade grounds diminished the virtue of futuwwa,
the chivalric, almost Samurai-like code of the individual Muslim warrior. To shoot at an enemy
from a distance rather than look him in the eye and fight with a sword was seen as a form of
cowardice. Hence the Ottoman army continued to sustain defeat after defeat at the hands of its
better-equipped Christian enemies.
Another case in point was the controversy over printing. Until the eighteenth century a majority of
ulema believed that printing was haram. A text, particularly one dealing with religion, was
something numinous and holy, to be created slowly and lovingly through the traditional calligraphic
and bookbinding crafts. A ready availability of identical books, the scholars thought, would cheapen
Islamic learning, and also make students lazy about committing ideas and texts to memory. Further,
it was thought that the process of stamping and pressing pages was disrespectful to texts which
might contain the name of the Source of all being.
It took a Hungarian convert to Islam, Ibrahim Muteferrika, to change all this. Muteferrika obtained
the Ottoman Caliph's permission to print secular and scientific books, and in 1720 he opened
Islam's first printing press in Istanbul. Muteferrika was a sincere convert, describing his background
and religious beliefs in a book which he called Risale-yi Islamiyye. He was also very concerned
with the technical and administrative backwardness of the Ottoman empire. Hence he wrote a book
entitled Usul al-Hikam fi Nizam al-Umam, and published it himself in 1731. In this book he
describes the governments and military systems prevailing in Europe, and told the Ottoman elite
that independent Muslim states could only survive if they borrowed not only military technology,
but also selectively from European styles of administration and scientific knowledge.
Ibrahim Muteferrika's warnings about the rise of European civilisation were slowly heeded, and the
Ottoman state set about the controversial business of modernizing itself, while attempting to
preserve what was essential to its Islamic identity.
Muteferrika's story reminds us that unless Muslims are conscious of the global trends of their age,
they will continue to be losers. My own experience of Muslims has suggested that we are endlessly
fascinated by short-term political issues, but are largely ignorant of the larger tendencies of which
these issues are simply the passing manifestations.
This ignorance can sometimes be astonishing. How many leaders in the Islamic world are really
familiar with the ideas which underpin modernity? I have met some leaders of activist factions, and
have been consistently shocked by their lack of knowledge. How many can even name the principal
intellectual systems of our time? Structuralism, post-modernism, realism, analytic philosophy,
critical theory, and all the rest are closed books to them. Instead they burble on about the
'International Zionist Masonic Conspiracy', or 'Baha'ism', or the 'New Crusader Invasion', or similar
phantasms. If we want to understand why so many Islamic movements fail, we should perhaps

begin by acknowledging that their leaders simply do not have the intellectual grasp of the modern
world which is the precondition for successfully overcoming the obstacles to Islamic governance. A
Muslim activist who does not understand the ideologies of modernism can hardly hope to overcome
them.
A no less lamentable ignorance prevails when it comes to non-ideological trends in the late
twentieth century, and which are likely to prevail in the new millennium. And hence I make no
apologies for discussing them in this paper. Like Ibrahim Mutefarrika three centuries ago, I am
concerned to alert Muslims to the realities which are taking shape around them, and which are
moulding a world in which their traditional discourse will have no application whatsoever. It is
suicidal to assume that we will be insulated from these realities. Increasingly, we live in one world,
thanks to a monoculturising process which is accelerating all the time. There is a mosque in Belfast
now, and there is also a branch of MacDonalds in Mecca. We may be confident in our faith and
assumptions, but what of many of our young people? What happens to the young Muslim student at
an American university? He learns about post-modernism and post-structuralism, and that these are
the ideologies of profound influence in the modern West. He asks the Islamic activist leaders how to
disprove them, and of course they cannot. So he grows confused, and his confidence in Islam as a
timeless truth is shaken. Under such conditions, only the less intelligent will remain Muslim: a
filtering process which is already painfully evident in some activist circles.
It is, therefore, an obligation, a farida, to understand the processes which are under way around us.
To summarise the leading trends of our age is beyond the ambitions of this short paper. I will focus,
therefore, on just a few representative issues, not because I can deal with them fully, but simply to
suggest the nature of the challenges for which the Umma should prepare over the next few decades.
These three issues are: demography, religious change, and the environment.
Let me deal with the demographic issue first, because in a sense it is the most inexorable.
Population trends are easily extrapolated, and the statistics are abundant for the past hundred years
at least. Projections are reliable unless catastrophe supervenes: epidemics, for instance, or
destructive wars. I will assume that neither of these things will assume sufficient proportions to
affect the general picture.
Here are some figures taken from D. Barrett's World Christian Encyclopedia, published by Oxford
University Press in 1982. I will set them out in text rather than tabular form, in case the format does
not survive Web downloading.
In 1900, 26.9% of the world's population was Western Christian, while Islam accounted for 12.4%.
In 1980 the figures were 30% and 16.5% respectively. The projection for 2000 is 29.9% and 19.2%.
Percentages for other religions are fairly static, and since 1970 the total of atheists has, surprisingly
perhaps, experienced a slow decline.
These figures are of considerable significance. Over the course of this century, the absolute
proportion of Muslims in the world has jumped by a quite staggering amount. This has come about
partly through conversion, but more significantly through natural increase. And the demographic
bulge in the modern Muslim world means that this growth will continue. Here, for instance, is the
forecast of Samuel Huntington in his new and resolutely Islamophobic book The Clash of
Civilizations (pp.65-6):
"The percentage of Christians in the world peaked at about 30 percent in the
1980s, leveled off, is now declining, and will probably approximate about 25% of
the world's population by 2025. As a result of their extremely high rates of
population growth, the proportion of Muslims in the world will continue to
increase dramatically, amounting to 20 percent of the world's population about the
turn of the century, surpassing the number of Christians some years later, and
probably accounting for about 30 percent of the world's population by 2025."

It is not hard to see why this is happening. America and Europe have increasingly aging
populations. In fact, one of the greatest social arguments of the new millennium will concern the
proper means of disposing of the elderly. Medical advances ensure an average lifetime in the high
seventies. However active lifetimes have not grown so fast. At the turn of the century, a Westerner
could expect to spend an average of the last two years of life as an invalid. Today, the figure is
seven years. As Ivan Illich has shown, medicine prolongs life, but does not prolong mobility nearly
as well. These ageing populations with their healthcare costs are an increasing socio-economic
burden. The UK Department of Health recently announced that a new prescription drug for
Alzheimer's Disease is available on the National Health Service - but its cost means that it is only
available to a selected minority of patients.
In the West's population is top-heavy, that of Islam is the opposite. Today, more than half the
population of Algeria, for example, is under the age of twenty, and the situation is comparable
elsewhere. These young populations will reproduce, and perpetuate the percentage increase of
Muslims well into the next millennium.
Hence, to take an example, in the Maghrib between 1965 and 1990, the population rose from 29.8
million to 59 million. During the same period, the number of Egyptians increased from 29.4 million
to 52.4 million. In Central Asia, between 1970 and 1993, populations grew at annual rates of 2.9
percent in Tajikistan, 2.6 percent in Uzbekistan, 2.5 percent in Turkmenistan, and 1.9 percent in
Kyrgyzia. In the 1970s, the demographic balance in the Soviet Union shifted drastically, with
Muslims increasing by 24 percent while Russians increased by only 6.5 percent. Almost certainly
this is one reason why the Russian empire collapsed: Moscow had to detach its Muslim areas before
their numbers encouraged them to dominate the system. Even in Russia itself, Muslims (Tatars,
Bashkirs, and Chuvash, as well as immigrants) are very visible, accounting for over 10 percent of
the populations of both Moscow and St Petersburg.
This reminds us that the increase in the Muslim heartlands will have a significant impact in Muslim
minority areas as well. In some countries, such as Tanzania and Macedonia, the Muslims will
become a majority within twenty years. Largely through immigration, the Muslim population of the
United States grew sixfold between 1972 and 1990. And even in countries where immigration has
been suppressed, the growth continues. Last year, seven percent of babies born in European Union
countries were Muslims. In Brussels, the figure was a staggering 57 percent. Islam is already the
second religion of almost every European state - the only exceptions being those European
countries such as Azerbaijan and Albania where it is the majority religion. If current trends
continue, then an overall ten percent of European nationals will be Muslim by the year 2020.
What is the significance of this global change? Does it in fact entail anything at all? After all, there
is a famous hadith narrated by Abu Daud on the authority of Thawban, which says that the day will
come when the Muslims will be numerous, but will be like froth and flotsam (ghutha') carried along
by a flash-flood.
It is true that sheer weight of numbers counts for much less today than it did, say, a couple of
hundred years ago, when military victories depended as much on numbers as on technology.
Napoleon could say that 'God is on the side of the larger battalions' - but nowadays, when huge
numbers of soldiers can be eliminated by push-button weapons, this is no longer the case; a fact
demonstrated by Saddam Hussein's hopeless and absurd defiance during the recent conflict over
Gulf oil supplies.
The rapid increase in Muslim numbers does, however, have important entailments. But for this, the
UN would not have chosen Cairo, the world's largest Muslim city, as the site of its 1994 Population
Conference. There is still some safety in numbers. But more significant than mere numbers is the
psycho-dynamic of population profiles. Aging populations become introspective and flaccid. Young
populations are more likely to be energetic, and encourage national political assertiveness.
The new millennium will dawn over a Muslim world with disproportionately young populations.

Moreover, these populations will be increasingly urban. And such situations historically have
always bred instability, turmoil, and reform. One explanation for the Protestant reformation in
Europe is based on the preponderance of young people in urban sixteenth-century Germany, the
result of new agricultural and political arrangements. The growth of fascism in Central Europe in
the 1930s is also attributed in part to the growth in the number of young people. And in Islamic
history, one thinks of the example of the Jelali rebellions in the sixteenth and seventh century: once
the great Ottoman conquests had ceased, the young men who would have been occupied in the army
found themselves at a loose end, and launched a variety of sectarian or social protest movements
that devastated large areas of Anatolia.
The Islamic revival over the past few years has faithfully reflected this trend. One of the first
Muslim countries to reach a peak proportion of youth was Iran, in the late 1970s (around 22% of the
population), and the revolution occurred in 1979. In other countries the peak was reached rather
later: in Algeria this proportion was reached in 1989, just when the FIS was winning its greatest
support.
Following the millennium, this youth bulge will continue in many Muslim societies. The number of
people in their early twenties will increase in Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, and several other
countries. As compared to 1990, in the year 2010 entrants to the jobs market will increase by about
50% in most Arab lands. The unemployment problem, already acute, will become intolerable.
This rapid growth is likely to render some states difficult to govern. The bunker regimes in Cairo
and Algiers are already confronting rebellions which have clear demographic as well as moral and
religious dimensions. So the first probable image we have of the next millenium is: in the West,
aging and static populations, with stable, introspective political cultures; and in the Islamic world, a
population explosion, and established regimes everywhere under siege by radicals.
The next consideration has to be: will the bunker regimes survive? This is harder to comment upon,
although many political scientists with an interest in the Islamic world have tried. Before the
modern period, peasant revolts stood a good chance of success, because manpower could carry the
day against the ruler's army. Today, however, advances in technology have made it possible for
military regimes to survive indefinitely in the face of massive popular discontent. Spend enough
money, and you can defeat even the most ingenious infiltrator or the most populous revolt. This
technology is becoming cheaper, and is often supplied on a subsidised basis to the West's favoured
clients in the Third World. Similarly, techniques of interrogation and torture are becoming far more
refined, and have proved an effective weapon against underground movements in a variety of
places.
Let me give you an example. Last year's Amnesty International report explains that in January 1995,
the US government licenced the export to Saudi Arabia of a range of security equipment including
the so-called 'taser' guns. 'These guns shoot darts into a victim over a distance of up to five metres
before a 40-50,000 volt shock is administered. These weapons are prohibited in many countries,
including the UK.
Another example, also documented by Amnesty, is the export in 1990 of a complete torture
chamber by a UK company, which was installed in the police special branch headquarters in Dubai.
This is known in the Emirates as the 'House of Fun'. The Amnesty report describes it as 'a specially
constructed cell fitted with a terrifyingly loud sound system, a white-noise generator and
synchronized strobe lights designed to pulse at a frequency that would cause severe distress.'
These are just two examples of the increasing sophistication of torture equipment now being
supplied to the bunker regimes. One could add to this list the improving techniques of
telecommunications surveillance.
But what about the Internet? Isn't the Internet the ultimate freedom machine, allowing the pervasion
of all types of dissent, from anywhere in the world, to anywhere in the world?

At the moment the Internet is only available in a few Muslim countries. Already there are
indications that monitoring of the phone lines which carry the signals is in progress. The
centralizing nature of the Internet is in fact tailormade for intrusive regimes. A fairly straightforward
programme on a mainframe computer logged on to the telephone net can inform the security forces
instantaneously if a forbidden site is being accessed. Once that is established, investigation and
arrest are a matter of course.
I believe that as technology improves, including ever more massive surveillance systems, it seems
quite likely that the regimes will be able to suppress any amount of dissent, on one condition - that
it does not spread to the armed forces. The Shah fell because his army turned against him, not
because of the protests on the streets. But in Algeria the revolution has been suppressed, largely
because the radicals think they can overwhelm a modern state without support from the armed
forces.
The societies governed in this way are now experiencing severe traumas and cultural distortions.
They are sometimes called 'pressure-cooker cultures'. The consequences for the human soul of
being subjected to this kind of pressure are quite alarming, and already in the Muslim world we see
manifestations of extreme behaviour which only a decade ago would have been unthinkable.
This is not the context for providing full details of the problem of 'extremism', or what traditional
Islam would call ghuluww. But it is clearly a growing feature of our religious landscape, and I will
have to deal with it in passing. In early Islam the movement known as Kharijism fought against the
khalifa Ali for the sake of a utopian and purist vision of Muslim society. Today, tragically, the
Khawarij are with us once more. I have in mind incidents such as the 1994 shooting in Omdurman,
when Wahhabi activists opened fire on Friday worshippers in the Ansar al-Sunna mosque, killing
fourteen. Ironically, the mosque was itself Salafi, but followed a form of Wahhabism that the
activists did not consider sufficiently extreme.
In Algeria, too, throat-slittings and massacres of villagers, and fighting between rival groups, have
transformed large areas of the country into a smoking ruin.
We sometimes like to dismiss these movements as marginal irrelevancies. However, the signs are
that until the conditions which have bred them are removed, they will continue to grow. The
mainstream Islamic movements are seen to have failed to achieve power, and desperate young
people are turning to more radical alternatives. It is fairly clear that a growing polarisation of
Muslim society, and of the Muslim conscience, will be a hallmark of the coming century.
What is the defining symptom of Kharijism? In a word, takfir. That is, declaring other Muslims to
be beyond the pale, and hence worthy of death. This tendency was attacked vigorously by the ulema
of high classical Islam. For instance, Imam al-Ghazali, in his book Faysal al-Tafriqa bayn al-Islam
wa'l-Zandaqa explained that it is extremely difficult to declare anyone outside Islam for as long as
they say La ilaha illa'Llah, Muhammadun rasulu'Llah. And today, Sunni schoolchildren in many
countries still memorise creeds such as the Jawharat al-Tawhid of Imam al-Laqqani, which include
lines like:

idh ja'izun ghufranu ghayri'l-kufri

fa-la nukaffir mu'minan bi'l-wizri
since forgiving what is not unbelief is possible,
as we do not declare an unbeliever any believer on account of a sin.
wa-man yamut wa-lam yatub min dhanbihi

fa-amruhu mufawwadun li-rabbihi

Whoever dies and has not repented of his sin,
his matter is turned over to his Lord.
The legitimation of differences in fiqh was rooted in the understanding of ijtihad. And differences in
spiritualities were justified by the Sufis in terms of the idea that al-turuq ila'Llah bi'adadi anfas alkhala'iq ('there are as many paths to God as there are human breaths'). As Ibn al-Banna', the great
Sufi poet of Saragossa expressed it, ibaraatuna shatta wa-husnuka wahidun, wa-kullun ila dhak aljamali yushiru ('our expressions differ, but Your beauty is one, and all are pointing towards that
Beauty').
Diversity has always been a characteristic of Islamic cultures. It was only medieval Christian
cultures which strove to suppress it. However, there is a growing tendency nowadays among
Muslims to favour totalitarian forms of Islam. 'Everyone who disagrees with me is a sinner, cries
the young activist, 'and is going to hell'.
This mentality recalls the Kharijite takfir, but to understand why it is growing in the modern umma,
we have to understand not just the formal history, but the psychohistory of our situation. Religious
movements are the expression not just of doctrines and scriptures, but also of the hopes and fears of
human collectivities. In times of confidence, theologies tend to be broad and eirenic. But when the
community of believers feels itself threatened, exclusivism is the frequent result. And never has the
Umma felt more threatened than today.
Even in the UK, the takfir phenomenon is growing steadily. There are factions in our inner cities
which believe that they are the only ones going to Heaven. 99% of people who call themselves
Muslims are, in this distasteful insult to Allah's moral coherence, not Muslims at all.
We can understand this psychic state more easily when we recognise that it exists universally. Not
just in Islam, but in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism, there is a conspicuous tendency
towards factional excluvisism. In Christianity, one has to look no further than the Branch Davidians
of David Koresh, 89 of whom died when their ranch in Texas was stormed by US troops three years
ago. The Davidians believed that they were the sole true Christians - everyone else would burn in
Hell.
In Japan, even the usually peaceful religion of Buddhism has been re-formed by this tendency. In
early 1995, the Aum Shinrikyo sect released Sarin nerve gas onto the Tokyo underground system,
killing eleven people and sending 5,500 to hospital. Their guru, Shoko Asahara, had for ten years
been preaching the need to overthrow the corrupt order in Japan, and transform the country into the
true Shambala. As he said, 'Our sphere shall extend throughout the nation, and foster the
development of thousands of right-believing people.' In his book From Destruction to Emptiness he
explains that only those who believe in authentic, pristine Buddism as taught by Aum can expect to
survive the corruption and destruction of the world. Non-Aum Buddhists are not true Buddhists at
all.
On the basis of this kind of takfir, he and his 12,000 followers bought a factory complex on the
slopes of Mount Fuji, where they successfully manufactured nerve gas and the botulism virus. The
sinners of Japan's un-Buddhist culture would be the first to suffer, they thought, but they also laid
extensive plans for terrorist actions in North America. It is claimed that had the sect been allowed to
operate for another six months, tens of thousands of people might have died from the sect's attacks
in the United States, which was seen as the great non-Buddhist source of evil darkening the world.
It is important to note the close parallels between Aum Shinryo-kyo and the modern takfir groups in
the Middle East. The diagnosis is the same: the pure religion has been ignored or distorted by an
elite, and the process has been masterminded by Americans. Hence the need to retreat and disown

society - the idea of Takfir wa'l-Hijra that informed Shukri Mustafa's group in late 1970s Egypt. In
secretive inner circles, the saved elect gather to plan military-style actions against the system. They
are indifferent to the sufferings of civilians - for they are apostates and deserve death anyway. Such
attacks will prefigure, in some rather vague and optimistic fashion, the coming to power of the true
believers, and the suppression of all other interpretations of religion.
This idea of takfir wa'l-hijra is thus, in structural terms, a global phenomenon. Its members are
usually educated, almost always having science rather than arts backgrounds. Technology is not
disowned, but sedulously cultivated. Bomb-making becomes a disciplined form of worship.
I believe that this tendency, which has been fostered rather than eliminated by the repressiveness of
the regimes, will grow in relative significance as we traverse the end of the century. It will continue
to besmirch the name of Islam, by shooting tourists, or blowing up minor targets in pinprick attacks
that strengthen rather than weaken the regimes. It will divide the Islamic movement, perhaps fatally.
And it will provide the regimes with an excuse further to repress and marginalise religion in society.
The threat of neo-Khariji heresy is thus a real one. It will exist, however, against the backdrop of an
even more worrying transformation. It is time now to look at the last of our three themes: the
apparently disconnected subject of the degradation of the natural environment, one of the great
neglected Islamic issues of our time - arguably even the most important of all.
There are a whole cluster of questions here. Clearly, as we leave the second millennium, the planet
is in abjectly poor physical shape as compared to the year 1000. Materialism, enabled by
Reformation notions of the world as fallen, and by protestant capitalistic ethics, has presided over
the gang rape of Mother Earth. Everywhere the face of the planet is scarred. Megatons of tons of
toxic waste are now circulating in the oceans, or hovering in the stratosphere. Hormone and plastics
pollution has resulted in a 50% drop in male fertility in the UK. Every day, another 12 important
species become extinct. Every form of life apart from our own, and perhaps domestic animals, has
been decimated by the holocaust of modernity. The BSE disaster is a hint of what may be in store:
Government analysts have confirmed that as many as 30,000 British people may contract
Creuzfeld-Jakob disease as a result of eating contaminated beef. As technology advances, similar
scientific blunders may well wipe out large sections of the human race.
But the most urgent and undeniable environmental issue which we carry with us into the new
millennium is that of global warming. For a hundred years we have been pumping greenhouse gases
into the skies, and are now beginning to realise that a price has to be paid. We need to focus close
attention on this issue, not least because it will affect the Islamic countries far more radically than
the West. Worryingly few people in the Muslim world seem interested in the question; and it is
hence urgently necessary that we remind ourselves of the seriousness of the situation.
For years government scientists mocked the idea of global warming. But the Rio Earth Summit in
1992 revealed to an anxious world that the scientific facts were now so clear as to brook no
argument. The world is heating up. The industrial gases in the atmosphere are turning our planet
into a greenhouse, reflecting heat back in rather than allowing it to be dissipated into space.
Here in England, global warming is noticed even by the ordinary citizen. Temperature records go
back over three hundred years, but the 10 hottest years have all occurred since 1945, and three of
the five hottest (1989, 1990 and 1995), have been in the past decade. Water supply is equally erratic.
January of 1997 was the driest for 200 years. Storms at sea have become so bad that the North Sea
oil industry is now laying pipelines because the seas are too rough for tankers.
What are the exact figures? Surprisingly, they seem tiny. The rise in average temperature between
1990 and 2050 will be 1.5 degrees Centigrade, which appears negligible. But the temperature rise
which 4000 years ago ended the last ice age was only 2 degrees Centigrade. Research has proved
that the polar ice caps are already beginning to melt, which is why the sea level is now creeping up
by five millimetres a year. In places like the North Norfolk coast the EU is spending millions of
pounds on new concrete defences to keep the sea out. How long even the most elaborate defences

can be maintained is not clear.

However, for the West, the bad news is mixed with good. Rising temperatures would probably be
welcomed by most people. It will, in thirty years, be possible to grow oranges in some parts of
southern England. Already, the types of seeds bought by farmers reflect the awareness that summers
are warmer, and winters are dryer. But no great catastrophe seems to threaten.
What is the situation, however, in the Muslim world? At the Rio summit, many Islamic countries
showed themselves indifferent in the issue. In fact, the countries which campaigned most strongly
against environmental controls were often Muslim: the Gulf states, Brunei, Kazakhstan and others.
The reason was that their economies depend on oil. Cut back emissions on Western roads, or switch
electricity generating to sustainable sources like tidal or wind power, and those countries lose out.
There is still inadequate awareness in Muslim circles of the great climatic calamity that is looming
in the next millennium. But just consider some precursors of the catastrophe that have already come
about. In the Sahel countries of Africa - Chad, Mali and Niger, which have over 90% Muslim
populations, rainfall is declining by ten percent every decade. The huge Sahara Desert is becoming
ever huger, as it overwhelms marginal pasture and arable land on its southern fringes. The
disastrous drought which recently afflicted the Sudan ended with catastrophic floods.
Any climatic map will show that agriculture in many Muslim countries is a marginal business. In
Algeria, a further 15% decline in rainfall will eliminate most of the remaining farmland, sending
further waves of migrants into the cities. A similar situation prevails in Morocco, where the worst
drought in living memory ended only in 1995. The Yemen has suffered from the change in monsoon
patterns in the Indian Ocean - another consequence of global warming. In Bangladesh the problem
is not a shortage of water - it is too much of it. Floods are now normal every three or four years,
largely because of deforestation in the Himalayas which limits soil retention of water.
Dr Norman Myers of Oxford University predicts that by 2050 'the rise in sea level and changes in
agriculture will create 150m refugees. This includes 15m from Bangladesh, and 14m from Egypt.'
However, this figure does not include migrants generated by secondary consequences of climatic
change. These huge waves of humanity will destabilise governments and produce wars. The modern
nation-state does not facilitate migration: Bangladeshis before 1948 could move to other parts of
India, but with Partition, they are stuck within their own borders. Epidemics, also, are likely to be
widespread. Some island nations, such as the Maldives or the Comoros, will disappear completely
beneath the waves, and their populations will have to be accommodated elsewhere.
Again, I repeat that these forecasts are not doomsday scenarios. Those are much worse. I merely
cite the predictions of mainstream science, as set forth in European Union and UK Department of
the Environment reports. It is true that measures are beginning to be taken to limit greenhouse gas
emission. But even if no more gases were to be released into the skies at all, temperatures would
continue to rise for at least a hundred years, because of the gases already circulating in the
atmosphere.
Let me close with some reflections on the above three themes.
Are these developments on balance cause for optimism, or for disquiet? Well, we know that the
Blessed Prophet (s) liked optimism. He also taught tawakkul - reliance upon Allah's good
providence. However, he also taught that tying up our camels is a form of relying on Allah. So how
should Muslims consider their options over the next few decades?
There are a number of issues here. Perhaps the most important is the cultivation of an informed
leadership. I mentioned earlier that most Muslim leaders cannot provide the intellectual guidance
needed to help intelligent young people deal with the challenges of today. Ask the average Muslim
activist how to prove a post-modernist wrong, and he will not be able to help you very much. Our
heads are buried in the ground. However, it is not only intellectual trends which we ignore. The
environment, too, is an impending catastrophe which has not grabbed our attention at all. Perhaps

our activists will still be choking out their rival rhetoric on the correct way to hold the hands during
the Prayer, while they breath in the last mouthful of oxygen available in their countries. They seem
wholly oblivious to the problem.
All this has to change. In my travels in the Islamic world, I found tremendous enthusiasm for Islam
among young people, and a no less tremendous disappointment with the leadership. The traditional
ulema have the courtesy and moderation which we need, but lack a certain dynamism; the radical
faction leaders have fallen into the egotistic trap of exclusivism and takfir; while the mainstream
revivalist leaders, frankly, are often irrelevant. Both ponderous and slightly insecure, trapped by an
'ideological' vision of Islam, they do not understand the complexity of today's world - and our
brighter young people see this soon enough.
Institutions, therefore, urgently need to be established, to train young men and women both in
traditional Shari'a disciplines, and in the cultural and intellectual language of today's world.
Something like this has been done in the past: one thinks of the Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad
where Ghazali taught, which encouraged knowledge not only of fiqh, but of philosophical theology
in the Greek tradition. We need a new Ghazali today: a moderate, spiritually minded genius who
can understand secular thought and refute it, not merely rant and rave about it.
The creation of a relevant leadership is thus the first priority. The second has to be the evolution of
styles of da'wa that can operate despite the frankly improbable task of toppling the bunker regimes.
The FIS declared war on the Algerian state, and has achieved nothing apart from turning much of
the country into a battleground. Unless the military can be suborned, there is no chance of victory in
such situations. Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and the rest are similar cases.
An alternative da'wa strategy already exists in a sense. In many of these countries, particularly in
Egypt, the mainstream Ikhwan Muslimin operate a largescale welfare system, which serves to
remind the masses of the superior ethical status of indigenous Islamic values. That model deserves
to be expanded. But there is another option, which does not compete with it, but augments it. That is
the model of da'wa activity to the West.
New Muslims like myself are grateful to Allah for the ni'ma of Islam - but we cannot say that we
are grateful to the Umma. Islam is in its theology and its historical practice a missionary faith - one
of the great missionary faiths, along with Christianity and Buddhism. And yet while Christianity
and Buddhism are today brilliantly organised for conversion, Islam has no such operation, at least to
my knowledge. Ballighu anni wa-law aya ('Convey my message, even though a single verse') is a
Prophetic commandment that binds us all. It is a fard ayn, and a fard kifaya - and we are disobeying
it on both counts.
Ten years ago a book appeared in France called D'Une foi l'autre, les conversions a l'Islam en
Occident. The authors, both career journalists, carried out extensive interviews with new Muslims
in Europe and America. Their conclusions are clear. Almost all educated converts to Islam come in
through the door of Islamic spirituality. In the middle ages, the Sufi tariqas were the only effective
engine of Islamisation in Muslim minority areas like Central Asia, India, black Africa and Java; and
that pattern is maintained today.
Why should this be the case? Well, any new Muslim can tell you the answer. Westerners are in the
first instance seeking not a moral path, or a political ideology, or a sense of special identity - these
being the three commodities on offer among the established Islamic movements. They lack one
thing, and they know it - the spiritual life. Thus, handing the average educated Westerner a book by
Sayyid Qutb, for instance, or Mawdudi, is likely to have no effect, and may even provoke a
revulsion. But hand him or her a collection of Islamic spiritual poetry, and the reaction will be
immediately more positive. It is an extraordinary fact that the best-selling religious poet in modern
America is our very own Jalal al-Din Rumi. Despite the immeasurably different time and place of
his origin, he outsells every Christian religious poet.
Those who puzzle over the da'wa issue in the West generally refuse to take this on board. All too

often they follow limited, ideological versions of Islam that are relevant only to their own cultural
situation, and have no relevance to the problems of educated modern Westerners. We need to
overcome this. We need to capitalise on the modern Western love of Islamic spirituality - and also
of Islamic art and crafts. By doing so, we can reap a rich harvest, in sha' Allah. If the West is like a
fortress, then we can approach it from its strongest place, by provoking it politically and militarily,
as the absurd Saddam Hussein did; in which case we will bring yet more humiliation and
destruction upon our people. Or we can find those areas of its defences which have become
tumbledown and weak. Those are, essentially, areas of spirituality and aesthetics. Millions of young
Westerners are dissatisfied both with the materialism of their world, and with the doctrines of
Christianity, and are seeking refuge in New Age groups and cults. Those people should be natural
recruits for Islam - and yet we ignore them.
Similarly, and for the same constituency, we need to emphasise Islam's vibrant theological response
to the problem of conservation. The Qur'an is the richest of all the world's scriptures in its emphasis
on the beauty of nature as a theophany - a mazhar - of the Divine names.
As a Western Muslim, who understands what moves and influences Westerners, I feel that by
stressing these two issues, Islam is well-placed not merely to flourish, but to dominate the religious
scene of the next century. Only Allah truly knows the future. But it seems to me that we are at a
crossroads, of which the millennium is a useful, if accidental symbol. It will either be the watershed
which marks the final collapse of Islam as an intellectually and spiritually rich tradition at ease with
itself, as increasingly it presides over an overpopulated and undernourished zone of chaos. Or it will
take stock, abandon the dead end of meaningless extremism, and begin to play its natural world role
as a moral and spiritual exemplar.
As we look around ourselves today at the chaos and disintegration of the Umma, we may ask
whether such a possibility is credible. But we are living through times when the future is genuinely
negotiable in an almost unprecedented way. Ideologies which formerly obstructed or persecuted
Islam, like extreme Christianity, nationalism and Communism, are withering. Ernest Gellner, the
Cambridge anthropologist has described Islam as 'the last religion' - the last in the sense of truly
believing its scriptural narratives to be normative.
If we have the confidence to believe that what we have inherited or chosen is indeed absolute truth,
then optimism would seem quite reasonable. And I am optimistic. If Islam and the Muslims can
keep their nerve, and not follow the secularising course mapped out for them by their rivals, or
travel the blind alley of extremism, then they will indeed dominate the world, as once they did. And,
we may I think quite reasonably hope, they will once again affirm without the ambiguity of worldly
failure, the timeless and challenging words, wa kalimatuLlahi hiya al-ulya - 'and the word of God is
supreme'.