The following is an excerpt from Islam and the Destiny of Man by Charles Le Gai Eaton (1921–2010), which was first published in 1985. Besides Gai Eaton, there are only two other Muslim writers who bring forth a synthesis between Eastern and Western thought in their presentation of Islam in a nuanced way that does not undermine its exclusive Truth claims: ‘Alija ‘Ali Izetbegovic and Muhammad Iqbal. However, in contrast to Izetbegovic and Iqbal, Gai Eaton’s work here stands apart in that he writes to educate the Western reader about Islamic cosmology in practical terms, both historically and in the modern world. He contextualizes the Quran, the role of the Sunnah, and the early history of Islam as it took shape in a way that facilitates for Western non-Muslims, and even Muslims in for that matter, an understanding of Islam on its own terms. For this reason, I make it a point to tell non-Muslims interested in Islam to read this book first before they even pick up an English translation of the Quran (I recommend M.A.S. Abdel-Haleem’s). I recently began to also recommend this work for Muslims given the continuous onslaught against the tradition being carried out by certain strands in the Muslim community who seem to be bent on uprooting the religion and reforming it into a cheap imitation of what has become known as the Enlightenment.
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The traditional Muslim writes with authority and conviction, but he does not know how to answer the questions which dominate Western thought in the religious context. These questions seem to him unnecessary if not actually blasphemous, and at heart feels that this task is superfluous. The truth of the Qurān is, for him, so compelling and so self-evident that, if it does not convince the unbeliever, his poor efforts are hardly likely to do so.
For the most part, however, it is Muslims who have been through the modern education machine who write the books which circulate in the West. The work they produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century cannot now be read without embarrassment. These men were the ‘Uncle Toms’ of Islam. Their defence of the religion depended, they thought, on proving that it contained nothing incompatible with the moral and philosophical norms of European civilization. They scoured the libraries for any favourable references to Islam in the works of the ‘great philosophers’ (such as H. G. Wells), but were often reduced to quoting long-forgotten journalists who had found a good word to say for the Prophet or for Muslims as such. The idea that the civilization they admired so blindly might be open to radical criticism in terms of Islamic norms scarcely crossed their minds.
The situation has changed in recent years, though the ‘Uncle Toms’ are still with us (thinly disguised modernists). Contemporary Muslim writers cannot be accused of taking no pride in Islam, indeed this pride is sometimes expressed in strident tones, and no one could claim that they are uncritical of Western ‘decadence’, though their criticism tends to miss the mark, focusing on symptoms rather than on causes. They have not, however, escaped a different kind of subservience to occidental norms. They tend to be deeply concerned with al-Nahdah, ‘renewal’, the ‘Islamic Renaissance’, which they readily compare with the Renaissance in Europe. Yet the European Renaissance was, from the religious point of view, a rebirth of paganism which Christianity had supplanted, and it was the source of that very ‘decadence’ which Muslims perceive in Western life and thought. Their inherent hostility to Christianity blinds them to the fact that forces and ideologies which destroyed one religion may as easily destroy another; or, if they do see this, they believe that Islam’s inherent strength and its capacity to absorb and Islamicize alien elements will protect it from subversion. This is, to say the least, a dangerous gamble.
Those who have close contact with Muslims will be accustomed to hearing, with monotonous regularity, the parrot-cry: ‘We will take the good things from Western civilization; we will reject the bad things’. It is strange that any Muslim should imagine this to be possible. Islam itself is an organic whole, a gestalt, in which everything is interconnected and in which no single part can be considered in isolation from the rest. The Muslim above all others should understand that every culture has something of this unity and should realize that the modern civilization created by the West, even if it seems constantly to change shape as in a kaleidoscope, forms a coherent pattern in terms of cause and effect. To draw one fibre from it is to find that this is attached, but countless unseen filaments, to all the rest. The small fragment of ‘good’, lifted from the pattern, brings with it piece after piece of the whole structure. WIth the light come the shadows; and with everything positive come all the negative elements which are related to it either as cause or as effect.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who is almost unique among Muslim writers in his understanding both of traditional Islam and of the forces of subversion at work in the West, makes this point: ‘Words and expressions have been used by many [of these writers] in such a way as to betray the state of cultural shock and often the sense of inferiority vis-à-vis the West from which they suffer. Their writings reveal most of all a slavery of the mind to the norms and judgements of Western civilization. Moreover, these norms are usually hidden under a veil of an “Islam” of which there often remains little more than a name and certain emotional attachments, an Islam which has become devoid of the intellectual and spiritual truth which stands at the heart of the Islamic revelation.’
The view first put forward by more or less hostile orientalists that Islamic civilization became decadent, ‘stagnant’ and ‘sterile’, from the moment it no longer produced scientists (as the term is now understood), that is to stay around the thirteenth century of the Christian era, is uncritically accepted by modernists and ‘fundamentalists’ alike. This is compensated by a passionate faith in the present or imminent ‘renaissance’, and they do not see that decadence (if the word has any application) is greatly preferred to deviation. Decadence is a symptom of weariness and laxity, whereas deviation takes the form of a malingant activity or dynamism directed towards false goals. Better a sleeping giant than a mad or demonic one.
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