The Concept Of Dawa’t In Islam
By Prof. M. A. Sofi, New Age Islam
24 August 2024
Let Me Clarify That It’s Nobody’s Case To Call Into Question The ‘Mandatory’ Nature Of Da’wat, The Sacred Duty Of Every Muslim To Reach Out To The Non-Muslim And Enlighten Them About The Word Of God As Conveyed Through The Quran And Its Manifestation In The Word And Action Of The Prophet.
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As a sacred duty, how does Dawa’t in Islam (Muslim outreach) reconcile with the absence of moral authority and of the will to excel among the Da’ee (missionary)?
In an effort to put the above question into perspective, it should help to quote Bertrand Russel:
"Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there's only opinion".
To make sense of Russel’s quote above, it’s important to locate his words in the context of historical circumstances that have shaped theology in a form in which it’s largely being seen, presented and practiced today by a majority of its followers who happen to owe allegiance to different shades of religious faith and different strands of thought within them.
The emphasis on blind faith as the sole determinant of a scientific truth is doomed to be as inconsequential as reason alone may be sought to be the sole criterion of truth in religion. The point is that while faith is seen as being central to religious belief and reason as the bedrock of scientific query, it takes a little of both faith and reason to be in a position to realise the potential hidden both in religion as well as in science in a most fruitful and fulfilling way.
The subliminal text of Russel’s quote ought to be understood in this particular context and in the light of how religion has evolved over thousands of years of its existence as an important facet of human existence.
As distinct from how theology has actually evolved and how it has been adopted by man as an inalienable part of human life, the role of common sense, reason and wisdom that ideally ought to inform the human perception of it has been relegated to the margins, resulting in its avatar in which it’s being seen and practiced today, and so aptly summed up in Russell’s quote above. But that’s not what theology is ideally meant to be – there’s more to it than how it is being practiced and propagated as experienced by man over long periods of its history.
Unlike in the case of blind faith, an educated, informed understanding of religious teachings necessitate deep thought and reflection involving questions about life and death and about man’s role in this world for a more rational, reasonable approach towards understanding the larger purpose of life and man’s relationship with the Creator. That demands the long, arduous process of questioning the conventional wisdom by putting everything to doubt before choosing to embark on a new path with clarity of thought and perspective. That brings up the question of Da’wat in Islam and what is it intended to achieve for the mankind and what takes an individual to be a good human being or a true Muslim for that matter? To argue that Islam provides a one-size-fits-all recipe for a life of fulfilment and salvation involving all human beings, and not just all Muslims is, to state the obvious, unpalatable to the starters. However, there is another side to the story though, that merits a dispassionate analysis, coming across as it does as a little tricky and way too delicate an issue to hope for consensus even amongst all Muslims.
The first hints of an answer to this question have to be sought in the concept of Dawa’t (bearing witness to the Truth) that entails the divinely ordained mission of every Muslim to reach out to those outside the fold of Islamic faith and beckon them to the path of Allah that He has laid down for the humanity in Quran as revealed to prophet Mohammad (SAW) who had embodied it in his word, action and deed. To this effect, the Quran clearly states “You are the best community raised up for mankind. You enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong and believe in Allah”. Let me hasten to add that in this commandment, it’s not intended that other religious communities are damned or that the non-Muslims are required to be roped in to get them to “convert” to Islam.
Quintessentially, the supreme mission of “bearing witness to the truth” encapsulates the much larger and nobler purpose of transformation of the self, to introspect, look within and to identify the “co-ordinates” in terms of man’s place in the cosmos and to carve out a role in life in the light of the principles as laid out in the holy scripture. Moreover, everyone shall be held to account for their actions and deeds to the extent of their knowledge and intellect involving their understanding of life and of their relationship with God. As so often referred to in the Quran “Verily, in the heavens and the earth are signs for those who believe and who think and reflect”.
Before delving deeper into these issues, it’s important to ask: how does one reconcile the previous commandment involving this divine appendage of “you being the best community” with the pathetic, ignoble condition of Muslims today who have lost the élan, the wherewithal and the moral authority to preach good sense, morality and wisdom to mankind? Where does one locate this ‘divinely imposed” delusion of grandeur having been bestowed upon them by the scripture, even when the Muslim community has stooped so low in their character and conduct as to come across as a most despised and depraved lot?
The situation is so hopeless that in the conditions of today, even the best among them who may be pious and virtuous find themselves hard put to get across their message of peace, good conduct and righteousness while attracting in return bile and revulsion from those who are approached by them as part of Da'wat.
This is so because, barring very few exceptions, Muslims have nothing to show for their superior conduct and good behaviour and more alarmingly, even for a modicum of excellence in setting the highest standards in their routine lives involving an engagement with business, contemporary education, science or technology where they have, at best, been among the poor trend followers as opposed to a thousand years ago when they were leading from the front as trailblazers in all domains of human endeavours.
The crisis is further compounded by the fact that the emphasis on Da’wat in Islam as an obligatory duty of Muslims is taken literally to mean an engagement with the fellow beings which is enjoined upon all Muslims, regardless of their level of competence where every single practicing Muslim would be required to go around to engage an outlier and call him to virtue and the path of truth and righteousness.
In a world that’s deeply fractious, polarised and more alarmingly largely Islamophobic, that necessitates the urgency to restrict Da'wat to within those groups of people who are knowledgeable and well versed in the mission of a Da’ee and who stand out for their superior credentials not only in their conduct, character and piety, but equally importantly in their worldly affairs. Else, the obligation of inviting human beings towards the path of virtue and righteousness in the light of divine messages and commandments (in the service of Deen) would end up as a hogwash.
These are some of the factors that ought to be weighed in and appreciated before embarking on the mission of Da’wat. That’s not all, though! There is also this so-called accident of birth that the Da’ee has to contend with while propagating the message of Islam among those who happen to be born as non-Muslims.
In such a situation what is needed is extreme care and circumspection, considering that as human beings, we are all naturally disposed to own and adopt a certain worldview that is ubiquitous at home and in the closely knit social circuit of which we happen to be an inseparable part.
The result is that we are what we happen to be born as - Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains or as a Sunnis, Shias and what have you, depending upon the pedigree and the ecumenical lineage inherited from our ancestry. Given such ineluctable circumstances, there’s a distinct danger of the Da’ee being frowned upon for what may appear to the other person as being a pretentious, condescending holier-than-thou individual. And obviously such a perception comes at a price for the Da’ee and their mission that would manifest itself in the shape of the mission ending up as a damp squib.
That begs the question: does it behove a conscious, educated, thinking civilised human being to remain trapped in a cocoon, a mindset that has been shaped by the circumstance of being born in a certain milieu where, at least in most such cases, one is naturally programmed to find no use for reflecting and interrogating one’s role and place in the world?
Let me clarify that it’s nobody’s case to call into question the ‘mandatory’ nature of Da’wat, the sacred duty of every Muslim to reach out to the non-Muslim and enlighten them about the word of God as conveyed through the Quran and its manifestation in the word and action of the prophet.
However, that is no reason why the Muslim community should stay smug in the thought of being chosen as the “best community”, and to sit pretty and do nothing by way of course correction which, in these circumstances, warrants deep introspection and the urgent need to explore alternative ways to spread the word of God as part of Dawa’t. As I see it, the best way to engage in Da'wat in the world of today is to begin to set OUR OWN house in order in the light of the issues raised above before hoping to reach out to others from a position of strength of character and achievement, unlike now when the community looks doomed to end up as a butt of ridicule on the strength of position of power and superiority of its detractors. All I want to say is that no worthwhile transformation of the self, the society or of the world is to be expected to be possible by an exclusive emphasis on individual piety (tazkia) alone and on the other-worldliness, or by choosing to remove our gaze from the suffering of fellow beings, in faithful subordination to the worldview of those “who see the evil and do nothing”. It’s this attitude of mind that would let the perpetrators of human suffering get away with their transgressions. The long and short of the story is that "There's no royal road to Janna'h/Swarg".
That’s only one side of the story, though! There are a whole lot of other pesky issues that warrant being addressed for a better appreciation of facts. These include, but are not restricted to, the question of reason in matters involving religion and theology. Let us understand that as long as an opinion remains divorced from reason and wisdom, the results could be misleading, even dangerous! By their very nature, theological matters are condemned to remain subjective unlike in science, and more so in mathematics where objectivity of thought derives from rigorous reasoning which is absent in matters arising in theology as stated in Russel’s quote above. Despite such apparent dichotomy between science and religion where reason is seen as being antithetical to religion, it always helps when reason and wisdom are factored in for a meaningful creation of knowledge as much in science as in theology and in building opinions.
Come to think of it, reason demands the coming about of the day of judgement where ultimate justice shall be served to those who have been denied justice on earth alongside those who shall meet their moment of comeuppance for perpetrating injustice and for spreading Fitna (dissension) in the society. On the other side, faith is not to be seen as being entirely incongruous with science once we know how it’s invoked in the plausibility of the axiom of choice as an important foundational principle of mathematics.
It’s important to note that an unexamined, "unconverted" life, if you like, entails a life where man remains trapped in a world that’s not of his own making and where he is condemned to live his life as dictated by tradition, rituals and custom that have come to him as a legacy from birth and that is shaped by a certain religious fervour where he can't tell the good from evil, the truth from falsehood.
In such circumstances, he does not, nor is he equipped with the tools to, interrogate his origin, the ideology or the faith that he has inherited from his surroundings and that he has been taught to adopt and embrace for the rest of his life. On the contrary, a willingness to accept, adopt, embrace or even reject any of these legacies, but only after due diligence and contemplation is something that Nature expects of (a thinking) individual for him to live a life that’s purposeful and meaningful that would befit him as the Ashraful Makhlooq (best of God's creation) who has been endowed with the faculty to thin and contemplate, unlike other living species. In other words, man shall cease to be qualified as an evolved, cultivated, cultured being unless he has questioned his place in the cosmos and subjected himself to "conversion from within" in the process of discovering the truth in an effort to be what he ought to be.
In the absence of reason and rational thought, an impulsive urge exacerbated by an external agency to force a way of life that is at variance with what one has acquired as a bequest from ancestry is no more than a flash in the pan that would go away at the slightest hint of wind wafting across the pan. That applies as much to the missionaries of Islam as to those from other religious faiths who have set upon themselves the mission of spreading their own sacred versions of the word of God.
In short, one would ideally wish to see Dawa't as part of a conscious will and as a sacred duty of every Muslim, not in terms of their zeal to ensure adherents of other faiths being formally converted to Islam, but by leading by example in every aspect of life that embodies the true spirit of the Quran as much in prayer and communion with Him as in the vast domain of their real life actions. That would be the true apotheosis of the highest character of an individual of which, however, there is acute scarcity besetting the Muslim community right now. If anything, there hardly are those in the Muslim world who combine the excellence of individual character with the excellence of the human mind that entails the pursuit of knowledge both in the domains of religious study and in modern education and science with dedication and commitment towards aspiring for a leadership role in all human endeavours.
This is so because in the world of today almost the entire Muslim community has allowed itself to stoop so low in their character and conduct as to come across as a most despicable lot where even the best among them who are otherwise pious and virtuous find no takers for their message of peace, good conduct and righteousness. That’s due in no small measure to how, for the most part, Muslims have precious little to boast of excellence in terms of setting the highest standards in their quotidian activities involving creative imagination in contemporary education, business or in scientific and technological enterprise.
No wonder that the Western world has dominated, and appears to continue to dominate the rest of the world unlike in the Muslim community, not only because of an absence of a pathological obsession with the “other-worldliness’ to the neglect of the world they are presently living in, but mainly on account of a no nonsense approach to life on the planet that it has sought to dominate through hard work on the strength of creation of knowledge and in discovery and innovation.
On the contrary, the overarching fear of life after death afflicting the Muslim world has benumbed it into a state of stupor that has made no material difference to the attainment of piety and morality in their lives on the one hand, and to the need for creating a culture on the other hand, where the pursuit and creation of secular knowledge involving science, humanities and mathematics etc. would take precedence over the irrational exclusive obsession with the other worldliness.
Notwithstanding these glaring disparities, however, between the Muslim community and those from other religious denominations around the world, there’s an all-encompassing, unifying force, a “great leveller” if you like, that brings together under its fold a considerable chunk of the humanity from all religious persuasions, as summed up in the following terse words of Simeone Weil:
“To die for God is not act of faith in God. To die for an unknown and repulsive convict who is a victim of injustice, that’s a proof of faith in God”.
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Prof. M. A. Sofi is currently NBHM Visiting Professor at JK Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Srinagar He previously taught at AMU, Aligarh, Central University of Kashmir, Srinagar and University of Kashmir, Srinagar Did Master’s from AMU, Aligarh (1978) and Ph. D Mathematics at IIT Kanpur(1982) Presently living in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir.
URL: https://www.newageislam.com/debating-islam/concept-dawat-daee-muslims-christian-sikhs-hindu/d/133026
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