By Ghulam Ghaus
Siddiqi, New Age Islam
21 November
2020
The Arabic
word ‘Asabiyyah or Asabiyyat’ can be
simply expressed through several related meanings in English such as,
‘prejudice’ and ‘bigotry’, ‘sectarianism’, ‘tribalism’, ‘chauvinism’,
‘bigoterie’, ‘fanaticism’, ‘partisanship’, ‘clannishness’ and ‘party-spirit’.
The Asabiyyah refers to ‘the concept of a
strong and blind adherence to a particular party, faction, cause or person’, or
in other words, to ‘the concept of excessive or prejudiced support for one’s
own cause, group, tribe, nation, person or thing without fair consideration of
the facts’.
The Asabiyyah was deeply rooted in the
pre-Islamic era. Islam abolished all the forms of Asabiyyah (bigotry/prejudice etc.) in several ways mentioned in the
Quran and the Ahadith. A few of them are as follows;
Allah
Almighty says in the Quran, “O mankind!
Truly We created you from a male and a female, and We made you peoples and
tribes that you may come know one another. Surely the most noble of you before
Allah are the most reverent of you. Truly Allah is Knowing, Aware” (49:13)
This verse
signifies the manner in which differences in religion, race, tribe, ethnicity,
language, nationality can be sources through which the human beings attain a
deeper appreciation for the reality of the human condition.
This is a
late Madinian verse which denotes a revamping of the moral order of Arabia to
one in which true worth is no longer determined by the Asabiyyah but by the depth of faith and righteousness (Taqwa).
The things
mentioned in this verse signify the eradication of all forms of the Asabiyyah (bigotry/prejudice etc), be it
in the context of nationality, race, caste, tribe, region and language,
majority and minority or whatever. In several Ahadith the beloved Prophet
(peace be upon him) forbade the Jahiliyyah attitude of the Asabiyyah. Some of them are as follows;
The
Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) is reported to have said, “One who is
killed under the banner of a man who is blind (to his just cause), who raises
the slogan of the Asabiyyat (bigotry
or prejudice etc.) or supports the Asabiyyat,
dies the death of one belonging to the days of Jahiliyya (pre-Islamic days).
(Sahih Muslim 1850).
Having
condemned the Asabiyyah in another
hadith, the Prophet (peace be upon him) further said, “….Whoso attacks my Ummah
(indiscriminately) killing the righteous and the wicked of them, sparing not
(even) those staunch in faith and fulfilling not his promise made with those
who have been given a pledge of security - he has nothing to do with me and I
have nothing to do with him.” (Sahih Muslim)
It is
recorded in Sunan Abu Dawud that the Prophet (peace be upon him) condemned the
Asabiyyat (bigotry/prejudice), “whoever raises the slogan of the Asabiyyat has
nothing to do with us, whoever kills due to the Asabiyyat has nothing to do
with us, and whoever dies the death of Asabiyyat is not from among us”.
When asked
about the Asabiyyah, the Prophet
(peace be upon him) replied saying, “The Asabiyyah
is when a man helps his people to do wrong” (Sunan Ibn Majah/Sunan Abu Dawud)
The reason
of the Asabiyyah being forbidden is
that Islam does not accept bigotry in any matters, but rather it repeatedly
suggests that one should deal with everything on the basis of justice,
truthfulness, honesty and reality and not on the basis of bigotry which blocks
the minds to grasp the humane morals and ethics.
If we
ponder over the present circumstances of the world, we will find that most
cases of the killing or fighting are directly or indirectly the consequences of
Asabiyyah (bigotry/prejudice). Not
only does the Asabiyyah lead to
violence, but also to block the vast space of one’s mind and thus the one finds
difficulty to experience the realities of many things in the world. Our minds
are created by Allah Almighty and they can achieve higher culmination of mental
development only when they are used in the correct directions which are not
possible for the minds affected by the virus of Asabiyyah. We have seen above that Islam clearly forbids the Asabiyyah by condemning it. It is our
collective responsibility to refrain from holding the Asabiyyah in all forms and move forward to look for solutions to
numerous challenges of the modern-days.
URL: https://newageislam.com/islamic-q-a/asabiyyah-(prejudice-bigotry)-block-space/d/123537
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