The themes of MFAS – The Muslim Faculty of Advanced Studies – emerged from four questions we postulated, which even if one does not answer them entirely can serve well in navigating the themes. They are:
Where are we?
How did we get here?
Where do we want to get to?
How do we get there?
Thinking about the nature of the world order within which we all live, both in the East and the West, we looked at these areas: the politics of power, technique/technology and science, psychology and psychiatry, philosophy, and we looked at society through literature, economics – in seeking to understand where we are.
Essaying an answer to our second question, ‘how did we get here?’, the world order today arises from a fourfold: the Jews, Greeks, Christians and Romans.
The Children of Israel took many things from the ancient world, Babylon in particular, and, contrary to their revelation which forbade usury, gave the modern world banking. That was taken up by mediaeval Italian bankers such as the Medici and then, during the Reformation, by the famous Protestant banking houses, examples of which today are Lloyds and Barclays;
The Greeks give us the university, academia (from Plato’s academy), theatre, and physics, philosophy, metaphysics (from Greek words) and a great deal more. Just look at how many words in the English have Greek origins;
The Christians are ostensibly the rulers. They sit on the throne, much as the Romans gave them theirs, but then as now the reality of power is that of an oligarchy of families who rule behind the apparent occupants of the seat of power. Contrary to our received perception of the event, the Christianisation of Rome was really the Romanisation of Christianity;
As to the Romans themselves, they had given birth to democracy as a ‘power’ when they threw out their king Tarquin and embraced the Republic, their ‘power’ often brutal and ruthless both before Christianisation and afterwards. They exterminated ancient Carthage, then a million or more of the Gauls (French Celts) and the Germanic tribes, and in an eerie echo showing the continuity of modern and ancient power, a US military thinker said during the Iraq War that the US “should do to the Iraqi city Fallujah what Rome did to Carthage” i.e. obliterate it. Modern examples of such brutality are all too common.
We can argue that these four forces give rise to subsequent manifestations such as the British Empire, Soviet Communism, Fascism and Nazism, Putin’s Russia, the declining US Empire, modern China, and so on.
They supply a grid that helps us to understand the origin of the current world order of banking, academia, politics, and brute power, and how it has arisen. As you can see ‘Islam’ apparently doesn’t ‘fit in’. For modern people it is the great question mark. Developing the implicit question here is then the fifth that must be pursued, for more than a few see the world order itself in epochal crisis.
The ‘where do want to get to?’ question must be answered with: the Madinan order, since that is a civic order of a strong but open family structure, neighbourliness, care for the poor and needy, and indeed love for them, upholding law and order and not least law and order in the marketplace excluding usury from it since that always acts injuriously to one party in the transaction and does damage to the wider society, respect for the wealthy and powerful, and more than anything great respect for knowledge and its people, and people of ma‘rifah – direct experiential knowledge of God. Madinan society always included People of the Book and quasi-People of the Book such as people of the Avesta and the people of the Vedas within its overview with a great deal of autonomy, as for example in the Osmanli millat system, and in Moghal India.
The ‘how do we get there?’ question must also be answered: by knowledge and education. Not by an exclusively ‘madrasa’ style education, nor a western mode, nor even a simplistic synthesis, but rather a genuine new approach that draws on the very best and highest from both, from primary up to tertiary level and beyond. And the core of that would be by a restoration of the guilds of the professions, trades and skills, and the creation of new ones tailored for the age where the young would both acquire their livelihoods but also worldview, moral upbringing and more, and those drawn to a more scholarly or even scientific approach would have a dedicated education in a range of subjects. And the fundamental requirement in both would be the inculcation and development of the noble qualities of character without which life in this world is meaningless, and because of the lack of which the world today is spinning out of control.
NOTE: it would be all too easy to frame things in a facile East versus West, or Islam versus the rest manner. Within the very heart of the global order itself we must seek for the ‘saving power’ that the poet Hölderlin intuited to be there “where danger is,” and it is hard to argue against the proposition that we are in a perpetually dangerous age and that the matter is urgent.
Our original four questions are quite open-ended, and although this has been a stab at answering them partially, it is not done to close the questions but on the contrary to open them up and suggest ways to approach them as a useful grid to understand the MFAS programmes, modules and lectures.