302
THE U M M A H A N D
T O M O R R O W ' S WORLD
Anwar Ibrahim
This article examines global sociocultural and civilizational futures in the
context of changing global realities. Overly reductionist worldviews are
being replaced by a recaptured awareness of complexity which can be
found in non-western models. The 'three world' model was overly
simplistic and has been rendered irrelevant: thinking about modernity
now requires thinking about culture, cultural identity, and diversity of
civilizational perspectives. The Islamic concept of Ummah provides such
a framework for the Muslim community. Consideration of the notion of
Ummah, its traditions and how it is viewed by Islamic fundamentalism, is
made before arguing that a new, future Ummah will provide a distinctive
pathway to change.
The unprecedented and unpredicted changes in the global political and
economic configuration have altered the realities of the present and compelled us to come to terms with a new, revised framework for making
sustainable projections of the future. Peter Drucker has argued that the new
gestalt must be viewed as 'configurations' that embrace several aspects of
our lives. I The shifting knowledge base, the crumbling of the Berlin Wall,
the unravelling of the Russian empire, transformations in the multinational
economy and threats to transnational ecology are some 'new realities'
confronting us in the post-war era. How are we to adjust to the 'new
realities'?
Beyond old dichotomies
The past four decades have been dominated by too simplistic, too reductionist a view of world dynamics. Whatever was included in the cold war,
power blocs, capitalism-communism, free market-central planning dichotomies, far too much complexity was left out and ignored. The collapse of this
dualistic vision, hailed as the harbinger of the triumph of the western model
of liberal democracy, allowed the most reductive conclusion of all to be
asserted :
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the cold war, or the passing of a
Anwar Ibrahim is the Minister of Education of Malaysia and President of the General
Conference of Unesco. He can be contacted at the Ministry of Education, Darnansara Utarna,
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
0016-3287/91/030302-9 ~ 1991 Butterworth-Heinemann Ltd
FUTURES April 1991
The Ummah and tomorrow's world 303
particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end
point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal
democracy as the final form of human government. 2
This is an unparalleled imperialistic vision of the future which is tantamount
to a denial of the existence of a worldview other than that of liberal
democracy and the dichotomy of capitalism-communism. It seeks to establish the universal domination of the purported model and thereby forecloses any possibility of exploring alternative models generated from within
other worldviews. The western liberal democracies are themselves fraught
with internal difficulties that are part of the dynamic of global problems.
They also wrestle with human dilemmas about the quality of social life and
social cohesion that perplex their citizens. To advocate the end of the duel
of dualism as the beginning of a unidimensional, unidirectional future for all
people is a depressing prospect even for citizens of the West. For the
western model comes replete with the problems of western modernity, and
that is a dynamic we all need to think beyond rather than entrench
ourselves in.
Some means must be found to take a more holistic view of existence to
achieve better balanced, more humane choices that are more reflective of
the non-market, non-material complexity of human beings and the world in
which we live. So reduced, so thoroughly secularized or materialistic has
the discourse of western convention become that it can only re-integrate
such insight with the assistance of other worldviews. Today, the West needs
to hear the debates within non-western societies since they are the repositories of unself-conscious acceptance of spirituality, the acceptance of
humanity as more than just material beings in a material universe. By this is
meant something more profound and testing for everyone than superficial
engagement of westerners with varieties of eastern mysticism. Holism is
alive and well within other worldviews. It is neither wholly absent from
western convention today nor unknown within that convention, but it has
been both constrained and deformed by the rise of western modernity.
What we need to recapture, beyond the dichotomies of the recent past,
is complexity. We urgently need a sense of complexity that is neither a
flirtation with nostalgia nor romanticism. Realism about complex visions of
the world we inhabit can be found within non-western worldviews. It is a
realism forged by experience of the pitfalls of the dominant, westernderived models of modernity, as well as the problems of traditionalism. It is
the non-West which has a history of debating and striving to negotiate a
holistic vision into modernity. Complexity is something we desperately need
to learn to comprehend because it is pre-eminently the condition in which
we live. It is impossible for any of us to attain a sustainable lifestyle that
embraces complexity without also embracing a plural vision of the human
future. For this reason there can be no end to history, but there must be a
relearning of the history that has made the world today.
This is why Muslim scholars from ibn Khaldun 3 to Malik Bennabi 4 have
emphasized the cyclical nature of history. History moves in cycles o f
civilizations. 'Each cycle', writes Malik Bennabi,
is defined by certain psycho-temporal conditions proper to a social group: it is a
civilization in these conditions. Then the civilization migrates, shifts its abode,
FUTURES April 1991
304 The Ummah and tomorrow's world
transfers its values in another area. It thus perpetuates itself in an indefinite exodus,
through successive metamorphoses: each metamorphosis being a particular synthesis of man, soil and time. s
What we learn from recent events is that both the western and Muslim
civilizations are moving towards a new metamorphosis and hence towards a
new identity.
Beyond three worlds
The metamorphosis of western civilization began to take shape in 1989 when
the Second World evaporated almost in an instant. It is improbable that the
USSR can survive for long in its present form. The majority of the Second
World by virtue of history and civilizational underpinnings finds its natural
affinity with the First World. When Mikhail Gorbachev speaks of Greater
Europe, 'the European home', he expresses something genuine about much
of Eastern Europe and many of the Soviet republics. Perestroika and
glasnost have remained, in theory and practice, a Eurocentric political
melodrama. Gorbachev asserts this without ambiguity:
Some in the West are trying to 'exclude' the Soviet Union from Europe ... such
plays, however, cannot change the geographic and historical realities. Russia's trade,
cultural and political links with other European nations and states have deep roots in
history. We are Europeans. Old Russiawas united with Europe by Christianity. 6
The European home has little meaning and less relevance for the Southern
republics--'the Asian Soviet Union' that includes Azerbijan, Kazakhistan,
Tajikistan, Turkmenia and Uzbekistan. Before the creation of the USSR these
republics had always been part of the Muslim world. It is the Muslim world
that is redolent of many ties and affective bonds that they have been denied
over the past 70 years. For these republics the past 70 years have been
another form of Russian imperialism, a continuation of a connection created
by a colonial encounter. 7
As the realignment of Europe and the remaking of the First World
proceeds apace, the Third World remains on the outside, peripheral and
excluded. The enormity of the problems and complexities that have affected
the Third World in the past continue to haunt them. The debt burden of the
developing world, estimated at $988 billion, will undoubtedly lead to serious
economic and political upheavals. The emergent strategic alliances in North
America and Europe spell danger to the viability of the struggling economies
of the developing countries. The failure of the Uruguay Round of GATT and
the persistence of protectionism and farm subsidies by the developed
countries could render North-South cooperation meaningless. Despite what
the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks signify, global spending on conventional
weaponry is on the increase. Worldwide sales of weapons crossed the
$1 trillion (1012) threshold for the first time in 1987. 8 The military expenditure
of developing countries gobbles up a large chunk of development funds
and the igniting of sustained regional conflicts or repression at home is an
inevitable consequence of such a large-scale build-up.
The three world format has been rendered irrelevant, but the core
problems afflicting the developing world--poverty, hunger, illiteracy, disease, pollution, the debt problem and global militarization--have not been
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The
Ummah and
tomorrow's world
305
resolved. What the sophistication of modern technology and material
abundance can achieve for some is even further removed from the life of
the poorest than it was at the start of the 'development' decades. What
seemed like three worlds was in fact the argument over economic management within one civilization, that of the West, that embraced and affected
all the rest. It made economics and material criteria far too reified an
objective of human ingenuity, at the cost of too many other necessities
without which material advance loses its meaning and, on the evidence,
may be rendered unattainable. This is not a rationale for forgetting economics. It is an overriding imperative for thinking more constructively about
how to deliver material enhancement within the context of a wider set of
relevant variables and realities.
We can no longer persist in thinking of economic modernity without
thinking of culture, cultural authenticity and identity, and the diversity of
civilizational perspectives. We have been too presumptuous in thinking that
modernity is value-free and neutral, exportable and importable, a repeatable
recipe in its original formulation. We have forgotten that modernity requires
domestication, diverse originality and homework, as well as reformulating
and refashioning. If we had made sensible use of a real definition of culture
and civilization we might have undertaken the necessary work that would
have made modernity appropriate to the diverse needs, opportunities and
potential of the peoples of the world. We might than have used resources
more responsibly, increased opportunities for them being capitalized on
and integrated into sustainable nations and sustainable ways of life compatible with human needs. Instead, we have been required to accept the
unacceptable--that modernity will change things for everyone, whether they
want the package deal of change or not, rather than undertaking to change
things to acquire the kind of modernity that people determine for themselves, a far more genuinely democratized, cultural vision of the future. 9
Culture is not an attendant subsidiary of any people. Culture is a whole
that includes premises, axioms and concepts that derive from discrete ways
of thinking about reality. It includes basic reality definitions that order and
make meaningful thinking about any topic, including economics. Modernity
as we know it is a cultural artefact of western civilization. As such, it
requires the replication of its wider preconditions wherever it goes, and that
is a basic problem of all who were lumped together as the Third World.
Thinking about modernity without paying adequate attention to Muslim
civilization as a living reality has generated dilemmas and antipathy to the
West and the East. But mere remembrance of our Muslim identity and
reviving our Islamic frame of reference is no panacea. It is, however, a fact
of the reformulation of the world scene that we must all learn to comprehend.
Ummah: a new framework for the Muslim community
Muslim identity is deeply rooted in the traditions of Muslim societies,
something authentic and inescapable for one-quarter of humankind. The
collapse of the old order makes it possible not just to raise the issue of the
future of Muslim identity but to become serious about adopting it as a more
appropriate framework for constructing our future. This requires a greater
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306 The Ummah and tomorrow's world
change than replacing a three world format with a vision of four. It means
dissolving the old convention of looking at modernity as a diversity-eradicating material concept. The historical consciousness nurtured by the Muslim
worldview is an antithesis of this Hegelian postulate:
... Muslims could not allow history to be directed by chance, or by Caesar, as civil
principles. That is why they hurled themselves on its stage from the very beginning,
as it were, seizing history by the horns and directing it towards realization of the
purposes of morality. 1°
The problem is that Muslim tradition has become ossified and frozen in
history. The limitations of our traditionalism are part of the reason for our
contemporary problems and must be resolved if we are to realize our
capability to change things to make a more appropriate and better future.
We cannot fall back on extant traditionalism for this is deficient in thought
and critical ability. Our traditionalism became static as a preservation
strategy. Such traditionalism is an expression of powerful resistance by the
powerless. Stasis is not, however, how our tradition emerged, nor is static
traditionalism what it intends. What we have to recover is dynamism, our
ability to utilize our tradition as a code for changing things. We need to
begin by changing our perception of our own tradition.
Instead of speaking of the 'Muslim world' we need a debate that refines
our perception of the Qur'anic term Ummah and makes it more than an
abstraction. Ummah does not imply merely the community of all those who
profess to be Muslims. The single most important implication of Ummah is
that it is a moral conception of how Muslims should become a community
in relation to each other, other communities and the natural world. It is
manifesting in thought, action and openness a distinctive moral vision that
is the raison d'etre of the Ummah. It is an enduring commitment to the
dynamism of a constant set of moral concepts and precepts that creates the
contours and ultimate configuration of the Ummah.
The unifying force of the concept of Ummah is important in another
respect, that of its underlying cultural precepts. The Ummah is not a
cultural entity patterned on the norms of any one dominant group nor is it
the product of cultural contingency. It does not embrace cultural relativism
but exists within and is expressed through diverse cultural groups. As both
concept and practice, the Ummah in history provides a demonstration of
diversity within unity. This has enabled the history of the Ummah to be
marked by an extremely rich interaction with other intellectual traditions.
In the contemporary world the Ummah is certainly not an authentic
representation of its history and heritage. Nevertheless, it has survived the
colonial era, decolonization and the different choices made by Muslim
nations in their modern history. It has led to the creation of new institutions
and organizations. The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), for
instance, has consistently .generated enthusiasm through its discourses on
the malaise of the Ummah and common determination and commitment to
surmount contemporary problems. 11 Unfortunately such efforts are often
marginalized, inhibited or even Overpowered by the dominant world order.
What is Wrong with the new institutions, like the OIC, is what is wrong
throughout the Muslim world a n d with Muslim traditionalism. They are
un-thought through, incompatible'amalgams of incompatible elements tha't
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The Ummah and tomorrow's world
307
lack the coherence of a consistently applied dynamic frame of reference.
They are authentic products of the Muslim world as it is lived today, as a
fragmented, destabilized, unreal reality. Transformation into an Ummah will
call for changing things wholesale.
The extrinsic challenges to the Muslim world of today are real, as are
the intrinsic weaknesses of the Muslim community; together they frame the
agenda for change. The quality of life in Muslim countries leaves much to
be desired. They have one of the highest rates of illiteracy in the world,
most notably among women. They are seats of violent social and political
upheavals. They present us with the greatest disparity between rich and
poor. The dignity of humanity gets mutilated and consistently abused
through political repression and rampant corruption. The loss of self-identity
is nowhere more apparent than in the Muslim world--hypocritical abhorrence of western tradition and culture in their exhortations, while at the
same time an aping of its morally decadent facets and the trivialities of the
West in the crudest possible manner. If this catalogue is a realistic commentary on the affairs of the Ummah, then today's Umrnah is a fad, devoid of
substance.
This superficiality can be found even in the Muslim revivalist tradition
lending credence to the argument that:
... the revivalist formula consisted in reinterpreting and remodelling the borrowed
elements on the basis of a legitimacy derived from Islam. Irrespective of whether the
concern was with the right to revolt, equality, the fight against despotism or the
shaping of a modern society based on scientific progress, the 'patchwork' was
effected with reference to the revivalist premise of the existence of a modernity
peculiar to Islam.12
Today, the Muslim world which so superficially absorbs and is so deeply
affected by the dominant world order has in several respects become an
insular society, full of contradictions and dichotomies. Conscious of its
identity, only to find itself aggrieved, the Muslim world has bred a sense of
exclusivity that denies the openness that is an authentic meaning of
Ummah. It is only through recapturing the dynamic of being an Ummah
that we can open up, liberate ourselves from the stultifying hold of our
persecution complex. As an Ummah, in the genuine meaning of the term,
we must see our social structure as an interactive model, a means of relating
to others in dialogue. The concept of Ummah does not mean pluralism and
multiculturalism only within the domain of the Muslim world, within the
confines of the common profession of a common faith. It is a universalist
outlook that provides the means for existing within a genuinely pluralistic
world. It regards intellectual pluralism as consonant with the spirit of the
Islamic tradition.
The need for civilizational dialogue is not merely a moral imperative of
the Ummah, it is a desperate need for everyone in the exigencies of forging
a new world order. We have too little debate on global interdependence in
the face of population growth and environmental problems. The Ummah as
a community is required to acknowledge moral and practical responsibility
for the Earth as a trust and its members are trustees answerable for the
condition of the Earth. This makes ecological concerns a vital element in our
thinking and action, a prime arena where we must actively engage in
changing things. ~3
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308 The Ummah and tomorrow's world
The conceptual shift to Urnmah is a tool of reason, a source of critical
awareness. It calls on us to think differently about our environment because
we see it as a value, and through this paradigm of thought to devise new
ways of operating that are morally and ethically defensible and sustainable.
Such critical awareness cannot blind us to a central fact of modern
existence. We suffer the ecological effects of actions taken beyond the remit
of our control in other countries. More important, the majority of the
ecological damage to our common Spaceship Earth has been affected and
enacted by the mature industrial societies which have attained their present
affluence and material abundance thereby. Rectifying the real and potential
ecological hazards of today should reflect the wealth and responsibility of
the North. We will have to argue vociferously against anything that inequitably distributes the practical consequences of ecological profligacy. There
can be no acceptance of demanding higher standards from the Third World
than are recognized in the First; nor can we accept the use of ecological
criteria as rationales to penalize and starve the Third World of resources and
means of earning a living that they are forced into adopting for lack of
realistic alternatives. Such situations are common today and evidence of
double standards and hypocrisy.
Equity and justice are prerequisites and imperatives of Ummah. This
means putting the eradication of poverty at the top of the international
agenda and finding means to enable the poor and powerless to work their
way out of their poverty. Poverty is the most disabling of conditions, the
most destructive of human dignity, as well as of the natural environment.
The major challenge is making resources available to assist the poor to
become self-reliant through their own efforts by giving them the means to
attain self-sufficiency, rather than for them to remain in continual dependence. Set against our experience of the failure of the 'development'
decades, the applicability of this approach is demonstrable. The U m m a h is a
vehicle for making us active along these lines and a mouthpiece for the kind
of sanity the world needs in the sphere of international assistance if the
scourge of hunger, famine, want, neglect and all its horrors are to be
abolished.
The majority of trade today between nations of the South takes place
via the colonial routes of the North, through the circulation of their goods
in the economies of the industrialized countries. This adds to the cost of the
products imported and transported, and enhances middlemen profits of the
already rich and prosperous nations. It acts as a disincentive to the poorer
nations of the South because so much more of their resources must be
expended to acquire goods and services they need. The status quo acts to
give effective monopoly privileges to the rich nations, as an effective
restriction of trade on the poorer nations and a general diminution of world
trade as a whole that perpetuates impoverishment of the whole world to our
common disadvantage. But instituting South-South trade is no easy operation for it requires new instruments of financial accounting and transacting,
as well as the financing of new routes and transportation infrastructure. TM
U m m a h consciousness makes the eradication of illiteracy a first priority,
a moral crusade. It is the development tool par excellence, the greatest
practical means of enhancing future opportunities and the growth potential
of any country. Our concern must then become quality education for life
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The Ummah and tomorrow's world 309
for the new future that we envisage. Appropriate education through appropriate institutions, organizations and curricula, will demand and facilitate
internalizing and synthesizing the heritage and fruits of a pluralistic world so
that it can be handed on to the next generation as a livable reality. Only
with access to appropriate education can U m m a h consciousness take root
and make possible the U m m a h of tomorrow as a personification of the
pristine morality of Islam endowed with creative, constructive, critical
thought.
Beyond Islamic fundamentalism
To promote ' U m m a h consciousness' there are two important consequences
of our recent acquaintance with Islamic fundamentalism that must be
overcome. The prevalence of the term 'Islamic fundamentalism' shows,
once again, the triumph of reductive labels as a prop of ignorance and a
barrier to mutual understanding. Among Muslims it encourages a confusion
that enables redundant and moribund traditionalism to flourish. It enables
obscurantism to go unchallenged because it claims a legitimacy that we have
not yet learnt to debate, let alone deconstruct and think our way beyond.
What has come to be seen as Islamic fundamentalism sets a false agenda of
peripheral issues as the only topics that get serious and sustained attention.
In its conventional understanding, Islamic fundamentalism causes division
and engenders unnecessary conflict.
How Islamic fundamentalism has developed among Muslims gives
credence to the hysteria of non-Muslim reaction and rejection. The nonMuslim world ignores or misconstrues the authenticity of the Islamic
reawakening to all our detriments. It uncritically accepts all its own stereotypes and ignorance of Islam as a vehicle of understanding to the detriment
of all. In an increasingly interdependent world there is a new agenda for
what we need to know, if we are to make peace a reality that is attainable
and sustainable, rather than being dragged by our mutual ignorance into
crisis after crisis.
The exclusivist outlook of Islamic fundamentalism violates the necessary
moral meaning of the concept of Ummah. It enables some expressions to
become Muslim imperialism writ large or writ small. This runs counter to
the model of the Medina state under the leadership of the Blessed Prophet
Muhammad. Recapturing the contemporary meaning of that model would
necessitate that Muslims engage with other people, nations, worldviews,
religions and ideologies to work for a set of moral objectives that we can
and must define together. But it takes us much further. It requires that we
respect the U m m a h of other people. It is a concept that first had communal
existence in the multicultural and multireligious community of the Medina
state whose written constitution guaranteed the right of continued selfexpression and development through their own institutions to its non-Muslim citizens. The history of the U m m a h has shown exemplary, almost
unique models of multiracial, multicultural, multireligious, pluralist societies. If ever we had need of recovering such an imperative, it is now.
The reductionist nature of our view of the world, the dominant mode of
thought for the past four decades, was a means of perpetuating injustice
and the intolerable in the name of laudable objectives. We need to
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310 The Ummah and tomorrow's world
construct a future devoid of one-dimensional reductionism, a plural future
where all peoples can flourish and collaborate with fewer false restlaints
and constraints, fewer misguided impediments. We need to think about the
world and ourselves differently to enable that change to come into being.
We need to create the freedom and tolerance for people to think about
themselves through their own identity as a moral, sustainable, expressible
whole.
Notes and references
1. Peter F. Drucker, The New Realities (Oxford, Heinemann, 1989).
2. Francis Fukuyama, 'The "End of History" debate', Dialogue 89, 1990, pages 8-13.
3. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: Introduction to History, translated by F. Rosenthal
(London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), originally published around 1377.
4. Malek Bennabi, Islam in History and Society, translated by Asma Rashid (Islamabad, Islamic
Research Institute, 1988), originally published in 1954.
5. Ibid, page 7.
6. Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (New York,
Harper and Row, 1987), page 191.
7. For the background to the Muslims and Islamic revival in Russia, see Amir Taheri, Crescent
in a Red Sky (London, Hutchinson, 1990).
8. See James Adam, Engines of War: Merchants of Death and the New Arms Race (New York,
The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990).
9. For an analysis of democratic, positive change in Muslim societies, see Anwar Ibrahim,
'From things change to changing things', in Ziauddin Sardar (editor), An Early Crescent: The
Future of Knowledge and the Environment in Islam (London, Mansell, 1989).
10. Ismail R. AI-Faruqi, 'Islam as culture and civilization', in Salem Azzam (editor), Islam and
Contemporary Society (London, Islamic Council of Europe/Longman, 1987), page 166.
11. On the origins and developmentof OIC, see Hasan Moinuddin, The Charter of the Islamic
Conference and Legal Framework o f Economic Cooperation Amongst Its Membership States
(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987); and Abdullah al Ahsan, OIC: The Organisation of the
Islamic Conference (Herndon, VA, International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1988).
12. Bertrand Badie, 'The impact of the French Revolution on Muslim societies: evidence and
ambiguities', International Social Science Journal, 119, 1989, page 15.
13. On the ecological and environmental ideas in Islam, see S. Parvez Manzoor, 'Environment
and values: the Islamic perspective', in Ziauddin Sardar (editor), The Touch of Midas:
Science, Values and Environment in Islam and the West (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984); and H. M. Ateshin, 'Urbanisation and environment: an Islamic perspective', in Sardar (editor), op c/t, reference 9.
14. See The South Commission, Towards a New Way To Measure Development (Caracas, 1989).
FUTURES April 1991