Change Management:Marx and Muslims

``While the Muslim World remains mired in debates about whether it is okay to eat a crow or not or whether namaz should be prayed with shalwars pulled up or not, the world has left us .............``

Who is/are this us; & how has muslim world affected this whoever is us?

What label , even hyphenated, would you use for yourself & in which order?
You may use the list from your own writing: Marxist, leftist, secularist, liberal, capitalist, Islamist, muslim or add more of your own.

Which of these labels would fast-track you into, as you put it......`` in the race for science, technology and commerce``.

Please do not use `Pakistani`: you already have an ID card/Passport for that.

......Like all processes, it started with the few and is now slowly expanding to many and many more, and with this revolution we saw a gradual dimming of borders and walls.....

You mean increased visa & immigration restrictions, fingerprinting, police enquiries, racism, religionism etc etc.

Were not borders always WIDE open ( or `porous` as the western thUggs say now) before the British baboons started polluting civilisations?

..an SAP consultant or an Oracle consultant will be a consultant first and then a Pakistani or an Indian or a Muslim or a Hindu or a Christian or what have you.....

So now are you a lawyer first & then father, son, husband, Pakistani, muslim, secularist?
Are all these personaa mutually exclusive? Do they have to? Are you deciding for others what they should be `first`?

Muslims should embrace it wholeheartedly. The refusal to do so will only make transition more painful and slow. Instead theMuslims should revisit the change management technique that we believe the Holy Prophet (PBUH) left us in form of Ijtehad and Ijmah...............

Again muslims and us? Do you do it subconsciously? Wouldn`t just `We`` or `We muslims` enhance your credibility, endear you a bit more to those you denigrate, like the western thUggs, as `Islamists`. It is quite possible that they might then invite you to their debates & then you can perform your long awaited Ijtehad & politely, gingerly, in an evolutionary manner tell them that the crow is haraam & that they need not even wear a shalwaar; a tehmad, in the sunnat of pbuh, is perfectly ok as well.

I cant understand why somebody should always be looking for ``isms``. If any ``ism`` is indeed required then we must remember that this is the age of Individualism. It is the individuality, individual enterprise and individual efforts that count. No matter which country or group you belong to today, your success or failure will entire depend on you.

To my mind, the Muslims should stop thinking in terms of ``us`` ,``we``, ``muslims`` etc. and they should start looking themselves as individuals. They should understand they are individuals first and then connected to a wide spectrum of mankind through their religion.

Movement of individuals from one stream to another is rather easy but to move an ocean on 1.5 or so billion people of different races, colors, nationality, temperament etc. etc. from one set of thought to another is almost impossible and thus futile.

Re: # 1

What`s your problem? It`s obvious he`s referring to his identity as a Muslim.

Oh RIGHT...I forgot, the bloody Ahmadiyya isn`t one in the first place!

I do not think that the Muslim world is busy debating eating crows, maybe the community Mullah is, that however, does not translate into the ``Muslim world``. The story of our times started long before the industrial revolution, it was when the seeds of the renaissance were being laid, when Islam gave birth to a new world. Capitalism did not start with the few, it started with the many and now has concentrated into the few, unlike what the author mentions, where anarchy ``beyond our wildest dreams`` reigns in production so that over half the world lives on the brink of starvation, in a world that can feed them many times over but chooses not to keep an ideology intact, and that ideology is neither ``radical Islam`` nor ``communism`` but an ideology of ultra capitalism married with the military metaphysic that would rather destroy food for the sake of profit than feed the needy. Going forward with this ideology, as the author is suggesting, would spell guaranteed disaster for not just Pakistan by any country in the third world.

That said, Marxism did not rise concomitantly with the development of ``radical Islam``, whatever he means by that, he referred to two completely divergent personalities, that of Pervez and Maududi. Marxism took root in an industrialized society, where the economic institution was strong, the post colonial radicalized Islam developed as a reaction to a society where the economic institution was weak and religious institutions, the be all of the people. We can look at a similar phenomenon today among African Americans in the US. They are excluded from equal participation in the economic setup; as a result we find that their churches do not only serve a religious function but an economic and political one as well. The political civil rights movement was thus largely a religious movement to start with. Modern hizb-ut-tahrir types represent a total distortion of the Quran, there is no concept of an all powerful khalifa type figure in Islam. Taking the model of Muslim rulers of medieval times and canonizing that as “Islam” is a distortion of Islam, and serves as fodder for those who want to demonize it.

The nation state system was not a ``natural evolution`` of anything. They were artificial entities that went against natural boundaries in most cases, part of the neocolonial setup to control what was previously colonized in a cost effective manner. The power elite, the neo colonial masters have never recognized any bureaucratic control where it concerns them, the whole world is their playing field, they do not respect national sovereignty or laws. These controls that form political entities, the nation states only work to keep in check the populations living inside them or to play one against the other for exploitation purposes.

The corporate media does not display ``freedom of speech``. Information is filtered through well-structured filters that present the current social structure as the only valid one, and are full of distractions rather than real issues. This is quite thoroughly documented by Chomsky and Herman. These media corporations are big business and private ownership and corporate interest is their bread and butter, they never cross well-defined lines. They reach millions, justify wars, contour people`s opinions in whatever direction then want and you talk about freedom? How many people can an ordinary individual reach compared to these media giants not even a tiny fraction.

``Accepting the existing realities`` does not mean, as the author is suggesting, that people submit to the US and say, ``Ok do whatever the hell you want to do with us``. Existing realities dictate that our world has gone terribly wrong and we need to stop this direction it has taken and re-chart the course using radical measures because time is running out. The Jihadists are part and parcel of that wrong direction, they legitimize the theft of our resources by the US elite, they play into their hands as distraction and moving attention away from what is important, the survival of humanity and their basic need fulfillment. Islam does not seek an Islamic state, it seeks a community that serves humanity, ``you are the best community that has been raised for HUMANKIND`` says the Quran. Communism does not seek a state, the state according to Marx would wither away, after a period of adjustment, when people (the workers) realize that they are the same with similar needs. What was missing in Marx`s formula was an ideology that develops human and not only class-consciousness that allocates status based on such consciousness. The humanity in Marx`s ideas can succeed only through a binding ideology that transcends materialism; Islam is its hope, not the other way around.

The author tries to bring Islam and communism together, as is the case with many apologists of the status quo, just to frighten the masses by associating it with a well-known foe, so that Muslims genuinely studying alternatives to the current system are scared. In the US apologists for capitalism try to bring these two together for a different purpose, to justify demonizing Islam. He thus ends up with a thoroughly confused article that fits in as distraction and not much else.

re: sanjay # 2

``I cant understand why somebody should always be looking for ``isms``.``

Why not? Aren`t these isms and lams just sets of ideas?

#5

But how long can a person live on borrowed ideas?? If Muslims are looking for some ideas, why cant they generate their own... their own ``isms`` rather than looking for some concepts originated somewhere else under different circumstances.

There is no doubt that Islam of today has reached a dead end and does not know where and how to move ahead..that is how to break or climb or jump-over this wall...But rather than looking here and there, they have to sit down together and decide their future course of action...i.e Religous Reforms to be precise.

Manto,

Let`s see if my understanding is correct. What you`re saying is that since Islamists+Capitalists together bashed up Communism+socialism, they are now man and wife and Islamists should apply change management to improve their sex-life and get rid of their inhibitions etc.

Hmmm... If that is correct then that is an intriguing thought.

what is the big illumination here? Islam and marxism are brothers from another mother. Both are incongruent with human attributes. Both shun individualism in favor of a centralized and robotic governance and economy. No big whup..I am just surprised we are so short oncontent on chowk

manto
``workers will own the means of production`` marx
they already do in the west since most of the stock is owned by the pension funds and insurance firms, maybe not they he predicted.

... it is okay to eat crow ....

............ and that is exactly what the muslims need to do - eat crow, admit that they were wrong in chasing a bedouin`s wet dream and move on with their lives .......

......... eating crow is the first step on the way to redemption

............ and what is for desert, you might ask?

......... humble pie !

.....and if i have some time, later in the day, i will give you the recipes and instructions for :

1) boiling crow and eating it wthouth the feathers sticking in your teeth
2) baking humble pie and eating it without getting it all over your face

re: Sanjay # 6

Perhaps there is something in what you say. That`s clearly not the Indian way, nor the way I would pray for Indian people to think, but as they often say in Arabia, different strokes for different blokes. :)

Re: # 11 by Hamidm2

LOL....terrific

Re: # 4

masadi,

... do you want the recipe , or are you still sticking to your guns and waiting to be rewarded with man o` salwa ............ trust me, forget about all this crap about ``you are the best community that has been raised for HUMANKIND`` ........ that, and two dollars, won`t buy you a cup of coffee at starbucks ...........

........first, you have to eat crow ........

Hamdani Sahib

Interesting, if flawed, article. Some comments:

Firstly, although parrallels have always been drawn between Marx`s ideas and trends within the Islamic world in terms of social equity, I have not come across any Marxist Muslim thinkers as such. Perhaps you could show me otherwise (Moudoudi and Pervez Sahibaan are not too convincing). Marx`s ideology in toto is of-course radically anti-religious and any muslim attempting to represent it would be shot down. However this may not detract from an element of the basic reality of observations of exploitation of resources and especially labour within a capitalist framework. This is perhaps why concepts of Marxism exist in an uneasy condition within the Islamic world.

Yet it is incorrect to equate theocracy as espoused by HT and the like alongside communism. The basic similarity which you allude to is that they are (1) reactionary to capitalist / imperialist trends. It could further be admitted in response to this that (2) both communism and theocracy aim at various forms of dictatorial control in their ideological guise. From this we could also say that (3) both develop the concept of `re-inforced dogmatism` as Popper put it i.e. that those external to the concept are inferior to it. So there are similarities due essentially to their reactionary nature. However the ideologies themselves are like chalk and cheese: one espousing economic egalitarianism with the other attempting to claim God`s mandate on earth.

The other rather surprising claim that you make is the lack of ideological basis of western capitalism. Infact I would argue quite the reverse that western capitalism exerts an ideological monopoly by way of imagined concepts of freedom of information, democracy etc. I would go on but I am sure that masadi has already dealt with it and there is no need to overegg the pudding.

ylh,

..... thank you for the first line of your wonderful article - it has brought sunshine into my life on this dull and dreary day ........ i feel inspired !

cheers and keep up the good work :)