Sectarianism Main Factor Responsible for Muslim World’s Problems
This is according to Professor Abdulaziz Sachedina, professor and IIIT Chair in Islamic Studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, who shared his comments and viewpoints in an interview with IQNA on the current atmosphere and circumstances surrounding the Muslim community in the world.
What follows is a rough transcription of some passages excerpted from the interview.
Islam is a uniting force that builds identity of all Muslims around the world within the Islamic community. When it comes to Muslim community, you need to put emphasis on Muslim identity as it comes first. In the context of Islamic world, we are Muslim human beings, sharing common values and aspirations while keeping our own national identities at the national level, including cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and social identities.
What has caused huge troubles and hurdles in the Islamic community is the modern notion of nationalism combined with sectarianism, which is related to extremism that goes to the extreme of either side by losing balance. This is what we should be really worried about. As I said earlier, Islam is a uniting force but some political leaders do not want to see that by overestimating their national identities as a new wave of nationalism.
The Muslim Ummah as a whole is facing many problems and challenges such as democratization, human rights, equal opportunity, gender equality, extremism, radicalization, and many other issues because Muslims are not united.
Unity was, from my viewpoint, the main message conveyed by Imam Khomeini to the Islamic world. I found the message refreshing and powerful as it was aimed at empowering Muslim people, telling us that we have an obligation to change. The late Imam wanted to see Muslims take more responsibility for their future; otherwise superpowers will make them change, but according to their own interests.
Imam Khomeini’s personality was unique, pure, symbolic, charismatic, and incomparable, the characteristics that has held him as the most important figure of Islamic world for decades.
Given the current situation of the Islamic world, I regret to say that I am very pessimistic about the future of the Muslim Ummah. One Hadith by the Prophet of Islam (peace and blessing of Allah be upon him and his progeny) says "People follow the religion of those who exercise authority over them.” On the other hand, the Quran says "and that man shall have nothing but what he strives for and that his striving shall soon be seen” (53, 39-40).
This is a matter of cause and effect or the law of causality. In the framework of the Islamic community, the cause is some Muslim nations’ rulers while the effect is the people who cannot change the cause unless they take power in their hands.
When the Arab Spring (Islamic Awakening) happened a few years ago, we had lots of hope. And now we see how it failed except for Tunisia although the country itself is also problematic. Overall, the massive uprisings led to a failure of democratic revival of the peoples' rights toward the Arab Spring as we have not seen anything concretely positive coming out of the movement.
To sum up,
I think the Muslim world is in crisis, but we know that the government forces
in those countries involved do not want their people to know as they make
desperate efforts to keep them ignorant in order to rule them by means of force
and division through the practice of divide and rule policy.
