The Good City and the Bad City
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Tarek
A. Ghanem
Staff writer – IslamOnline
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18/06/2002
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“Starry Night”
by Vincent Van Gogh |
In contemporary times, urban life has obscured man from his elemental values. With the realization of individual city-structure, industrial planning, and a sole (pop) culture coloring everything, the situation doesn’t look good. Behind the gray opaque curtains of modernity, westerly custom designs, and trans-communal cities provide the cultural, economic, ecological and spiritual forms of all non-western life forces, especially those of Islam.
Man’s “invention” of the city was the most farsighted feat on his journey of civilization. The inhabitation of the early polis or city-states marked the dawn of arts, writing, science, legal and political systems, crafts and organized trade. Ironically, the ancient cities were created as religious centers: Jerusalem, Zion, Rome, Constantinople, Lahasa (capital of Tibet), Makkah, Vatican and Medina.
Modernity, however, has made the city the hub of secular life. All around the world, religious values are more prevalent in rural areas. Worldly urbanism drives pious people into monasteries or seclusion for peace of mind and meditation. But is seclusion the answer to the noisy, urban and secular pulsations of the city?
In the City Hall and in the City Hole
Civic life in Medina, or al-Madina Al-Munawarah, was the foundation of Muslim civilization. The masjid (mosque) acted as the nucleus of the city with a dual function: religious and worldly for the purpose of Muslim refinement and civility.
Perhaps because of the demise of the function of the masjid as a place to discuss civil affairs (not unlike a city hall), such as politics, social bonds, celebrations and knowledge of all sorts (especially in a faith that does not honor monasticism, but is based on socialization), that only religion has remained in the mosque.
But Muslims, and non-Muslims alike, live the dreams and the nightmares of the contemporary city simultaneously. Efficiency, organizational structures, technological sophistication, up-to-date affairs and businesses are, in many ways, blessings, but also lonesome, stressful, artificial, hollow, polluted, consumerist, and Machiavellian in their competitiveness. The resultant social psychoses are all curses and plagues.
Those who think that in order to conduct an Islamically devout life-style, the axiom and domain of social order should be kept to out of the city, or on the outskirts, are very mistaken. For Islam, since its genesis, and civic modes of existence are two sisters.
Thinkers from the Beautiful Days of Muslim
Hadara (Civilization)
As soon as the beloved Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) settled in Medina, he signed with all the tribes what is commonly referred to as the first constitution in the history of humanity, i.e., the constitution of Medina, paving the way for modern civil life. In fact, Medina was called Yathrib before his arrival. It was only after his migration that it was changed to al-Madina al-Munawarah (the Luminous City).
From then on the city continued to be the embryo of Muslim polity and civilization. The early Muslim philosopher al-Farabi, who is known as the philosopher of the “city,” in his valuable work Fi mabadi’ Ara’ Ahl al-Madina al-Fadila (On the principles of the opinions of the inhabitants of the Good City), drew a model of civilization based on “a virtuous establishment” and “attainment of happiness” as well as Shari`ah based egalitarianism. Also, Ibn-Khaldun, the political philosopher par excellence and father of sociologists, in al-Muqadima (The Introduction) articulated a scheme that represents social institutions and human activities removed from philosophical utopia.
The vanguard Muslim philosopher, Parvez Manzoor, once wrote that the works of al-Farabi, which is based on Greek philosophy and hinders any attempt to create an “open society” (like Plato), and Ibn-Khaldun, which is rather cyclic and deterministic, highlights the existential medium of Muslim civility and urban life.
Post-Everything!
Islam surfaces as the ultimate alterative to contemporary urban life despite postmodernism. Postmodernism is where consciousness has become divorced from ethics and committed to materialistic reasoning (after a long process of separation starting from the Magna Carta and later the renaissance), and where post-civilization has its eyes fixed on a single universal moral order.
On the individual level, Muslim consciousness, the multi-dimensional and transcending worldly sphere it holds, is the remedy for urban illnesses. The paramount answer to urban secularism is the modern masjid: one that is avant-garde, equipped with multi-media and advanced. The masjid cannot be marginalized, and its function is too essential to be contained within its walls. If it is not multi-functional, for example as a school, library, social assembly, city hall, grass-root parliament, and even the center of all lawful activities, then its value is depreciated.
From the Masjid, Muslim solidarity will cure the social needs of its community. And by drawing parallels from the life of the Prophet (peace be upon him), anxiety and egoism, characteristic of urban and metropolitan life, can be substituted by making meditation part of urban life (or a vacation from it). Consider the periods of time that the Prophet used to spend in reflection in the cave of hira’. That is our model. Human beings are so caught up nowadays in their city lives forgetting that they are part of humanity and the universe (needless to say, sometimes a nation or a culture).
Secularism has even made vacationing a trait in itself. Halal (lawful) vacations and family trips have become almost unworkable. The Prophet (peace be upon him) used to race with his wife, ‘A’isha, regularly outside Medina - even when he was in his early sixties (hadith, Musnad Ahmad).
On the universal level, as Manzoor pleads in his work
Beyond
City and Civilization, the “city” becomes the medium for Islam as a dynamic and holistic worldview in the universal context:
The most valuable concept of Islam, even for to the post-civilizational, one-world conscience, will, undoubtedly, be the Umma, the value-community of Islam which is only temporally and historically parochial, but which is also simultaneously with it, spiritually, ideationally and ideologically, truly universal… Only by perceiving the world as a Community and not as a society may we arrive at the one-world moral consciousness of the post-civilizational man. Hence, the warm, humane - and feminine - image of the Umma is likely to acquire more cogency and appeal in the post-civilization era - provided it is not interpreted parochially but is construed as our gift to the human community.
Conceptually, Islam has been apprehended as a faith, community and civilization... Islam is an autonomous, self-sufficient, non-historical system that does not interact with the world around it; in fact, it does not need it - little different, that is to say, from the ‘Ghetto models’ of Islam that some of the contemporary Muslims are so fond of promoting in the name ‘civilizational’ self-sufficiency and autonomy! Of all the conceptual straitjackets applied to Islam, the one cut in the shape of the City is the least fitting… What is true of Islam is true of the world as well. When we conceive our abode in terms of the city-image, the global order we aspire for appears static and civilizational. Should we, on the other hand, wish to create a dynamic moral world-order, we’ll have to invent metaphors and images that go beyond the mankind’s parochial experience of the City and the Civilization. In the post-civilizational age, the City as a metaphor of perfect order has run its course.
The
author encourages your comments. Please e-mail him at t.ghanem@islam-online.net
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