Role of Islam as a Unifying Force

¶ … role of Islam as a unifying force

Perhaps more than any other religion in the world, Islam has put to work its less obvious sense in order to unify the peoples sharing the same belief. Through its art, its common language and its judicial system that has the Koran teachings at its base, Islam was a unifying force among the Arabic peoples of the Arabic Peninsula, Northern Africa and the Middle East.

There is a short discussion I would like to address here and that is to identify the differences between culture and civilization. This will help us see how religion LO is included in this set of concepts. From my point-of-view, religion LO can be considered an element of civilization through its cultural component. If we exclude Marxist ideology that argue that civilization is but a certain level that culture has attained and make no distinction between the two, when we refer to culture, we refer to the spiritual values of a people or a group of people. In this way, it is the spirit that gives birth to cultural manifestations and we connect culture directly to the spirit. As for civilization, this would, in my opinion, include both spiritual (that is cultural) and material values and it is a larger concept.

I have addressed this in the beginning of my essay as to draw a line between the two concepts and point out that if we can argue that all cultural activities are inherently religious (and this can certainly be argued), then we can consider that, in general, because of the material attribute that the concept of civilization shares, religion LO is but a component of this larger concept. However, if we take a closer look at our thesis regarding the Islamic civilization, we will see that, more than any other religion, the concept of religious civilization appears. We almost never talk about a religious civilization. We talk about the Buddhist culture or about the Christian culture, but we are seldom inclined to talk about the Buddhist civilization. That is because by associating the concept of materiality to that of civilization, we are inclined to separate it from the spiritual aspect, or rather include the latter. This is not the case with Islam.

I have addressed in my opening paragraph three argumentative elements that I will use in sustaining my point-of-view. These refer to Islam's unifying role through the Islamic judicial system, through Islamic art and through the common language. Islamic law plays perhaps the most important unifying role. This is mainly because it is more than a set of rules and regulations, but predicates moral principles by which the believer must abide. Substantially, the Muslim (that is "one who submits") lives face with Allah at all times and Islam is part of his everyday life.

If we compare this to Christianity, for example, laicity in the Christian world has been clearly defined and has been so for a couple of hundred years. Even in the Middle Ages, the Church and Inquisition did not execute the sentence itself, but left to the laical state. We do not have an unifying concept in Christian law: all we have is some moral commandments that are strictly religion O. And have no interpolation with LO. As pointed out in the syllabus, the Western world thought long ago the separation between Church and State and this has not changed. Referring to the law systems, in Europe, for example, they are not of religious influence, but have a clear laicity about them: most of them relate to the Napoleonic Code, from 1806, which was conceived in a period of less religiousness, following the French Revolution.

However, in Islam, this separation between State and Church has never taken place. The countries forming the Pan-Arab League (I am referring to them as a form of exemplification. I am not excluding the Islamic peoples of Malaysia or Indonesia) share a common law system, which is not the case of any the Christian states. More than this, the common law system is based on a set of moral issues that come from religion O. And on which the law system (identifiable as a manifestation religion LO) is based. In Islam we have the perfect interdependence between the two forms of religion in a law system that is followed by all believers. The difference from the Christian states is that, while in the Western world, law is an attribute of the State, in Islamic states, it is an attribute of the religious institution and of religious tradition.

While in the Western states, the different forms of law divide the states, in Islamic ones, law unites through its religious vein.

The second element I wished to address was Islamic art and the way this becomes a unifying force. If we consider again as a term of comparison, we see that we quite rarely refer to the Christian Art, and when we do it only so as to differentiate from other forms of religious art. We refer to Gothic Art, to Baroque Art, that is we identify currents with different common characteristics. We speak however of Islamic because it is a certain characteristic of Islamic spirituality.

First of all, when we address Islamic art, we must think of the fact that one of God's names is al-Jamil, which means the Beautiful. I am referring to this as an argument in favor of way culture identifies itself with religion: any beautiful creation represents a form of Godly manifestation. Just as much as he manifests himself through religion, God manifests himself through art. If we study this closer, we could think that in Islam, art is just as much a way to reach God as religion is.

Let's take a look at the sacred building of the mosque. The mosque literally means the place of prostration, specific to the Islamic religion. However, before the prostration, man stands in the mosque and this can be seen as a mean to unify people. Indeed, the concept that man is God's left-tenant on the Earth, concept that is shared by all Islamic believers, has a unifying force in itself: ALL of the Islamic believers are God's representative here on Earth. ALL of these believers are perfect believers. We have no story of damnation here, but a purifying concept of superman. Of course, in pointing out this, I am not really making a clear distinction between religion O. And religion LO, but I was referring to the role of the mosque and how this connects to Islamic concept of the perfect man. And in this sense, we can perhaps better understand some of the conflicts going on today in the world: the Islamic people believe that God has made man a perfect creature. The Christian people believe that God has damned Man and expelled him from the Garden of Eden. There is no wonder why in one case religion unifies in perfection, while in the other it caused hundreds of years of religious wars.

As one pointed out, the mosques are usually hidden from the public, usually by a bazaar or secondary buildings. This is not indeed a sign of disrespect, but the mosque is in itself a unifying force for Islamism. It is the place where, besides prayer, other activities can take place within the community. It can be a place of social gathering, a place where economic transactions take place (in or around the mosque). It is in this way that religion finds way to penetrate in every aspect of the believer's life and every Islamic believer finds a mean to join the rest of the community within the religious boundaries. In this sense, we could compare the role of the mosque in Islamic faith with the role the Church had in the Middle Ages for example. Then the Church constituted a place of schooling (if we take note of the many schools that had developed around the local churches or monasteries), a place of learning (we only have to think of the monasteries in Ireland that have kept alive much of the Roman learning spirit throughout the Dark Ages), a place of settling local disputes of the community and a place of social gathering and spectacles. It is much the same that today the mosque plays the part (and has done so for some hundreds of years now) of cement material for the Islamic community.

Symbolically, much as, in the Middle Ages, the local Cathedral was placed in the center of a city (we only have to think of cities such as Bruges, Paris, where Ile del la Cite was the center of Paris at that time or London, with Westminster), the mosque will almost always be geographically situated in the center of the Muslim city or town. The mosque is also the place from where the muehdins call out for the collective prayer, in yet another form of unity bestowed about by the mosque.

The unifying form of Islam as seen through its art component is perhaps most evident in the Islamic decorations. Even if different in appearance, the resemblance between the decorations used in a mosque in Afghanistan for example and a mosque in Spain are obvious. Why is that? One of the obvious reasons could be that, as is the case with law, art is in itself an expression of religion and the principles by which religion governs, among them unity and unicity (of God), can find their place in artistic manifestation as well. Islam art can indeed reveal the inherent religiousness of art.

The unity of Islamic art directly relates to the unity God in Islam. Otherwise, we cannot possibly explain the common cement that links artistic expressions in places that are geographically so far away from each other. But we must consider the fact that in Islam culture there is no separation between the sacred and the profane, artistic constructions are but a form of religious manifestations. When we have a single religion that believes in the principle of unity and an art that is the expression of religious fervor, then we can definitely conclude that art reflects the principle of unity. It is indeed a mere syllogism: religion expresses the principle of unity, art expresses religion, then art expresses the principle of unity. I can therefore state beyond doubt that Islamic art fully expresses the principle of unity and that Islamic art unites.

Let's consider for a moment the art of calligraphy that is a specific form of cultural manifestation within Islam. Religion LO manifests itself here as well: it is believed that writing, hence calligraphy, can be traced all the way back to God, who is believed to have written the celestial version of the Koran. It is a distinct form of artistic manifestation, but all the same, it also embodies the religious form of manifestation and is a unifying force itself.

The last issue that I need to address in proving that Islam had, as religion LO, a unifying role throughout the people sharing this belief, is that of the language. We must remember that, with the exception of countries in the Extreme Orient, such as Malaysia or Indonesia, most of the other countries, especially those in Northern Africa and the Middle East, where Islam actually started and to which we refer here, speak a common language: Arabic. The importance of this fact as a unifying factor is not to be underestimated. Let us consider only the fact that God's word could be spread by using a common language understood by ALL, even by the lower classes. If we compare this to Latin, a similar mean of spreading the word of God, the differences are immense: Latin was only understood in the Middle Ages by a low number of highly educated people. Most of the commoners could not read, write or even understand Latin.

The case of Arabic is completely different: the simple man of the street spoke Arabic at home, when conducting his business, in the social environment that he lived in and this was meant that Islam and Mohamed's word could be spread to everybody by the simplest of means.

I have addressed two matters that have to do with Islamic civilization, that is law and language and one that has to do with Islamic culture, that is Islamic art. The main link between the three is the high level of unity that Islam provides. Even if spread across a multitude of states and crossing different state boundaries, Islam faith, principles and concepts can be transmitted to its believers by using common art concepts, decorations and principles, a common language and common law, inspired by the Koran teachings. All these are meant to prove that Islam provided through its religion LO component a mean of unifying people from different, geographically dispersed areas by ensuring a common ground, a base of moral principles from which everything else could be constructed.

2. The growing role of humanism has replaced the role of religion O. In the development of world civilization ever since the European Renaissance. As I have pointed out towards the European Renaissance, it is understood that I will refer mainly to Christianity as the central point of my argumentation. The European Renaissance, dating its beginnings perhaps somewhere in the 12th or 13th century (I would be inclined to consider Dante as the first to humanist) separates the Early Middle Ages, including its Dark Ages, where the role of religion O. was primordial in every manifestation of the human society, from the period ever since, when humanism and laicity began to replace it. Because of this consideration, we can state and later argument that the Renaissance marked a milestone in the evolution of religion O.

Laicity is, in my opinion, a direct consequence of humanism. It seems that the debate should start with humanism, as it could be the clue to the whole comparison. Humanism in itself represents the purest, free expression of the human spirit. Hence, its name of course. Why do I call it the purest form? Because, in my opinion, religion O. As it manifested itself in the Middle Ages is a form of oppression, of censorship against the human spirit. I believe that the human spirit never found a true form of expression for itself until it was able to free itself from the taras of religion.

As the human being found that it could express itself freely, that it could believe in himself before believing in a superior being, laicity could take its place. Of course, laicity was also a speculation of the State, which somehow replaced the Church in setting rules and regulations, some just, many unjust, as a mean to point to order, but somehow we seem to find more understanding in the setting of rules by an institution of the state than by the arbitrary institutions of the Church. Somehow, this is probably because we find the State more worldly, closer to us than we do religion. And this began with Renaissance.

Until that time, all was happening under the overshadowing Church. Every aspect of life was overviewed (let us not say controlled) by the Church. If we have a look to the thousand of years of history that followed the Fall of Rome in 476, we find that the Church's role in society was overwhelming. Christianity had by that time already organized itself as a big "ism": it had existed for 500 years. For 200 years, it had been the official religion of the Romans (as proclaimed by Constantine the Great in 313), and since 395, it had been the only religion of the Empire. As Rome fell in 476, a void of power was created. Indeed, the Empire was divided into a myriad of little states, feudal states and administrative divisions that replaced the Roman strong administration.

The Christian church was there to replace that void of power. The Pope was to keen enough to proclaim the suzerain right of the Sacred Church over the feudal rulers. This has a great importance, as it explains the involvement of the Church in everyday life and will later be used in comparing it to its role after the European Renaissance. Until then, the Church and religion O. had ruled the spiritual world of the people. Now, as feudalism began to grow, it proclaimed its involvement in the material world as well. Continuing until 1305, when the Pope was exiled to Avignon and lost much of his prestige, the role of Papacy in the Middle Ages is unthinkable.

In a certain way, this can be explained and discussed: the Middle Ages, especially the Dark Ages that saw the rise of Papal influence, represented a period when nobody could vouch for security. Life expectancy probably never surpassed 35 and the afterlife could present itself as eternal pain and torture unless you followed the exact rules of the Church. There was no one to turn to except your feudal overlord and the Church. The feudal overlord provided protection and material security. The Church provided for your spiritual salvation.

I have to underline this point, as it explains why the role of religion O. became so preponderant during the Middle Ages. The word around which it all revolves is security. Christian religion provided a very intelligent way of providing for the human soul and that was by introducing damnation and, later on, the principle of free choice (liberum arbitrum). By knowing that you have been damned through the original seen and lost God's grace, you were forced to live your whole life waiting for the Judgement Day and hope that the afterlife would not turned out to be everything that real life had. The free choice principle was even more shrewd: teodicity had to explain why God permitted so much evil and pain in the world and why he let you make mistake. So, Christian dogmatics provided a clear-cut explanation for this: when you committed a sin, you had given up on God's divine inspiration and you were on your own: it was not God that had made the decision of sin for you, but yourself, through your sinful nature had committed the sin.

I am pointing out towards these Christian concepts so as to understand how religion O. worked in order to manipulate the masses and how its role was so preponderant. Let us consider Dante's example, whom I consider the first true humanist, but where the spirit of the conquering religion O. is still striking. In his Inferno, he travels in the underworld and meets some of the historical characters. In one of the rings are placed the ancient philosophers. How do we understand this? Characters that had lived many hundreds of years before Christianity and that had never known it went to hell because they did not abide by the principles of a religion that they had no knowledge of?

If Dante, a true humanist in many aspects, writes about this, then we can understand what the conception of the simple folk on the street would have been. No one could overpower the eternal fire. It was the ultimate weapon for religion O.

Religion O. made its presence felt especially in what learning and study was concerned. Most of the manifestations in literature and philosophy in the 5th to the 12th century are strongly related to religion. Debates between the Arians and the Orthodox about the nature of Christ, the existence of several schismatics, Gnostics, etc. shifted philosophy from its discussion and debate about man to that about God. Christianity spent almost one thousand years debating whether or not God was one with Christ or not and introducing more and more principles about how to be an even better Christian, so that you may have a shot at salvation.