ISLAM
AT THE
CROSSROADS

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This book was written nearly half a century ago -to be precise, in the autumn of 1933 -and was first published in Delhi in 1934, and subsequently in Lahore: a plea to the Muslims of my generation to avoid a blind imitation of Western social forms and values, and to try to preserve instead their Islamic heritage which once upon a time had been responsible for the glorious, many-sided historical phenomenon comprised in the term "Muslim civilization".

This first literary effort of mine on a purely Islamic subject found an immediate response among English-speaking Muslims of what was then an undivided India, and was reprinted in many editions. An Arabic translation followed a few years later, and its impact on the educated public in the Middle East was, if anything, even greater than that of the original, Englishlanguage version. The positive reception accorded to it soon gave rise to other books, by other Muslim writers, who took up the main theme of Islam at the Crossroads and elaborated it in various forms and on various levels, each according to his own bent of mind, sometimes coinciding with this or that of myviews, but more often than not arriving at conclusions and postulates which appeared to me then -and appear to me now contrary to what I had envisaged. What I had in mind when I wrote this book was a re-awakening of the Muslims' consciousness of their being socially and culturally different from the all-powerful Western society, and thus a deepening of their pride in, and their desire to preserve, such of their own traditional forms and institutions as would help them to keep that essential "difference" alive and make them once again culturally creative after the centuries of our community's utter

7

stagnation and intellectual sterility. Throughout, the main accent was on "re-awakening" and "preserving": that is to say, preserving those forms and values of our past which were still relevant to the reality of Islam as a culture-producing force , and re-awakening the spirit of Islamic ideology as expressed in the Holy Our'an and the Prophet's Sunnah.

But, as it happened, much of what I had aimed at when writing Islam at the Crossroads was subsequently misunderstood by some of the Muslim readers and leaders who failed to grasp the full implications of my call to cultural creativeness, and began to think that what mattered was a mere return to the social forms evident in the past centuries of Muslim decadence. This, as I have already said, was quite contrary to what I had aimed at. To be sure, a re-awakening has taken and is taking place in the Muslim world: but, alas, it is not a re-awakening to the true value s of the Our'an and the Sunnah but , rather, a confusion.resulting from the readiness of so many Muslims to accept blindly the social forms and thought-processes-evolved in the medieval Muslim world instead of boldly returning0to the ideology apparent in the only true sources of Islam: the Our'an and the Sunnah.

It is in the endeavour to clarify something of the tragic confusion nowadays prevailing in the Muslim world that I am now presenting a new, revised edition of this book in the hope that it may be of benefit to the Muslim youth of today , just as the original1934editionwasdedicatedto theMuslimyouthofthose days -to the fathers or even the grandfathers of the present generation. Ifsome of their forebears misunderstood my effort, perhaps the present-day young Muslims are better able to appreciate its meaning in the light of what has passed since it first appeared half a century ago. May it aid them on the difficult road that still lies ahead of them.

Tangier, 1982. MUHAMMAD ASAD

FOREWORD

Seldom has mankind been intellectually as restless as it is in our time. Not only are we faced with a multitude of problems requiring new and unprecedented solutions, but also the angle of vision in which these problems appear before us is different from anything to which we have been accustomed so far. In all countries society passes through fundamental changes. The pace at which this happens is everywhere different; but everywhere we can observe the same pressing energy which allows of no halt or hesitation.

The world of Islam is no exception in this respect. Here also we see old customs and ideas gradually disappear and new forms emerge. Where does this development lead? How deep does it reach? How far does it fit into the cultural mission of Islam?

This book does not pretend to give an exhaustive answer to all these questions. Owing to its limited scope only one of the problems facing the Muslims today, namely, the attitudewhich they should adopt towards Western civilization, has been selected for discussion. The vast implications of the subject, however, have made it necessary to extend our scrutiny over some basic aspects of Islam, more particularly with regard to the concept of the Sunnah. It is impossible to give here more than the bare outline of a theme wide enough to fill many bulky volumes. But none the less -or, perhaps, therefore -I feel confident that this brief sketch will prove, for others, an incentive to further thought on this most important problem.

And now about myself -because the Muslims have a right, when a convert speaks to them, to know how and why he has embraced Islam.

In 1922 I left my native country, Austria, to travel through Africa and Asia as a special correspondent to some of the leading Continental newspapers, and spent from that year onward nearly the whole of my time in the Islamic East. My

9