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The ‘Outsiders of Islam’

Will the muslims who live in the West be the future outsiders of the Islamic world? To be clear what we mean, let’s accord this term the sense it has when a race is said to have been won by an ‘outsider’, that is, by a contestant thought before the event to have had very little chance of winning. The muslims of the West, who are certainly outsiders in the primary sense of being expatriates (muslims on foreign soil, living beyond the Dar al Islam, the ‘realm of Islam’), are certainly not so in the word’s secondary sense of outcasts, ‘banished from’ or ‘stripped of’ their muslim identity, as ayman al-Zawahiri [of al Qaeda] was still recently claiming. But they could well take on the role of outsiders in the third sense defined above of those through whom, in a totally unexpected and unforeseen fashion, could come the progress – even the salvation – of an Islamic civilisation that is at present dramatically locked into a state of stagnation, or even into one of moral, social, intellectual and spiritual regression. Will they be likened tomorrow to those Persians of whom Ibn Khaldûn spoke in the 14th century in a famous passage of his Universal History? ‘It is remarkable,’ he wrote, ‘that with a few notable exceptions the majority of Islamic savants, whether in the religious or the scientific field, have been from outside of the arab people’ such as ‘Sîbawayh and, after him, al-Fârisî and az-Zajjaj. all of them were of non-arab (Persian) descent’ and this ‘in spite of the fact that Islam is an arabic religion, and its founder was an arab’ (Ibn Khaldûn, 1967: v. 3, 311–313) noting that, as did that writer himself in this quotation, we are taking the word ‘Islam’ here in the sense of the Islamic religion. This came about, he explained, from the fact that in the first few centuries of Islam the nomadic Bedouin arabs were lacking in the arts and sciences which in contrast were flourishing in the urban centres of the Persian Empire. It was this circumstance of the immersion of Persian Islamic thinkers within a particularly rich cultural environment at a distance from the birthplace of Islam itself and outside of the ‘arab peoples’ which stimulated the whole body of thought of that civilisation.