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ajmerikhawaja.com
Khan Liaquat Ali Khan, the first Prime Minister of Pakistan: A 1951
speech in the US : Courtesy Commonwealth USA
_______________________________________________________
Her Royal Highness Queen Noor of Jordan - A speech on the Issue of
Palastine : Courtesy Commonwealth USA
_______________________________________________________
Al Haaj Malik Shahbaz, popularly known as Malcom X: - A speech in
NY before his cold blooded assissination
_______________________________________________________
HRH Prince Charles; on Islam
I start from the belief that Islamic civilization at its best... has an
important message for the West in the way it has retained an
integrated and integral view of the sanctity of the world around
us. I feel that we in the West could be helped to rediscover the
roots of our own understanding by an appreciation of the Islamic
tradition's deep respect for the timeless traditions of the natural
order.
I believe that process could help in the task of bringing our two
faiths closer together. It could also help us in the West to rethink,
and for the better, our practical stewardship of man and his
environment in fields such as health-care, the natural
environment and agriculture, as well as in architecture and urban
planning.
Modern materialism is unbalanced and increasingly damaging in
its long-term consequences. Yet nearly all the great religions of
the world have held an integral view of the sanctity of the world.
The Christian message with, for example, its deeply mystical and
symbolic doctrine of the Incarnation, has been traditionally a
message of the unity of the worlds of spirit and matter, and of
God's manifestation in this world and in mankind.
But during the past three centuries, in the Western world at least,
a dangerous division has occurred in the way we perceive the
world around us. Science has tried to assume a monopoly even a
tyranny over our understanding. Religion and science have
become separated, so that now, as Wordsworth said, "Little we
see in nature that is ours". Science has attempted to take over the
natural world from God; it has fragmented the cosmos and
relegated the sacred to a separate and secondary compartment of
our understanding, divorced from practical, day to day existence.
We are only now beginning to gauge the disastrous results. We in
the Western world seem to have lost a sense of the wholeness of
our environment, and of our immense and inalienable
responsibility to the whole of creation. This has led to an
increasing failure to appreciate or understand tradition and the
wisdom of our forebears, accumulated over the centuries. Indeed,
tradition is positively discriminated against us if it were some
socially unacceptable disease.
In my view, a more holistic approach is needed now. Science has
done the inestimable service of showing us a world much more
complex than we ever imagined. But in its modern, materialist,
one-dimensional form, it cannot explain everything. God is not
merely the ultimate Newtonian mathematician or the mechanistic
clockmaker. As science and technology have become increasingly
separated from ethical, moral and sacred considerations, so the
implications of such a separation have become more sombre and
horrifying we see in genetic manipulation or in the consequences
of the kind of scientific arrogance so blatant in the scandal of
BSE.
I have always felt that tradition is not a man-made element in our
lives, but a God-given intuition of natural rhythms, of the
fundamental harmony that emerges from the union of the
paradoxical opposites that exist in every aspect of nature.... That
is why I believe Man is so much more than just a biological
phenomenon resting on what we now seem to define as "the
bottom line" of the great balance sheet of life, according to which
art and culture are seen increasingly as optional extras in life.
This view is quite contrary, for example, to the outlook of the
Muslim craftsman or artist, who is never concerned with display
for its own sake, nor with progressing ever forward in his own
ingenuity, but is content to submit a man's craft to God. That
outlook reflects, I believe, the memorable passage in the Koran,
"whithersoever you turn there is the face of God and God is
all-Embracing, all-Knowing". While appreciating that this
essential innocence has been destroyed, and destroyed
everywhere, I nevertheless believe that the survival of civilized
values, as we have inherited them from our ancestors, depends on
the corresponding survival in our hearts of that profound sense of
the sacred and the spiritual.
Traditional religions, with their integral view of the universe, can
help us to rediscover the importance of the integration of the
secular and the sacred. The danger of ignoring this essential
aspect of our existence is not just spiritual or intellectual. It also
lies at the heart of that great divide between the Islamic and
Western worlds over the place of materialism in our lives. In
those instances where Islam chooses to reject Western
materialism, this is not, in my view, a political affectation or the
result of envy or a sense of inferiority. Quite the opposite. And
the danger that the gulf between the worlds of Islam and the other
Eastern religions on the one hand and the West on the other will
grow ever wider and more unbridgeable is real, unless we can
explore together practical ways of integrating the sacred and the
secular in both our cultures in order to provide a true inspiration
for the next century.
Islamic culture in its traditional form has striven to preserve this
integrated, spiritual view of the world in a way we have not seen
fit to do in recent generations in the West. There is much we can
learn from that Islamic world view in this respect.
There are many ways in which mutual understanding and
appreciation can be built. Perhaps, for instance, we could begin
by having more Muslim teachers in British schools, or by
encouraging exchanges of teachers. Everywhere in the world
people want to learn English. But in the West, in turn, we need to
be taught by Islamic teachers how to learn with our hearts, as well
as our heads. The approaching millennium may be the ideal
catalyst for helping to explore and stimulate these links, and I
hope we shall not ignore the opportunity this gives us to
rediscover the spiritual underpinning of our entire existence.
We are only now beginning to gauge the disastrous results. We in
the Western world seem to have lost a sense of the wholeness of
our environment, and of our immense and inalienable
responsibility to the whole of creation. This has led to an
increasing failure to appreciate or understand tradition and the
wisdom of our forebears, accumulated over the centuries. Indeed,
tradition is positively discriminated against as if it were some
socially unacceptable disease.
In my view, a more holistic approach is needed now. Science has
done the inestimable service of showing us a world much more
complex than we ever imagined. But in its modern, materialist,
one-dimensional form, it cannot explain everything. God is not
merely the ultimate Newtonian mathematician or the mechanistic
clockmaker. As science and technology have become increasingly
separated from ethical, moral and sacred considerations, so the
implications of such a separation have become more sombre and
horrifying as we see in genetic manipulation or in the
consequences of the kind of scientific arrogance so blatant in the
scandal of BSE.
I have always felt that tradition is not a man-made element in our
lives, but a God-given intuition of natural rhythms, of the
fundamental harmony that emerges from the union of the
paradoxical opposites that exist in every aspect of nature.... That
is why I believe Man is so much more than just a biological
phenomenon resting on what we now seem to define as "the
bottom line" of the great balance sheet of life, according to which
art and culture are seen increasingly as optional extras in life.
This view is quite contrary, for example, to the outlook of the
Muslim craftsman or artist, who is never concerned with display
for its own sake, nor with progressing ever forward in his own
ingenuity, but is content to submit a man's craft to God. That
outlook reflects, I believe, the memorable passage in the Koran,
"whithersoever you turn there is the face of God and God is
all-Embracing, all-Knowing". While appreciating that this
essential innocence has been destroyed, and destroyed
everywhere, I nevertheless believe that the survival of civilized
values, as we have inherited them from our ancestors, depends on
the corresponding survival in our hearts of that profound sense of
the sacred and the spiritual.
In those instances where Islam chooses to reject Western
materialism, this is not, in my view, a political affectation or the
result of envy or a sense of inferiority. Quite the opposite. And
the danger that the gulf between the worlds of Islam ...on the one
hand and the West on the other will grow ever wider and more
unbridgeable is real, unless we can explore together practical ways
of integrating the sacred and the secular in both our cultures in
order to provide a true inspiration for the next century.
Islamic culture in its traditional form has striven to preserve this
integrated, spiritual view of the world in a way we have not seen
fit to do in recent generations in the West. There is much we can
learn from that Islamic world view in this respect.
There are many ways in which mutual understanding and
appreciation can be built. Perhaps, for instance, we could begin
by having more Muslim teachers in British schools, or by
encouraging exchanges of teachers. ...But in the West, in turn, we
need to be taught by Islamic teachers how to learn with our
hearts, as well as our heads. ...I hope we shall not ignore the
opportunity this gives us to rediscover the spiritual underpinning
of our entire existence.
HRH Prince of Wales.
- Courtesy Oxford University, UK
_______________________________________________________
