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| The Hindu Phenomenon |
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RETREAT AND RAGE |
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addition, the use of the Arabic script has helped create Islamic
languages out of non-islamic ones, the transformation of Hindavi (or
Hindi) into Urdu in India being a case in point. Similarly, Muslims
use the same decorative patterns all over the world and segregate
their women in the same way. Then there is the classical literature
which has been carried wherever Muslims have gone and transmitted
from one generation to another. This has produced a common cultural
heritage which has defined being swamped by the most dramatic
differences of environment, and of pre-Islamic culture as, say,
between India and Arabia. The Muslim personality is a reality
despite regional and ethnic differences.
In view of the rise and fall of a number of Muslim dynas- ties, it is tempting to dismiss the ummah as a myth. This temptation must be resisted. Despite the absence of central political control since the Abbasid caliphate, the ummah has been a potent reality and it remains so today. There has been no period in Muslim history when ideas and movements arising in one corner have not reverberated throughout the Muslim world. Non-Arab and non-Persian thinkers have written in Arabic and Persian precisely because they have seen themselves as part of the larger Islamic community of which these have been the languages of discourse and because they have sought influence throughout the Muslim world. Iqbal, for instance, wrote much of his poetry in Persian in British India in this century, though Persian had long creased to be the language of discourse in this country. As for ideas and movements, if the Wahhabi influence emanating from Mecca dominated the Muslim mind in much of the nineteenth century, Maulanaal-Mawdidi in this century can be said to have fathered what is now called Islamic fundamentalism. |
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