Extract from the book : “Islam and The West”

Encounters

2. Legal and Historical Reflections on the position of Muslim populations under Non-Muslim Rule.

To these one must now add an entirely new category-Muslim minority communities formed by voluntary migration from Muslim lands to part of the House of Islam. For such an action by Muslims, there is no precedent in Islamic history, no previous discussion in Islamic legal literature. The Jurists, ancient and modern, discussed the predicament of the Muslim under a non-Muslim government under several headings : the new convert alienated from his previous coreligionists, the temporary visitor taken as a captive or traveling as an envoy or a trader, the unhappy inhabitant of a Muslim country conquered by unbelievers. Not surprisingly, the possibility never seems to have entered their minds that a Muslim would voluntarily leave a Muslim land in order to place himself in this predicament. There have always been individuals and even small groups-students, political exiles, as well as traders, but until recent years these unending flow through the centuries of travelers of every kind from Christendom to the lands of Islam.

A mass migration-a reverse hijra-of ordinary people seeking a new life among the unbelievers is an entirely new phenomenon, which poses new and major problems. The debate on these problems has only just begun. The most common argument offered in defense of such migration is darura, necessity, interpreted in economic terms. Some have tried to adduce a prophetic precedent for their action by citing the example of the Prophet, who, before the hijra, authorized some of his Muslim followers in Mecca to seek refuge in Christian Ethiopia. The Prophet himself, that is, had authorized the migration of Muslims to a Christian country. Others reply that they were leaving a pagan, not a Muslim, city and that no Muslim state existed at that time. The flight to Ethiopia does not therefore set a precedent for voluntary migration from a Muslim to a Christian country.

One may wonder far the new Muslim immigrants to Christian and post-Christian lands-many of them men of limited education- are aware of these juridical arguments and of the legal and theological texts on which they are based. It does not greatly matter. These texts are evidence of the concerns, beliefs, and aspirations of the community from which they came. For the outsider, they are the most accessible, the most reliable, and often the only source of information. For the insider, there texts, and the simpler tracts and homilies based on them, are one of the channels through which the living tradition of the community is transmitted to him; there are many others, in the home, the school, the mosque, the marketplace, and the company of his peers. And one of the lessons to be learned from these texts is the capacity of the tradition in the past to confront new problems and to respond to them in unexpected ways.

Last year, while I was in Paris, I was invited to participate in a television program discussing books. The following day, a young man in a shop where I went to make a purchase, recognizing me, remarked that he had seen me on television talking about Islam. He then made an observation that has been puzzling me ever since.”My father,”he said,”was a Muslim, but I am a Parisian.” What, I wondered, did he mean-that Islam is a place? Or that Paris is a religion? As stated, neither proposition, obviously, is true. Yet as implied, neither is completely false. Their interacting implications reflect the dilemma of a minority, most of them from the less modernized parts of their own societies of origin. Who now find themselves in a situation in which they differ from the majority among whom they live, not only because they profess a different religion, but also because they hold a radically different conception of what religions means, demands, and defines.

Book : Islam and The West.

Author : Bernard Lewis

Oxford University Press, New York Oxford.

Copyright 1993 by Oxford University press.