A huge portrait of Emir Abd el Kader in the house of Sheikh Mohamed Bachir Ibrahimi is the dominant image I have of the first meeting with the Sheikh in 1944, when, after my essay on CONTRIBUTION THE ARAB-ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION to universal culture, it I got home
I accompanied by Amar Ouzegane, future Minister of Agriculture of Algeria released, and with whom I had lived nearly three years in prison and concentration camp.
Abd el Kader was both a symbol and example of life, religious and militant, Sheikh Ibrahim. He showed us that day, continuation of the struggle since 1830, the Algerian people against the threat of depersonalization, loss of identity that was imposed on him for over a century, 'French colonialist invasion, and also the perversion of Islam by the marabout, who worked also with occupant.
degradation of Sufism by maraboutism professing both an escape from everyday life by a morbid obsession with the afterlife, and a false mysticism " puts perfection in the non-desire of life on earth "as Sheikh Ben Badis wrote, the Emir Abdelkader disciple of Ibn Arabi (the" Sheikh el Akbar "), was able to bind, as the highest Islamic tradition, faith and politics. The mystical moment was for him, that of "refocusing" on God. His action, as war leader and statesman, was the expression of his faith and spirituality to shape the world according to the "guidance" from God.
These are the two poles of life, religious and political severally.
Sheikh Ibrahim was with Sheikh Ben Badis, the successor to the renovation of Algeria, of the work of reform in Egypt by El-Afghani, Muhammad Abdu, Rashid Reda, who died in 1935. This work was both innovative in terms of religious, political and cultural.
Praising the interpretation of the Quran by Mohamed Abdou, Grand Sheikh of Al Azhar, Sheikh Ibrahim added: "Rachid Reda open to scholars towards Koranic exegete ... After him, the mastery of Koranic exegesis for the entire Muslim world, went to Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis the promoter of the intellectual renaissance Reform in Algeria, and even North Africa. "
Sheikh Ibrahim was with Sheikh Ben Badis, the soul of a true" cultural revolution "in Algeria, which made possible the liberation of the Algerian people in 1962, one hundred and thirty years of alienation, and regaining its Arab-Islamic identity to which its people have never stopped fighting the resistance of Abd el Kader the uprisings and El Sheikh Bouamama Mokrani, until the 1954 uprising to victory and liberation of 1962.
The task of the reformers was immense.
Sheikh Ibrahim recalls that in 1913 in Medina during his vigils Sheikh Ben Badis, which ended with the morning prayer, began to germinate the idea of " Association of Ulema, which should be born in 1931.
They refused both the ideas of Zia Gokalp, Turkey put into practice a few years later, Mustafa Kemal who, mistaking "modernization" with "Westernization" was losing its soul to Islam by a mechanical imitation of the West, and the blind conservatism of those who enter in the future backwards, did not read the Koran that with the eyes of the dead. The official program of the Zaytuna , until 1912, did not include only the comments of Al Quran Baydawi (d. 1316) and Galalayn (one of whom died in 1459, and the other, his disciple , 1505).
Whatever the respect that we can bring to these great scholars of the past, it is serious to believe that the creative thinking of Islam has stopped with them, and that the medieval tradition can provide an answer to the problems of our time. Especially as the "Statute" of the Zaytuna sanctified dogmatism. It specifically states: "No person shall engage in the discussion of principles that scientists have been passed from age to age, which are acquired science. "
Sheikh Ibrahim Sheikh Ben Badis and had to fight the twin scourges: the slavish imitation of the West, and slavish imitation of the past.
Sheikh Ibrahim wrote that the worst fault of those who adopt the culture West "is a total ignorance of the truths of Islam, and that the worst fault of those who claim to Islamic culture is a total ignorance of the problems and requirements of our century. "
In the Islamic perspective, when faith is inseparable from the laws of the community, that is to say about politics, the major problem was to discover how Islam could" modernize "without ceasing being himself, that is to say without imitating the West.
The solution advocated by Sheikh Ben Badis and Sheikh Ibrahim in the path opened by Egypt and Mohamed Abdou Rashid Reda, but in the specific conditions of Algeria, directly confronted colonialism, colonialism and military policy, but also spiritual colonialism was to find the creative dynamism of Islam morning, that of Revelation Koran and the Prophet's example.
It was necessary to achieve that goal, "stripping" of a matrix Millennium ritualism, legalism, narrow literalism, reading the Qur'an and Sunnah .
The company did in question the divine origin of the Koran, nor the grandeur of tradition: she found the otherwise the living source.
This "Ijtihad" is, in the words of Mohamed Iqbâ. "The principle of movement" which expresses the creative power of Islam and, as said Rashid Reda, a bold opening of the "Ijtihad", depends the future of the expansion of Islam .
It is true that, very early, in the first crisis of the Abbasid Empire, manifested a decline already expressed cautious with Hanbal, which marks the end of the first and rapid expansion of the Islam. It was even worse, three centuries later with the earthquakes of the Mongol invasion and the Crusades. It began to theorize, with El Mawerdi, from a Scholastic book-on the power of the Abbasid empire in decline
The great merit of El Afghani, Mohamed Abdou, Rachid Reda , Sheikh Ben Badis, Sheikh Ibrahim, was referred back, beyond the theological speculations, and glosses of legal wrangling accumulated over the centuries, until the living source: Revelation Koran and the example of Prophet, and to proceed as did the great jurists, who had worked to achieve, in new historical conditions, the objectives we assign the eternal divine word.
Act can not be petrified, so that life, it's mission is to shape it according to God's plan, which has made man his Caliph, is in perpetual metamorphosis.
In front of this revival of Rashid Reda, of Ben Badis, the Bachir Ibrahimi, the great Muhammad Iqbal wrote: "I find that the claim of the present generation of Muslim reformers to reinterpret the basic legal principles in light of their own experience and different editions of modern life, is perfectly justified. The Koran teaches that life is a process of continuous creation, which requires each generation, guided but not prevented by the work of his predecessors, has the must solve its own problems. "
Because they were not content to repeat, in their literal wording of the decisions taken in concrete historical situations, but have found the spirit and the divine guidance to achieve the same purpose in circumstances new historical novel, Sheikh Ben Badis in Constantine, Algiers Oqbi El Sheikh, Sheikh Ibrahim in Oran and Tlemcen, have educated a generation that would find that Islam living in the main force mobilization liberating the Algerian people.
Only in the light of Islam that the problem could be posed in full flight: the Algerian revolution could not have simply to replace the team colonialist power by Algerians who exercise that according to the same laws. It was to create a new community based on values radically different from those that were imposed last hundred thirty years by the occupant of specifically Islamic values.
This task required the transformation of men as well as the structural transformation. A false revolutionaries claiming to change everything, except themselves, the Qur'an reminds us "God does not change a people until it does change what is in him. "(XIII, II).
Because they were imbued with the Qur'anic truth, the men who created in 1931 with Sheikh Ibrahim and Sheikh Ben Badis, the Association of Ulema, put at the forefront of their program a huge education effort , both against the school depersonalization colonialist occupier who was trying to uproot the child of Algerian Arab-Islamic culture, against obscurantism marabout, if not, by his superstitions and his "intercession" in the spirit of Islam (and cared for this reason, the power colonialism), and against an outdated teaching of Islam that the mummified and sterilized by the mere repetition of the past.
The problem was to escape the trap of a double-blind integration to the Western model of growth and culture, or a total rejection of everything that was not the medieval tradition.
Merit reformers was to show that instead of opposing sterile science and religion, it was possible to achieve a critical and selective integration science and technology of the West, by requiring, as means the purpose of Islam.
The "Shari'a", this way of life dominated by the desire to accomplish God's plan, does not imply a repetition of the multiple rigid rules that have governed life beautifully Islamic community a millennium ago, but to the creative effort to shape today's societies, under conditions Historical radically new, which call for initiatives and new methods, as the eternal message of Islam. Thus helping to "remember God, and the deeper meaning of life and history, Islam can bring to a dying world, not through lack of means but no goal the sense of a community dedicated to the realization of God's plan.
The occupant was not mistaken about the importance of this work in depth in the month of March 1940, Sheikh Ibrahim was exiled under house arrest. In this situation he was elected to death Sheikh Ben Badis, president of the Association of Ulema. Released in early 1943, he created in one year, seventy-three Muslim schools in the towns and villages, and four cents in subsequent years. Arrested after the massacres perpetrated by the occupier in 1945, Sheikh Ibrahim resumed upon discharge, at its educational task.
Roger Garaudy
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