إجازة الشيخ أحمد بن محمد بن أحمد لبن بقراءة الإمام عاصم

موضوع: ISLAM AT THE CROSSROADS الأحد 08 يناير 2017, 9:45 pm

ISLAM AT THE CROSSROADS 51V2SGPGVXL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_

ISLAM AT THE CROSSROADS
Muhammad Asad
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DAR AL-ANDALUS
GIBRALTAR
www.islamicbulletin.com
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Contents
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Author's Note 7
Foreword 9
The Open Road of Islam 13
The Spirit of the West 29
The Shadow of the Crusades 49
About Education 63
About Imitation 75
Hadith and Sunnah 82
Conclusion 98

"الحمد لله وحده والصلاة على مَنْ لا نبي بعده"
AUTHOR'S NOTE
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This book was written nearly half a century ago – to be precise, in the autumn of 1933 - and was first published in Delhi in 1934, and subsequently in Lahore: a plea to the Muslims of my generation to avoid a blind imitation of Western social forms and values, and to try to preserve instead their Islamic heritage which once upon a time had been responsible for the glorious, many-sided historical phenomenon comprised in the term "Muslim civilization".

This first literary effort of mine on a purely Islamic subject found an immediate response among English-speaking Muslims of what was then an undivided India, and was reprinted in many editions. An Arabic translation followed a few years later, and its impact on the educated public in the Middle East was, if anything, even greater than that of the original, Englishlanguage version.

The positive reception accorded to it soon gave rise to other books, by other Muslim writers, who took up the main theme of Islam at the Crossroads and elaborated it in various forms and on various levels, each according to his own bent of mind, sometimes coinciding with this or that of myviews, but more often than not arriving at conclusions and postulates which appeared to me then -and appear to me now contrary to what I had envisaged.

What I had in mind when I wrote this book was a re-awakening of the Muslims' consciousness of their being socially and culturally different from the all-powerful Western society, and thus a deepening of their pride in, and their desire to preserve, such of their own traditional forms and institutions as would help them to keep that essential "difference" alive and make them once again culturally creative after the centuries of our community's utter stagnation and intellectual sterility.
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Throughout, the main accent was on "re-awakening" and "preserving": that is to say, preserving those forms and values of our past which were still relevant to the reality of Islam as a culture-producing force, and re-awakening the spirit of Islamic ideology as expressed in the Holy Our'an and the Prophet's Sunnah.

But, as it happened, much of what I had aimed at when writing Islam at the Crossroads was subsequently misunderstood by some of the Muslim readers and leaders who failed to grasp the full implications of my call to cultural creativeness, and began to think that what mattered was a mere return to the social forms evident in the past centuries of Muslim decadence.

This, as I have alread y said, was quite contrary to what I had aimed at. To be sure, a re-awakening has taken and is taking place in the Muslim world: but, alas, it is not a re-awakening to the true value s of the Our'an and the Sunnah but, rather, a confu sion.

resulting from the readiness of so many Muslims to accept blindly the social forms and thought-processes-evolved in the medieval Muslim world instead of bold ly returning 0 to the ideology apparent in the only true sources of Islam: the Our'an and the Sunnah.

It is in the endeavour to clarify something of the tragic confusion nowadays prevailing in the Muslim world that I am now presenting a new, revised edition of this book in the hope that it may be of benefit to the Muslim youth of today, just as the original 1934 edition was dedicated to the Muslim youth of those days - to the fath ers or even the grandfathers of the present generation.

If some of their forebears misunderstood my effort, perhaps the present-day young Muslims are better able to appreciate its meaning in the light of what has passed since it first appeared half a century ago. May it aid them on the difficult road that still lies ahead of them.
Tangier, 1982.
MUHAMMAD ASAD
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