Recipe of Social Change: Some Lessons from History

People often ask for immediate solution with immediate results, and when they don't get it they often term your arguments as mere rhetoric. This is not a complaint but an observation of a reaction, often by young people who are sprinkling with energy. One of my mentors had the same observation, he shared an observation from hundreds of speeches which he gave to university audiences to raise funds for Muslim refugees in war struck areas, the young people use to ask him "what they can do?", and question from older people use to be "Why this happened?"... I observe the same during my interaction with the same age group, they get impatient without a clear line of action which they want to see after discussion on some problems and their root causes.

This is natural and justified. However it is necessary to understand how social changes are brought. There are primarily two ways to bring a social change, (a) to replace the entire system with a new one, and (b) make adjustments in the existing system. But both requires something which we will discuss below.

The first one either needs brute force by some external agency or power, or it occurs through ideological transformation of the same very people over the period of time. Prophet Muhamamd s.a.w, brought this ideological transformation in Arabia, which was then exported to 1/3 of the world by sahaba-e-kiram r.a. or their decedents. After around 700 years Changez Khan and his family destroyed almost all of Islamic Civilization; however they themselves got inspired by Muslim traders, and converted to Islam. Their decedents laid down the foundation of the great Mughal Empire. Also Tatarian clean sweep operation provided Sultan Usman Ghazi, a Turk, to establish Ottoman Empire as well, later on.

Something interesting happened during the time of Imam Ghazali r.a. also; Mutazalites were spreading Greek philosophy and logic among Muslim masses, which if had got popular would have destroyed the belief system of Islam. Imam Ghazali r.a. wrote Tahafatul Falasafa to destroy their influence for once and all. This was on pure academic grounds, a battle of Ideas.

On a parallel plane, Europe got transformed from a theological to a secular, democratic and capitalist structure. This transformation had two initiators, one Protestantism, and secondly the inspiration of scientific advancement of Muslim world. Furthermore the looted wealth from colonies in south and North America and India acted as a catalyst in the process. This transformation wasn't all peaceful, in fact the Protestants and catholic resisted each other quite brutally and dragged each other into blood baths as well for quite a long time. The prime driving force again was none other than ideological! 

And then the history witnesses examples of oppression, loot and plunder like never before. The secular, liberal democratic process was imposed on colonies with brute force (and it is still being done today), so that their state of affairs were managed in a way which favors the colonial imperial masters, then British, and today USA. Whenever this model was imposed, the ruling elite naturally had to be loyal to the Britishers or US. Therefore it lacked the popular support, or to neutralize the resistance the existing feudal or dictatorial structure with which the masses were already accustomed were given a new exterior in the name of democracy. Recently this was done with Iraq and Afghanistan, previously good examples are India and of course Pakistan...

This is of course was not natural, and hence unsustainable, and therefore is bound to change into something else. It is quite possible that it might turn into anarchy... if that’s not acceptable, then two levels of effort are required... to understand lets see the role of Allama Iqbal and Jinnah in the process of creation of Pakistan...

To allow Britishers to rule Pakistan by proxy wasn't of course on the agenda of Iqbal and Quaid-e-Azam. This tag team has important lessons for us in context of the discussion. Iqbal was more of an idealist, visionary & philosopher and Jinnah was more of a strategist; fighter & pragmatist... A social transformation needs efforts on these two planes, one of normative ideas & ideals, and the 2nd on the plane of action oriented positivist pragmatism. The ideals sets the direction, the pragmatism driven by ideals helps formulate a strategy keeping in view the ground realities, so that social transformation can be made possible in the direction inspired by ideals.

It’s not that these two sets of qualities are mutually exclusive, rather the right balance of the two in the right quantity is the characteristic of Prophets, an ordinary person have any of the two sides more dominant on the other. Some people are more of type-1, and some are more of type-2.

Prophet Muhammad s.a.w is a perfect example in this regards, who was capable to do both with the direct help of Allah s.w.t. Examples of Hazrat Umar r.a.a, Hazrat Ali r.a.a, can sighted in this context as well. But after them we see hardly any example of someone who had the two set of qualities in one. Mostly the famous personalities like Tariq bin Ziyad, Muhammad bin Qasim, Yousuf bin Tashfain, Salahuddin Ayubi, Sultan Usman Ghazi, Tipu Sultan, etc were more of the 1st type as their ideals and inspirations were already calibrated. On the other hand people like Imam Ghazali r.a., Ibn-e-Tamiya r.a. Shah wali ullah r.a. worked on the planes of ideas to bring the society back on track.

Again even today it’s even more difficult to find a personality who had the two set of qualities in him. However It is quite possible to team up the two types, or they team up themselves together.

It is needless to emphasize the importance of the first type, the visionary, philosopher, idealist and the mastermind, as without him the 2nd type would do little good. The first type can inspire millions still without the help of 2nd type like Ayatullah Khomaini did in Iran or Moududi in Pakistan (of course the two end up creating very different kinds of results); however the 2nd type might end up in disaster alone like Adolf Hitler, despite he understood well the importance of the first type, which he tried to be himself! A big mistake... Why? Because you never know what your brain is telling you is the right thing to do, for details see how he used Social Darwinism to justify killing of handicap or week neonatal to raise a perfect community of people.

Now just to explain more, it’s not just one sole type-1 individual, and one single type-2 leader which is required, rather it’s is an entire movement of type-1 and type-2 individuals, who play their part to set up a discourse and practically materialize it's ideals into reality.

This is where discussions, highlighting of problems, talking about them, even doing all so on social media becomes significant, only if they are contributing in making specific type of discourse, specific set of normative ideals, to become the benchmark to evaluate and gauge the direction, so that the activists move in the right direction, and their synergy bring the right type of change...

Now this is a time consuming process... often it take centuries to change the course of an entire civilization. Take European enlightenment movement for example. It took no less than 3 centuries of intellectual struggle to replace theological discourse, with a secular, liberal and scientific one. The dominance of a particular kind of discourse then manifests itself into social, economic and political institutions. The nature of such institutions which emerged was of course way different after the establishment of an Islamic society in Madinah which spread across the world in course of a century.

So the young blood needs to harness their raw energy so as to utilize it in the right direction. They should develop little maturity to understand that normative discussions on ‘what should be’ and ‘what shouldn't be’ done, and critical analysis to identify the loopholes in the system on the basis of the normative benchmarks, isn't at all a waste of time. Such a discussion prepares us for the times when we would be in a position to take some action to bring things back on the track. But imagine what a waste of opportunity would it be, hadn't such a discussions would have taken place now.  

Author is an academic researcher, author, blogger, social entrepreneur, activist, mentor and tweets @javaidomar