Forecasting and Planning the Future of the Global Muslim Umma

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

As a professional, long-range global forecaster, it appears to me that Muslims and, in fact, the entire world are at a juncture where individual civilizations and even the entire global civilization on earth will rise or fall according to whether they recognize new challenges and adopt appropriately new responses.  Both Arnold Toynbee and his mentor Ibn Khaldun said that civilizations rise when they respond appropriately to challenges and fall when they do not.

The challenges now faced by all civilizations are three fold.  The first challenge is spiritual.  In an era of militant secularism, either the twenty-first century will be a century of spiritual renewal in all religions or there will be no civilization in the twenty-second century.

The second basic challenge is economic.  The economic challenge is the ever growing wealth gap both within and among countries, which is caused increasingly by the transformation of industrial capitalism to financial capitalism.  As productive industry declines, especially in the developed countries, financiers shift from financing real goods, which requires planning for the future, to buying and selling debt with an exclusive focus on a quick profit in the present. 

The resulting gap between what popularly is called the 1% versus the 99% and the growing popular awareness of this gap inevitably will cause alienation and terrorism, which in an era of proliferating nuclear weapons and even without them can destroy civilization.

The third challenge is political.  Whoever owns the wealth in society also owns the government.  This has always been and always will be inevitable.  The extreme of this truism in reverse is economic socialism, where whoever owns the government will own the wealth.  This means that political self-determination, sometimes known as democracy, will be possible only if the barriers to broadening capital ownership can be removed by changing the financial system in order to facilitate the universal human right to individual ownership of productive wealth, without violating property rights by stealing from the existing owners. 

This can be accomplished by what President Ronald Reagan called a Second American Revolution, whereby credit is based not on past accumulations of wealth but on future profits, and where money is made available without interest to every citizen of a country, restricted to individual investment in self-financing productive enterprises, rather than made available to bail out the financial speculators from their failed schemes.

As an American I ask how is this relevant to the future of America?  As a Muslim I ask how is this relevant to the Muslim umma around the world?  And as a human being I ask how is this relevant to everyone.

Classical or traditionalist American thought focused on justice based on both divine revelation, scientific observation of natural law, and human reason.  Classical or traditionalist Islamic thought focused on the same three sources of justice, namely, on wahy or haqq al yaqin, on ‘ain al yaqin, and on ‘ilm al yaqin, which together reveal the Sunnat Allah or higher natural law.

The greatest challenge to contemporary civilization, beyond the loss of enlightened spiritual awareness, is the loss of justice even as a concept.  Normative justice, best modeled in the maqasid al shari’ah, has been moribund in America for 150 years and in the Muslim world for six hundred years.  This tragedy can be remedied only if Americans can transform their culture into a model of justice both at home and abroad.  Muslims can remedy their failing societies only if they can do the same.

The challenge of Muslims, both in the West and in the East, is to bring out the best of the Islamic civilization as a model for the world by working with other people in the West to bring out the best of their heritage.

This task must be institutionalized as a first step in inter-civilizational cooperation so that persons and institutions of all faiths can combine their common wisdom in building a better future of peace, prosperity, and freedom through the interfaith harmony of compassionate justice.  The challenge is clear, but we need prime movers to lead the way.