The Fate of Zheng He: A Warning for the Future of America

by Faruq ‘Abd al Haqq

  Shortly before the American invasion of Iraq, a book abut the life and times of a pre-Columbian discoverer of America, Admiral Zheng He, was published and sold in all the major bookstores and airports of the world.  This book, entitled 1421: The Year China Discovered America, is the result of fifteen years of full-time research by an admiral of the U.S. Navy, Gavin Menzies.  The real significance of this book is not that for the first time we learn about a non-European who planted small colonies on both the East and West coasts of North and South America before Colunbus supposedly discovered it.  The importance of this book is what it says about why this is the first time we have learned of it.

  The fate of Zheng He, the devout Muslim son of a Mongol leader, and of the great Chinese empire which he helped build in the ninth Islamic century is the same as the fate of the Islamic empire in the West, namely, Southwest Asia and Africa and Andalucia in Europe, and may augur the fate of Europe and America. 

  Zheng He’s two great armadas spent three years exploring the entire world, equipped with hundreds of linguists from all the known languages and with specialists from every scientific specialty to gather information and leave behind small colonies wherever they went.  When he finally arrived home in China, he was captured by a rival faction that had staged a coup and condemned all his accomplishments.  They condemned Zheng He’s search for knowledge as divine punishment for the natural calamities that had struck China at that time.  All his ships were destroyed and his logs (records) burned.  All study of foreign languages was condemned upon penalty of death and all new construction of infrastructure projects, which admittedly were so enormous that they may have contributed to the bankruptcy of the national treasury, were permanently stopped.  All foreign cultures were ridiculed, including those that honored justice as the basis of civilized life, even though Confucius, the preeminent founder of the Chinese civilization, put justice at the center of all virtues.

  Fortunately, not all the records of Zheng He’s epic discoveries were destroyed either in China or elsewhere around the world, but it took one man, an American admiral, fifteen years to collect the overwhelming proof of everything that Zheng He did and of why in the end both he and China as the first global nation disappeared from the face of the earth.

  Muslims as well as non-Muslims today should read this very thick book with all of its footnotes in order to understand why the Islamic civilization and all other civilizations suffered the same fate as China and why Europe and America seem to be embarked on the same suicidal course.  The cause was a shift from the search for knowledge as a sacred responsibility to a search for material power as a substitute for God, combined with an existential fear of wisdom that was not subject to this power. 

  These two causes, in turn, were the product of an sollipsistic and even autistic arrogance and egotism that amounted to a polytheistic worship of oneself.  Arrogance is the one sin that is incurable, because the arrogant person or society denies that it is arrogant.  The inevitable product is the elimination of justice not only in practice but even from the vocabulary of a desacralized culture. 

  One should ask oneself, what happened when the Greeks lost their admiration for justice and then the Romans lost their sense of justice that they had borrowed from the Greeks.  What happened when the Sunnis in the Muslim world oppressed the Shi’a, who alone of all the Muslims had not only elevated justice to the second pillar of the faith, right after worship of Allah and even before Prophethood, but actually practiced it.  For six hundred years the universal principles of justice, known as the maasid al shari’ah, have been dead throughout the Sunni Muslim world, and the Shi’a have served as a scape-goat for its civilizational collapse.  Why?  The reason is simple.  Justice, as well as those who support it, are always condemned by the oppressor, because oppression is unjust.

  And lastly, has anyone ever heard President Bush even mention justice, except in the sense of vengeance?  Has anyone ever heard him speak of freedom in any sense other than license to be free from the human responsibilities that produce justice?  The only perfect freedom is when our only desire is to be the person and community that our Creator established as our purpose for existence.  God revealed in the Qur’an, tama’at kalimatu rabbika sidqan wa ‘adlan, “The Word of your Lord is fulfilled and perfected in truth and in justice.”  To claim that freedom is the opposite of truth and justice is nothing short of rebellion against God.

  Should we be surprised if President Bush and his possible successors and their ideological mentors and all the innocent people who live under their reign will suffer the fate of the universal condemnation that has destroyed every empire in human history?

  At the end of his life, Zheng He was permitted to make the long trip overland to Makkah to pray at the site where the wisdom that powered his life was revealed and to unite himself with the love and power that can never be extinguished even unto the end of the world.