This year, Sir David Attenborough, the world-renowned naturalist tells the United Nations Security Council that climate change is the biggest threat modern humans have ever faced.
This message is further reinforced by the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, who calls climate change a “crisis multiplier” that has profound implications for international peace and stability.
Rarely are the multiple crises or threats facing humanity seen through the ‘symptoms’ and ‘root cause’ perspective, which is how those sensitive to the worldview of Islam and the traditional worldviews of Asia would perceive and analyse challenges.
As Al-Ghazālī once signalled in his Naṣīḥat al-Mulūk, “The intelligent man is one who sees the spirit and reality of things and is not deceived by their forms.”
In Asia and most parts of the non-Western world prior to the 19th century, those informed by their respective religious and intellectual traditions used to assume and imbibe a different worldview from the modern Western materialist one many of us do today.
A ‘worldview’ can also be understood as a person’s entire system of understanding of what is perceived to be true and real which is shaped by education at every level of a person’s life, formal and informal, and finally culminating in the education received at higher levels.
The worldview of Islam for instance looks at everything in existence as interconnected— including the material (zahir) and immaterial (batin) realities.
This interconnected vision of realities for the genuine Muslims is beautifully explained by Adi Setia based on his study of the commentary of the Qur’an (tafsir) by Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, as follows: “…it is through the precise yet artful interplay between the design configurations of the cosmos, the biosphere and the human self that Divine favors are realized for humanity, that they may be thankful to their Lord, and be certain of their meeting with Him.”
With the rise and hegemony of modern Western materialist and reductionist worldview, these different visions of existence and repositories of wisdom have been sidelined, restricted in meaning, or dismissed by the new hegemony that assumes itself to be most evolved in its way of thinking, thereby implicitly assuming other worldviews as irrational or primitive.
Although popular academics such as Steven Pinker, Yuval Harari, and others would like to convince us otherwise, the modern materialist worldview for the past one hundred years has proven to be limited in terms of curtailing the various manifestations of injustice in our times.
For instance, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, last year the world spent close to 1.9 trillion dollars on arms or military expenditure, but fell short by less than 2.15 billion in fulfilling the United Nations appeal to prevent a devastating famine in Yemen— in other words, trillions were spent to reinforce the Military-Industrial Complex but fell short to take humanity to safer shores.
There have been growing voices in the East and West for the need to return to the modes of thinking or worldviews of great traditions of Asia to address our multiple crises more meaningfully.
Scholars like Tan Sri Professor Dr. Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas have long made the case to the global Muslim community to reflect on the Worldview of Islam more profoundly, hence his masterpiece, the Prolegomena to the Metaphysics of Islam: An Exposition of the Fundamental Elements of the Worldview of Islam, which should be considered as a noteworthy contribution to this global conversation.
His Royal Highness (DYMM Paduka Seri) Sultan Nazrin Muizzudin Shah has also recognised the significance of the question of ‘worldview’ when he remarked in his Opening Address at the Khazanah Megatrends Forum in 2014, “Indeed, successfully recalibrating our collective worldview may even take a generation—but it will be a cause which is worth fighting, and a cause which is worth winning.”
The life and future of a nation and a civilisation are at stake if discussions on ‘worldviews’ are not given due attention by the decision-makers in various sectors, that is to say, if we do not recognise that the root cause of the major crises of our time is ultimately connected to our mode of thinking or worldview—more specifically the existing ‘modern’, materialist mode of thinking in which there is no spiritual dimension, no cosmic order, nor meaning in life.
Once there is greater clarity with a people’s worldview projected by their faith, only then can they be part of the solution, and only then can we as a collective be able to offer genuine, far-reaching, and long-lasting solutions to the present-day challenges facing man and the natural world—regardless of one’s intellectual capacities and position in life.
In the case of Muslims, our collective future is thus dependent on how much recognition and acknowledgment of the truly great scholars—past and present—who are the key representatives of the worldview of Islam, are given in our society. This does not negate the worthwhile contributions of scholars and thinkers from different nations and civilisations.