Sweeping changes enveloping the contemporary world has changed the nuts and bolts from micro to macro levels of life. These changes influenced by technology, adaptation to it and the collateral influence have transitioned life from Holocene to Anthropocene. Anthropocene is the global ecological change brought about by human intervention with nature. It is the new era where human interventions have gone to the extent of altering nature and nature fighting back causing climate change and global warming. Emergent out of this change is the Post-Normal Times (PTN). It is defined as an “in-between period where old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have yet to be born.“
The focus of this article is about how to posit Muslim family in the Post-Normal Time amidst its challenges?
Family and Post-Normal Times are intertwined helical like the DNA influencing mutually. Therefore, in the present, the conception of family cannot be thought of without considering the influence of PNT on it. Failing to appreciate this would decimate family.
Family is the building block of society. It produces the much-needed human resources to help manage the physical resources to improve the quality of life of humanity and other creations. It is the expansion of the family from unitary to the extended system that spans into clans and tribes networking to evolve the society. Family is the smallest socio-political and economic unit creating the microcosm for the individual to develop and grow within the protective ecosystem of society. It is the only system that helps humanity procreate and nurture children until they become adults. It foments character and cultivates capacity before introducing them to society as adults. It is a microscopic society. The community results from bonding together of families having similar traits, cultures and values.
The true form and function of the family being such, that the changes that are taking place in society impacts it severely denting its destined role leading to atomization and individuation. As a consequence, individuals are struggling and the society becoming atomised.
Islam considers family as a holistic unit that breed the ‘Vicegerent of Allah’, as every Muslim is a Vicegerent of Allah who has the responsibility and duty of care of the world and humanity at large. A Muslim being responsible to conduct the affairs of the world responsibly and diligently cannot be anachronistic but relevant and timely.
Contemporary Muslim families are challenged by the PNT. As defined before, it is a time where “old orthodoxies are dying and new orthodoxies are not set in”. In the contemporary Muslim families, old traditions, conventions and orthodoxies have vanished or are vanishing creating a vacuum in the family system deforming the entire structure.
Socio-economic and political situations, changing disciplines of knowledge, science and technology and the consequential influence on the thought process, behaviour and attitudinal change to adapt to new situations make old orthodoxies depart. In these challenging times, holding on to old orthodoxies does not make life liveable practically in new situations. It makes no sense. Similarly, absence of orthodoxies create vacuum in life which one yearns to fill with something that is satisfactory. In this dilemma, contemporary families swing like pendulum seeking new orthodoxies to sustain but is not yet present.
Vanishing of the old and the absence of new orthodoxies to sustain family based on the Qur’anic guidance within the parameters of Islamic Worldview is a challenge. This vacuum is the kingpin of the problems of the Ummah. It is the responsibility of each Muslim, collectives and groups and thought leadership to respond to this emergent threat undermining the very survival of the Ummah. It is yet to be responded by Islamic scholarship. Failure to direct family from grassroot level to wherever new guidance is required within the framework of the Islamic worldview is an urgent necessity. Contemporary Muslim Family is struggling to keep to together as a family unit within Islamic worldviews, traditional Muslim cultural values and morality in the new challenging times.
Sweeping changes that are taking place are making once comfortable and friendly terrain of life inimical and strange. It disconnects us off the roots unless nuanced steps of guided mutation take place to adapt to new situation based on Qur’anic guidance. For example, technological changes have influenced our ways of life, how our resources, time and faculties are used. These changes have brought about new problems that require new solutions. Technological influence on human communication and relationship has changed the way we once communicated. People have access to communicate thousands of miles away contemporaneously but are becoming distant with their near and dear one living in the same room due to the communication revolution taken place. People are living in their virtual cells as floating atoms without any bonding and stability. Social and gender barriers and other forms of segregations once dominant is broken influencing new cultural behaviour of people. The newly emergent Artificial Intelligence is going to bring in a plethora of change hitherto never imagined. These would change the ecosystem of the family and create virtually a new ecosystem that require new adaptations and guidance.
Liberal political ideologies spawned by world capitalist class is atomizing people as individuals breaking the bonds of family, community and society. It is a premeditated political ideology focussed on free enterprise in the name of human liberation but focussed on capital accumulation by the rich and the powerful. As of now six richest people in the world are owning half the global human wealth. For their purpose to be served and to be richer, they use all forms of divisive ideas to atomize society so that the society, community or the family will not be powerful to resist their exploitation. They want men, women and indeed children to be free from the clutches of the family and society but shackled by them to exploit and further the neo liberal market economy. This is the goal of liberalism. Liberalism espouse LGBTQ+ as a tool of breaking family and society emphasising on the scientifically unverified negative human inclinations of LGBTQ+ as inherent human traits to be recognised as human rights.
They use the global platforms like the World Economic Forum and the likes of the United Nations to form International Conventions to carve the niches to benefit from. Their focus on globalized family law looks benign and masquerade as creating uniformity in law and justice to those suffering from cultural exploitations. But the reality is to secularize family to undermine it from it becoming a bonding agent of society that resist atomization and exploitation by neo liberal economy.
Similarly, LGBTQ+ is an artificially nurtured third force in the arsenals of neo liberalist used to atomise society. This is backed by the multi-billion dollars’ pornography industry that serves the purpose of atomising the family and driving people away from natural sex engendering tranquil family life. Pornography is produced under high-quality management tools by the industry as marketable products. Its consumers are illiterates, novices and those who lack tranquil sexual experience within the legitimate bonds of marriage. The product serves the eyes and emotions of the consumer evoking libertine sensual urge. They put them on sexual overdrive which cannot be sustained through natural sex as between husband and wife. Stephen Sackur from BBC who interviewed Mia Khalifa, former adult actress about life in the porn industry. This is what she said, “she was considered a money minting machine selling her beauty and flesh. At times, though there were no coercion, she was scared to refuse what she was told to act”.( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMfxzJUt69E) Sex industry is a stimulator of trade in human traffic and modern slavery. Human trafficking especially girls from trouble torn countries from the Middle East, Africa, Rohingya refugees and Ukrainians are unfortunate victims of the sex industry. Refugee and IDP families lose their children overnight and they go untraceable instantly due to organised crime. These happens despite international conventions that prohibits it. It is a leak in the bucket, where the powerful determine what is profitable to the misery of others. On one side of the coin, sex industry is considered a legitimate business on the other side it opens avenues for illicit human traffic and trade. Both are products of socio-economic and political inequities in society that robs the right of women to be decent citizens.
Pornography is addictive and destroys the mind and relationship between partners. It damages family and misguides the youth of the opportunity of future family making and a potential tranquil life. The product variations in pornography ranges from unnatural sex to same sex and incest to multi-partner orgies. These insidiously permeate the society to influence and instil dehumanised values undermining decent human behaviour focussed on profit making by the industrialist and liberal political ideologists. This is a volcano driving sub-human behaviour away from public views. These operate behind the screen in the VDUs and in privacy. These cancerous growth help depraved liberalist values to be justified as normal to be legitimised by law in the guise of freedom, a volcanic eruption that would decimate the family and society to benefit neo liberalist ideology.
The recent state of the nation address by Russian President Vladimir Putin clearly depicts this threat posed by liberalism and LGBTQ+ to the family system which decimate society. His emphasis on the challenges to the family and larger society of this negative liberalist culture espoused by the west is damaging human morality espoused by all religions and civilized cultures.
A nuanced understanding of the implications of PTN is very important to understand the threat posed to the Muslim family as an ecosystem build around Islamic worldview. Understanding and proactively responding this challenge from the Qur’anic perspective innovatively is imperative. Responding to this would put Muslim family and indeed the Umma on a new threshold to revolutionize global changes to help mankind to see light in the new dark age, inshallah.
Thoughts from London 