THE RESPONSE OF TRADITION

One of the effects of what we have now come to recognise as modernity is that if you are not up there with the rest of the crowd following "fashion" then you must be "backward". There is a very sophisticated process at large which having moulded us into consumers incessantly pushes us to be in front of everyone else. Advertising is the unsubtle manifestation of this mechanism and there is a lot more to this than what meets the eye. It exploits the human instincts for acquisition and competition. Fashion has many guises and its most obvious manifestation is the clothes industry to the extent that the terms "clothes" and "fashion" are now inter-changeable. This is one of a number of artificially constructed cultures of modern mass consumption where models manage to look progressively glamorous whilst they progressively wear less and less. This is a clever trick and behind it are the veils that both cover the reality and produce the illusion at the same time.

Modern civilisation, behind the politics, the jargon, the hype and the advertising industry is as naked as the fashion models and like them is glamorous and captivating. It is also fleeting, it is built in obsolescence and its nakedness attracts and devours. It exhorts us to "change" and we are told to "change or get left behind" and this is another way of inviting one to join the "rat race". There is much truth in the phrase "slaves to fashion" and this slavery pushes each one of us to race ahead of the other. All this is good for the banks, industrial conglomerates and the super markets and then one hears complaints about the "hectic pace of life". Hidden in this last phrase is something that is real and frightening. The ideology of growth is now sacrosanct as politicians (and the electorate) make a fetish of "economic growth". This is the anchor of liberal democracy but analysts have come to the conclusion that the global economy is growing exponentially – a mathematical term which in layman’s language could be phrased as "where the hell are we going?" Most of us are not even aware that there is a question of this nature to be asked. We enjoy the ride goaded on by the selfish short termism of our share prices, bank balances, property values, insurance policies and life spans. Incidentally, as we become accustomed to increasing our national economies for ever and ever, nobody has noticed that Planet Earth has remained the same size for much of its life span and will continue to remain the same during the time allocated to our species on it and way beyond.

The great cities of the planet encapsulate these aspects of modernity best. They attract people like suicidal moths to a powerful street lamp. It is estimated that over half the world’s population will be living in cities early into the new millennium. This is part of a twin process now jargonised into "urban drift" and "rural depopulation". Fewer and fewer of us want to work the land any more and what a good excuse for huge mechanised farms and giant chemical corporations producing genetically modified crops "to feed the growing number of hungry mouths".

Seasoned travellers sometimes face the unexpected and this happened to me in Indonesia during a visit to this mosaic of a country last March. My colleagues in the Institute of Ecology in Bandung had arranged a visit for me to a madrassa in one of the neighbouring villages. It was described blandly in advance to me as an alternative school system; it was a traditional way of education; a parallel system. But I was in for a surprise. The person I was first introduced to was "the marketing manager". This puzzled me - a marketing manager in a madrassa?

He said, "the economic crisis in the country never touched us".

More puzzlement, "why?", I asked.

"Our fresh produce are in great demand, especially in the cities", came the reply.

These responses were very matter of fact and my puzzlement grew into curiosity - madrassa equals economic independence. How was that possible?

What I was led into was a village community, which practiced organic farming, described to me as the traditional way, for economic self-sufficiency. Here is another example of how modernity plays tricks with words. It is fashionable to go into "organic farming" yet the methods used by this movement is as old as the hills and the people of this village have got it right – it is the "traditional way". This was one of a network of Pasentran madrassa villages that had survived the ravages of colonialism, which in other parts of Indonesia are known as Zawiya schools and in Malaysia as the Pondok system. Apparently there are hundreds of them and the particular village I was taken to supported about 300 students whose ages ranged from twelve to eighteen and a third of them were female. Most of the learning activities were centred in an around the Mosque and the male students when they were not studying worked in the fields. The female students worked in the packing sheds grading and weighing the produce for market. The Village also boasted a herd of dairy cows and a fish farm. There was a clinic and sports facilities.

There was no talk here of national curricula, grant maintained schools and free market universities and the remarkable thing about this community was that the whole ethos of it was non-institutional. One did not get the impression that one was in a regimented over organised place. The feel was that of a village - a community of people of which the students were a part. The income derived from agricultural produce supported the students. They were housed and fed by the village, they paid no tuition fees and yet the village made a profit. I then saw the point of the marketing manager.

My conservation with the Imam who was also the head of the community was wide ranging. He was surprisingly well informed and our discussions ranged from self-sufficiency to the way the Muslims used to trade internationally without the help of the banks. I told him about certain Muslim groups in the West who are advocating a return to traditional trading through the use of gold and silver coins. His response to this was to tell me that he does not trust paper money and that his community traditionally kept their surplus wealth in gold. This is how this community saved themselves when the crisis hit the country and the banks collapsed.

So we are back to tradition again. The fashion today is banks and paper money, which is at the root of the environmental crisis and any critiquing of this, is considered to be a bit unfashionable if not cranky. The shame is that Muslim economists steeped in the western tradition of this pseudo science modify the Islamic approach to this subject to stay in fashion. Islam has a profound alternative to offer in this vital area of human interaction stemming from the injunctions in the Qur’an on riba, but those who advocate Islamisation have distorted the whole process. As "Islamic economics" patently proves it has come to mean modifying Islam in an attempt to match the consumer power of the dominant model. Such is the power of fashion and the path to "progress" - another fashionable buzzword, but what does it mean? The term’s application relates almost exclusively to economic progress, but the fact that this is causing massive pollution and species extinction at an alarming rate are issues people are not willing to look at squarely. There is also a direct relationship between social collapse and the "progress" we have been making in the last century or so and this manifests itself most clearly in the so called "advanced countries".

And then there is "sustainability". It is now the buzzword in Eco-economics. Very fashionable in fact, but nobody can agree to what it means. But, here we have people living sustainably after the very traditional fashion of their forefathers and learning to cope with the dominant model at the same time. No definitions needed here – just getting on with it. There is also a salutary lesson here for us activists in the West. These people are not part of the constructs of the new global order. They are not part of the NGO movement nor do they claim to be part of "civil society" whatever that means, although they have been civil for centuries and they have been "networking" long, long before this term was dreamed up by God knows who.

May be we should change the way we do and look at things. Perhaps these communities made the mistake of remaining traditional and proving at the same time that tradition is best. It is also not a monopoly of any one faith or tribe or group. It has evolved out of centuries of responses to the rhythms of nature and importantly it is in context. It is not subject to the vagaries of one economic theory or another and neither is it dependent on the impulses of global financial markets. This is real progress. It is not polluting and it does not line the pockets of politicians and petty officials and is indifferent to the stock market quotations of trans national corporations.

The World Bank and the IMF are now the fashion but traditionally we have always relied on our wealth on Allah’s generosity - WALLAHU KHAIRUR RAZIQEEN.

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