OSMAN NURI HADŽIĆ: ISLAM IS NOT AN OBSTACLE TO CULTURE AND MUSLIMS ARE NOT CULTURALLY INFERIOR

Osman Nuri Hadžić was born in Mostar in 1896, and he died in Belgrade in 1937. Upon the completion of rushdiye and madrasa in Mostar, he continued education in Sarajevo, at the School for Sharia Judges. He was the first Muslim who was admitted to the Faculty of Law in Zagreb, in 1893, where he graduated in 1896. He published tales, short stories, short essays and novels in many literary journals. For several years he was the editor-in-chief of Mearif – a folk calendar for Muslims.

Together with Safvet-bey Bašagić and Edhem Mulabdić, he launched a biweekly Bosniak journal for entertainment and education – Behar. His books Muhammed a.s. i Kur'an and Islam i kultura classified him as one of reference author s who wrote notable works in the area of history of Muslim culture, in Europe in the 20th century.

These short notes from the Biography of Osman Nuri Hadžić will serve as a framework for at least general understanding of his extreme contribution to presenting and explaining the thesis that Islam is not incompatible with modern civilizational trends and that the external, territorial expansion of Muslim state was accompanied with the growth of Muslim society from the inside, in terms of culture and civilization.

At the age of 25 Osman Nuri Hadžić self-published a study “Islam and Culture”, which is considered a pioneer undertaking of presentation of the history of Islam and Islamic sciences in Bosnian.

The study was written as an exhaustive academic response to Milan Nedeljković who, in 1892–1893, in Ljetopis Matice Srpske, made a series of serious accusations and negative qualifications of Islam and Muslims. In Nedeljković's opinion, the “Mohammedan people”, compared to Christian peoples, is in the inferior position, they have sunk into superstition, ignorance, laziness and lethargy, since Islam is ipso facto the fiercest adversary of progress and culture.

Responding to anti-Muslim hysteria, in the manner of an encyclopedically well-educated scholar and a subtle intellectual polemicist, Osman Nuri Hadžić distinctively ridiculed Nedeljković.

Presenting irrefutable logical, philosophical, historical and theologian counterarguments for all the listed, imprecise claims, Osman Nuri Hadžić demonstrated excelling knowledge of Islamic academic disciplines, and also proved Nedeljković’s obviously deeply-rooted hatred of and prejudice against Islam and Muslims.

 There is no doubt that Osman Nuri Hadžić thoroughly studied literature about Islam written in English and German. He did so using a strict academic methodology, discerning the essential difference between science and ideology and exhibited the ability to distinguish historical facts from biased and one-sided views of Islam.

In this respect, Osman Nuri Hadžić claims that those who read books about Islam written by Gustav Le Bon or Syed Ameer Ali on the one hand and those who learn about Islam from authors such as Muir, Sprenger, Nöldeke, Kremer and others who have their works published in renowned literary-professional journals in Germany do not and cannot have the identical perception of Islam.

As for Nedeljković's objections that Islam is a false religion and that Prophet Muhammed, a.s. is only a counterfeiter of Christianity, Osman Nuri Hadžić responded with a single counterargument: “if we deny the divine character to Islam because we cannot understand its sublime thoughts about God and supernatural miracles, then all the other religions should also be denied the divine character in general, while it was not possible for Muhammed, a.s. to get in a long-lasting touch with Christians before Revelation, since in the three short trips out of Mecca  Muhammed, a.s. could not study other religions and create, out of them a 'completely different and distinctive religion.”

To Nedeljković's obscure objections that Islam stagnates in cultural sense because it is stuck and rots in fatalism and pessimism, Osman Nuri Hadžić provides both Qur'anic-Hadith evidence which rebuts such a counterfeit of a monotheistic religion, and simple and indisputable historical facts. Fatalism, as Osman Nuri Hadžić shrewdly notes, is not an obstacle to cultural development, since “ancient Greeks rose to the highest level of culture not as a Christian but as a pagan people, and they were fatalists on top of it”. Logical contradiction of such an incoherent and low-level accusations of Islam is made better visible by a brilliant observation of Osman Nuri Hadžić: “And if, let us say, Islam taught predestination, then nobody could be forced or invited to religion, because all of it would be in vain, and one should wait for what comes 'from the above, from Allah'.”

Osman Nuri Hadžić uses a multitude of examples to illustrate the opinion that historical events contradict tendentious views that Islam is a surmountable obstacle to cultural development. The first clock that Europe had was actually a gift by khalif Harun er-Rašid to Charlemagne, and at Muslim courts khalifs encouraged scientists and richly reward them regardless whether they are physicians, philosophers, architects or writers.

Even a today's reader of „Islam and Culture“ cannot help observing the intellectual passion, as well as personal pride, self-respect and self-confidence with which Osman Nuri Hadžić describes great achievements of Muslims in raising academic, cultural and civilizational standards in one period of history: “Splendid palaces of khalifs contemptuously looked at squalid sheds of European rulers, and their construction, exterior and interior decoration, brilliance and beauty – they were like courts of a thousand and one night, which have ever been created by burning human imagination” Osman Nuri Hadžić refers to Draper, who expresses doubt that at that time (8th century in Spain) any European nation was so progressive as to embark on the road of education and science as Muslims did, since one should not forget that a pope studied at university in Cordoba, that Averoes from Cordoba commented on Aristotle, that Ebu Osman wrote Zoology, that El-Biruni traveled all the way to India for scientific purposes, that El-Abbas and El-Bejtar studied botany at the highest scientific level.

It is fascinating to see wit of Osman Nuri Hadžić in uncovering a common forgery in history, a too often cited falsehood in Western literature, that hazreti Omer, the second Muslim khalif, destroyed the famous Library of Alexandria. To this purpose, he cites English historian Gibbon: “Alexandrian archbishop Theophilus destroyed the glorious and famous library Serapeum in Alexandria in 389. For almost twenty years after the event, the sight of empty shelves caused compassion and resentment in every viewer.” Together with this reminder of Gibbon, Osman Nuri Hadžić drew scholars' and researchers' attention to the fact that an Ottoman author wrote the whole study Iskenderijje kutubhanesi, where he thoroughly refuted falsehoods about the destruction of Library of Alexandria.

In his outstanding study, Osman Nuri Hadžić dis not stop at refuting the presented falsehoods about Islam and Muslims. He also clarified historical background of the propagandistic attributing of violence and injustice to Islam and Muslims for all acts performed by some states or individuals laying the whole blame on Islam.

Historically viewed, the false, twisted and negative presentations of Islam reach back to the 15th century and Byzantine monks who, in the opinion of Voltaire himself, as cited by Osman Nuri Hadžić “wrote more against Islam than against janissaries”. Such foundations of anti-Muslim sentiment were enhanced by German orientalism, which identified Islam with Ottoman conquests.  

Osman Nuri Hadžić managed to light a spark of insight that roots of non-recognition of Islam as a religion which has grandiose contents and potentials for cultural development still reach much further than the tendentious approach to Islam by a Serbian quasi-scholar.

Recognizing the dominating Eurocentric spirit in science and culture of the time, Osman Nuri Hadžić, as a confirmation to his contemporaries, presents an interesting opinion of an English scholar, doctor Lihtner, recorded after a journey to India: “Western world holds the opinion that there is no school or education except in the West; everything in the East is bad and incomplete. However, it is actually not so. In India, Islamic schools, classes and regulations and more progressive and better than ours, English., in every respect. During my stay in India I peeped into every single corner of Islamic schools and I did not notice anything which could raise an objection, which could be inappropriate in any way. If I saw anything inappropriate, it was in our English institutes.”

Underscoring conformity of Islam with culture, Osman Nuri Hadžić entered ranks of significant thinkers of the 20th century who made huge intellectual efforts to oppose the organized conspiracy of disavowal, relativization and silence against Islamic culture. In the 1950s, Marxist-oriented thinker Roger Garaudy, in his book Islam, Culture and Civilization, reminded us of the conversation of a French historian with a madame Navazie, when he asked her on one occasion: “Which is the most unfortunate day in the history of France?” She did not answer. She did not know which day it had been?! Then he replied: “It was the year of 732, when the Battle of Poitiers took place, the year when Arabic culture retreated before French barbarism.”

To fully understand the meaning of these ambiguous words, it is necessary to be reminded that, for example, French Revolution was welcome by the greatest minds of the time, such as Goethe, Kant and Hegel. Hegel even said of Napoleon himself: “I saw the mind riding a horse.” In other words, in this case military power was nothing else but a mere expression of cultural superiority.

References:

• Hadžić, Osman Nuri (1894), Islam i kultura, Zagreb.

• Garodi, Rože (1981), Islam, kultura i civilizacija, Starješinstvo Islamske zajednice u Bosni i Hercegovini, Hrvatskoj i Sloveniji, Sarajevo.