Ali A. Mazrui

The debate about the end of history raises issues that sometimes touch almost upon the philosophy of history, insofar as they relate to the significance of not only a particular century but of the human species.  Francis Fukuyama provoked this debate in his seminal article entitled, "The End of History?" in the journal The National Interest. At the end of the twentieth century, Fukuyama saw "an unabashed Victory of economic and political liberalism."' His central argument was that the whole world was moving towards a liberal democratic capitalist system that was destined to be the final sociopolitical paradigm of all human evolution. As Fukuyama put it:

• What we may be witnessing is just not the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

For Fukuyama, at the time of writing the original article (in 1989), the momentous changes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, which were only just unraveling, were part of that historical evolution towards democratic capitalism that he argued all societies would experience sooner or later. Fukuyama has since expanded his thoughts into a book?

Fukuyama’s Thesis and the Muslim World

For our purposes, we may ask, how does this thesis relate to the Muslim world? Is our Muslim society also evolving towards a system of liberal capitalist democracy? Or will Islam provide an alternative concluding paradigm to human history? Muslims in fact believe not so much in the end of history as in the end of religious history.

Islam considers itself to be both the inheritor and the continuation of the Abrahamic tradition in history. It is stated in the Qur’an:

• He has made plain to you of the religion that He enjoined upon Nuh and that which We have revealed unto you, and that which We enjoined upon Ibrahim and Musi and Isa, that you keep to obedience and be not divided therein. (42:13)’

Muslims see the Prophet Muhammad as the last of the prophets. Muslims claim that both the Jews and the early Christians had prophesied the coming of Muhammad and the Qur’an. With regards to the Jews, the Qur’an asserts:

• Say: Have you considered if it is from Allah, and you disbelieve in it, and a witness from among the children of Israel has borne witness of one like it, so he believed, while you are big with
  pride; surely Allah does not guide the unjust people. (46:lO)

With respect to the Christians, Muslims believe that Jesus had already informed his followers about the coming of the last prophet. The Qur’an asserts:

• And remember, Jesus, the son of Mary, said: 0 children of Israel! Surely I am the apostle of Allah to you, verifying that which is before me of the Tawrah and giving the good news of an Apostle who will come after me, his name being Ahmad; but when he came to them with clear arguments they said: This is clear magic. (61:6)

One may ask: to what extent has history vindicated these Muslim beliefs?

History has so far proven Muhammad to be the last of the grand founders of grand religions. Islam is the youngest of the grand global sacred faiths. And it is arguable that since Islam was born more than fourteen centuries ago, no religion has become numerous enough to be the national religion of even a single country in the twentieth century. Is Islam then the concluding chapter of religious history in the world? The Qur'an states explicitly that Muhammad is the last of the prophets: "Muhammad is not the father of any of your men, but he is the apostle of Allah and the last of the prophets" (wan 33:40).

Does the expression "the last of the prophets" mean that he is in fact declaring the end of religious history since this is the final conclusion of this particular phase of human experience? Are Muslim societies therefore  vindicated by fourteen centuries in which no other prophet has repeated the grand religious construction?

But with regard to the secular tide of the end of history, are Muslim societies nevertheless moving towards liberal democratic capitalism? In the last years of the twentieth century, the world of Islam is larger in population-and growing faster-than the world of liberal democracy. As Weeks has pointed out in a demographic study of Islamic nations: "At current rates of growth, the 1988 estimated population of some 980 million Moslems could nearly double to l .9 billion before the year 2020, accounting then for 23 percent of the world's total.

While Islamic countries have a crude birth rate of 42.1 per one thousand population, developed countries have a crude birth rate of 13.1; while Islamic countries have an average rate of natural increase of 2.8 percent, that of developed countries is only 0.3 percent; and the average total fertility rate of Islamic nations is 6 percent, while that of developed countries is only 1.3 percent.

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