Three Generations, One Crisis

Fifty years ago, the Malaysian philosopher Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas described the society we now live in with an accuracy that has only sharpened with time. What follows in this article is largely an exposition of his diagnosis, because it deserves to be heard in something close to his own terms, and because everything else in this series stands on it.

Western society, al-Attas observed, is divided into three generations: the youth, the middle-aged, and the old. Each generation moves within the confines of its own search for meaning, circling the same two questions: Who am I? And what is my destiny?

The youth look at the values handed down by their parents and find them neither useful nor relevant to their way of life. So they decline to take the middle-aged as models, and demand instead the freedom to choose their own path. The middle-aged, for their part, remember that their own values failed to guide them when they were young. Knowing they cannot provide the guidance their children need, they surrender that freedom, hoping the young might succeed where they failed. But the young cannot find guidance in their own generation either; they cannot produce from their midst a model worth following. So they live with uncertainty and doubt, daring to hope that when they reach middle age they will remould the world nearer to their heart’s desire.

And the middle-aged know how that story ends, because they are living it. Their former values have lost their meaning, their search for identity has failed, and their lives, in al-Attas’s words, are void of happiness. So the values that remain, the only ones left to measure success by, are secular and material: the climb up the social ladder, wealth, power, renown. In the middle of that competition, they feel their intelligence beginning to weaken and their vitality beginning to decline, and anxiety, regret, and sadness take hold as they glimpse what is coming: retirement from public life into the loneliness of old age.

Which brings us to the elderly, and to the sentence in al-Attas that is hardest to read. The old, in such a society, are forgotten, because their existence reminds the young and the middle-aged of what they will become. The old remind them of death. They have lost vitality, success, memory, their use and function in society; they have lost, as he puts it, “friend and family — they have lost the future” (al-Attas, 1978/1993, p. 93).

The name of this condition

Why does it end this way? Al-Attas’s answer: when a society builds its philosophy of life on secular foundations and takes materialistic values to live by, the meaning and worth of a person come to be measured by his occupation, his use, his working and earning power. When old age takes those away, it takes his identity with them, because the identity was never anything else.

So the three generations circle forever in what al-Attas calls a vicious circle of unattainment, each dissatisfied with its own self-made values, each finding itself a misfit. And he gives this condition a name from our tradition: ẓulm, injustice (al-Attas, 1978/1993, pp. 92–94).

The naming matters, because in Islam injustice has a precise meaning. Justice is everything in its right and proper place; injustice is displacement, a thing put where it does not belong. A human being displaced from his proper place in relation to his Creator, his purpose, and his own self is a human being suffering ẓulm, even if he is the one inflicting it on himself. And here al-Attas makes the move on which this whole series turns: justice implies knowledge. To put things in their proper places, you must know what they are and where they belong, right from wrong, truth from falsehood. This, he argues, is why knowledge, ʿilm, holds so central a position in Islam that the Qur’an refers to it in one form or another hundreds of times (al-Attas, 1978/1993, pp. 76–78).

The crisis of the three generations, in other words, is at bottom a crisis of knowledge. Our displacement comes down to our deficiency in the knowledge of Islam and our confusion about its worldview.

Each generation searches for a model worth following, and cannot produce one. We were given one, and told so plainly.

The generation gap that does not exist

Al-Attas does not stop at diagnosis, and neither should we. His point in naming the crisis is the contrast: Muslim society, where it is true to itself, is not divided by the gap of generations, because every generation, in every age, has the same perfect model. Allah says:

لَّقَدْ كَانَ لَكُمْ فِي رَسُولِ اللَّهِ أُسْوَةٌ حَسَنَةٌ

Certainly there is for you in the Messenger of Allah an excellent example. (al-Aḥzāb 33:21)

The Prophet ﷺ is the perfect model not for one generation but for all generations, not for a time but for all time. The young do not need to reject their parents’ model, and the old are not discarded, because parent and child and grandparent are all facing the same direction, each generation confirming his example ﷺ to the next. Where his example is transmitted, the chain does not break, and the crisis of identity simply does not arise. A Muslim who knows his Covenant with his Lord knows who he is and what his destiny is; the two questions that torment the three generations were answered for him before he asked them.

The question for us, then, is not whether we have an answer to the modern crisis. We do, and we have had it for fourteen centuries. The question is whether we are transmitting it, and transmission is another word for education. What Islam means by that word, and how far it is from what the modern world means, is where this series goes next.

May Allāh place us, and our children, in our proper place: knowing Him, near to Him.

Sources and further study

This article is an exposition of the opening diagnosis in:

• Al-Attas, S. M. N. (1993). Islam and secularism (2nd impression). International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization (ISTAC). (Original work published 1978). See especially pp. 76–78 and 91–95.

Qur’ānic renderings are informed by classical commentaries.