The Loss of Adab

Syed Naquib Al Attas on his works and his writings has said that, the most crucial issues in the world civilizations is the “Loss of Adab”. May the West call this as norms and values, but, Naquib Al Attas stated that Islam as a worldview has its own concept about morality spirits in humans interactions. It is called as Adab’.

Differ from the West theorist about norms, almost of them have no consolidated meanings about values and norms. The Wests tend to emphasize values and norms on “how to do about it” not on “how to understand it”. And its implications, international systems nowadays have no consensus about norms and values. This case always convey us to double standard as the crucial problem of humans civilizations.

What is Adab’? Adab is the reflection of wisdom. And what is wisdom? Naquib Al Attas stated that wisdom is the knowledge that tells you about proper place of everyting. Islamic worldview states that adab is not something comesfrom university or even from the knowledge itself. And wisdom is the knowledge of the prophet. So that, we also call the prophet as the messenger who convey humans ‘how to civilized the civilizations’ and of course by the wisdom.

An-Nisa 58:

“Indeed, Allah commands you to render trusts to whom they are due and when you judge between people to judge with justice. Excellent is that which Allah instructs you. Indeed, Allah is ever Hearing and Seeing.”

There are four concepts which constitute the Adab’; commands, ahliha, hakam, and justice. Command is talk about prohibitions which bring us to the law and law enforcement. The second concept is ahliha (the people who are due), this is refer to “The Ahli” or The Professional/expert and on the highest level, this term comes to “Government”. All of these concept is aimed to constitute the ideal condition, which called as “Justice”.

The proper place in Islam, is predicate term which differ all things between Haq and Bathil. What is Haqq? Haqq is not same with truth, because Haqq is a reality and truth, some people also call it as “The True Real” because in some case the truth is not always become real. It is not also the property of sentences, it has ontological body that things already established in reality, and they have proper places.

The final aspects of Islamic Worldview about values and norms is, The Concept of Happiness as the purpose of humans life. How to define happiness can be done by defining the opposite meaning of happiness. It is misery. What is misery? Syed Naquib Al Attas states that negative emotional feelings is not the culmination of misery because it can’t be universal. Naquib Al-Attas said that “ultimately doubt” is the definition about misery. So, the opposite of (Ultimately) Doubt is (Ultimately) Belive (Yaqin). This is what we usually call as “Haqqul Yaqiin” as the concep of happiness in Islam.

From what I’ve learned about west thought on values and norms, They have no concensus about the consolidated norms. This anomali has caused some cases like double standard, stereotyping, radicalism, and so on. This paper has explain that, Islamic Worldview as a comprehensive thoughts has a distinct concept about values and norms. Islam does not use morality as a concept. Yet, Islam uses its own and pure concept, Adab. Adab is the reflections of knowledge that tells you about the proper place of everything, about the proper place of state, politics, economy, social life, and also the norms itself.