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The Challenges Countered by the Muslims in Reviving the Islamic Civilization
By: Dr. Hyder Reza Zabeth, PhD
Research Scholar in Islamic History
Department of Islamic History
Islamic Research Foundation
The Holy Shrine of Imam Reza (A.S.)
Mashhad, IRAN
Birth of Islamic Civilization
Thus We have appointed you a middle nation, that you may be witnesses upon mankind." (The Holy Quran, Surah [2:143]
What gives birth to a civilization is a belief system according to which specific ways of life appear in a given polity. These specific ways of life of a large social group, then, produce specific way of organizing social, political and economic activities of that polity; this, in turn, necessitates the establishment of institutions to carry out the various tasks which fulfill the commandments, customs and rites originating from the set of beliefs held sacred by that polity.
With the revelation of Islam, the landmarks of earthly and heavenly lives became clearly distinguished. By divinity, humanity achieved justice, equality, dignity and freedom. Allah alone is worshipped; the Muslim is led and submits to the orders of Allah alone. Allah is also the owner of everything. Islam was neither limited in place, national in scope, restricted to its own followers, nor for a special class. It was rather for all humans, with a broad horizon, establishing human brotherhood.
"O mankind! Lo! We have created you male and female, and have made you nations and tribes that ye may know one another. Lo! the noblest of you, in the sight of Allah, is the best in conduct". (49:13)
With the advent of Islam and the spreading of its light over these eastern states, this spirit was bolstered and augmented. It worked to unite individuals of the Islamic State, despite their races and origins. Consequently, Islam, as a religious ideology, an approach to life and a unifying force, managed to establish a human unity based on freedom, equality and tolerance; acting to abolish political barriers between various countries extending over three continents to give them a certain unified form.
Islam was destined to become a world religion and to create a glorious civilization that stretched from one end of the globe to the other. Already during the early Muslim caliphates, first the Arabs, then the Iranians and later the Turks set about to create classical Islamic civilization. Later, in the 13th century, both Africa and India became great centers of Islamic civilization and soon thereafter Muslim kingdoms were established in the Malay-Indonesian world while Chinese Muslims flourished throughout China.
It was not the warlike prowess of the early Muslims which enabled them to conquer half the then known world, and convert half that world so firmly that the conversion stands unshaken to this day. It was their righteousness and their humanity, their manifest superiority in these respects of other men.
The Muslims intermarried freely with the conquered people of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran and all North Africa - a thing none of their conquerors had ever done before. The advent of Islam brought them not only political freedom but also intellectual freedom. The result was what might be expected from so great a liberation of peoples who had never really had a chance before - a wonderful flowering of Islamic civilization which in the after generations bore its fruit in works of science, art and literature.
The simple, rational, Arab character of Muslim government passed with the last of the Umayyads to Spain; the Khilafat of the East was transferred to Abbasids, who were already under Iranian influence, and the capital was removed from Syria to Iraq. The city of Baghdad - a much more glorious Baghdad than the present city of the name, a triumph of town planning, sanitation, police arrangement and street lighting - sprang into existence.
By incorporating those conquered peoples, the Abbasid state forged them into an Islamic culture. This unification underlies the striking scientific progress extending from the beginning of the Abbasid state to the end of the fourth Hijri century. Therefore, scientists are unanimous in their assertion of the high position of Islamic civilization among major human civilizations in history. It is one of the most durable civilizations with the greatest impact on the world.
Nominally the Abbasid Khilafat of Baghdad lasted for full five hundred years, but for the last three hundred and fifty years of its nominal duration the real sovereign power had passed already to the Turks. There was change of rulers, but the civilization remained that of the Islam. Indeed it hardly if at all deteriorated and the condition of the common people throughout the Muslims empire remained superior to that of any other people in the world in education, sanitation, public security and general liberty.
Its material prosperity was the envy of the Western world, whose merchant corporations vied with one another for the privilege of trading with it. In other countries, even in Europe, in the same period, the peasantries were serfs bound to the land they cultivated, the artisans had still a servile status, and the mercantile communities were only just beginning, by dint of cringing and of bribery, to gain certain privileges. In the Muslim realm the merchant and the peasant and the artisan were all free men.
No color or race prejudice existed in Islam. Black, brown, white and yellow people mingled in its marts and mosques and places upon a footing of complete equality and friendliness. It was a civilization in which there were differences of rank and wealth, but these did not correspond to class distinctions as understood in the West, much less to Indian Hindus caste distinctions. No man in the cities of the Muslim Empire ever died of hunger or exposure at his neighbor's gate.
A noble feature of Islamic civilization was its cleanliness at a time when Europe coupled filth with sanctity. In every Muslim town there was a hammam, public hot baths, and public fountains for drinking and washing purposes. A supply of pure water was the first consideration wherever there were Muslims. And frequent washing became so much associated with their religion that in Andalusia[Spain] in 1566 the use of baths was forbidden under severe penalties, because it tended to remind the people of Islam.
The Global Civilization Created by Islam
Islam is a religion for all people from whatever race or background they might be. That is why Islamic civilization is based on a unity which stands completely against any racial or ethnic discrimination. Such major racial and ethnic groups as the Arabs, Iranians, Turks, Africans, Indians, Chinese and Malays in addition to numerous smaller units embraced Islam and contributed to the building of Islamic civilization.
Moreover, Islam was not opposed to learning from the earlier civilizations and incorporating their science, learning, and culture into its own world view, as long as they did not oppose the principles of Islam. Each ethnic and racial group which embraced Islam made its contribution to the one Islamic civilization to which everyone belonged. The sense of brotherhood was so much emphasized that it overcame all local attachments to a particular tribe, race, or language--all of which became subservient to the universal brotherhood of Islam.
The global civilization thus created by Islam permitted people of diverse ethnic backgrounds to work together in cultivating various arts and sciences. Although the civilization was profoundly Islamic, even non-Muslim "people of the book" participated in the intellectual activity whose fruits belonged to everyone.
The global civilization created by Islam also succeeded in activating the mind and thought of the people who entered its fold. As a result of Islam, the nomadic Arabs became torch-bearers of science and learning. The Iranians who had created a great civilization before the rise of Islam nevertheless produced much more science and learning in the Islamic period than before. The same can be said of the Turks and other peoples who embraced Islam. The religion of Islam was itself responsible not only for the creation of a world civilization in which people of many different ethnic backgrounds participated, but it played a central role in developing intellectual and cultural life on a scale not seen before. For some eight hundred years Arabic remained the major intellectual and scientific language of the world. During the centuries following the rise of Islam, Muslim dynasties ruling in various parts of the Islamic world bore witness to the flowering of Islamic culture and thought.
The Characteristic of Islamic Civilization
The symbol of Islamic civilization is the Holy Kaaba, the stability of which symbolizes the permanent and immutable character of Islam.
Once the spirit of the Islamic revelation had brought into being, out of the heritage of previous civilizations and through its own genius, the civilization whose manifestations may be called Islamic, the main interest turned away from change and adaptation. The arts and sciences came to possess instead stability and crystallization based on the immutability of the principles from which they had issue forth; it is this stability that is too often mistaken in the West today for stagnation and sterility.
The arts and sciences in Islam are based on the idea of unity, which is the heart of the Muslim revelation. Just as all genuine Islamic art, whether it be the Alhambra or mosque in Paris or London, provides the plastic forms through which one can contemplate the Divine Unity manifesting itself in multiplicity, so do all the sciences that can properly be called Islamic reveal the unity of Nature. One might say that the aim of all the Islamic sciences and, more generally speaking, of all the medieval and ancient cosmological sciences is to show the unity and interrelatedness of all that exists, so that, in contemplating the unity of the cosmos, man may be led to the unity of the Divine Principle, of which the unity of Nature is the image.
Islamic civilization as a whole is, like other traditional civilizations, based upon a point of view: the revelation brought by the Holy Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W.) is the "pure" and simple religion of Adam and Abraham, the restoration of a primordial and fundamental unity. The very word Islam means both "submission" and "peace" or "being at one with the Divine Will."
This was especially true in regard to the sciences of Nature, because most of the ancient cosmological sciences -- Greek, as well as Chaldean, Iranian, Indian, and Chinese -- had sought to express the unity of Nature and were therefore in conformity with the spirit of Islam. Coming into contact with them, the Muslims adopted some elements from each most extensively, perhaps, from the Greeks, but also from the Chaldeans, Indians, Iranians, and perhaps, in the case of alchemy, even from the Chinese. They united these sciences into a new corpus, which was to grow over the centuries and become part of the Islamic civilization, integrated into the basic structure derived from the Revelation itself.
The lands destined to become parts of the medieval Islamic world -- from Transoxiana to Andalusia -- were consolidated into a new spiritual universe within a single century after the passing away of the Holy Prophet of Islam (S.A.W.).
Importance of Education in the Development of Islamic Civilization
The Muslim universities of those days led the world in learning and research. All knowledge was their field, and they took in and gave out the utmost knowledge attainable in those days. They were probably the most enlightened institutions that have ever been a part of a religion. Following these commands and traditions, Muslim rulers insisted that every Muslim child acquired learning, and they themselves gave considerable support to institutions, and learning in general.
This contributed largely with the commands of Islam to make elementary education almost universal amongst Muslims. It was this great liberality, which the Muslims displayed in educating their people in the schools which was one of the most potent factors in the brilliant and rapid growth of Islamic civilization. Education was so universally diffused that it was said to be difficult to find a Muslim who could not read or write.
Every place, from the mosque to the hospital, the observatory, to the madrassa was a place of learning. Scholars also addressed gatherings of people in their own homes. The mosque played a very great part in the spread of education in Islam. Once established, such mosques could develop into well known places of learning, often with hundreds, sometimes with thousands of students, and frequently contained important libraries.
Teaching and learning in most large mosques became a fully fledged profession, and the mosque school took on the semblance of a university later on. So important centers of higher learning, indeed, that many of them still exist today as the oldest universities in the world. Amongst these Al-Zaytuna in Tunisia, Al-Azhar in Egypt, and Al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco.
The universities of Granada, Seville and Cordoba were held in the highest estimation by the scholars of Asia, Africa and Europe, and in the ninth century, in the department of theology at Cordoba, alone, four thousand students were enrolled, and the total number in attendance at the University reached almost eleven thousand. And on the eve of the British occupation, in Al-Azhar, were already 7600 students and 230 professors.
In the early Islamic era, the mosque was used for the teaching of one or more of the Islamic sciences and literary arts, but after the mid ninth century, more and more came to be devoted to the legal sciences. Scientific subjects were also delivered, and included astronomy and engineering at Al-Azhar, medicine also at Al-Azhar and the mosque of Ibn Tulun in Egypt. At the Qarawiyyin.
In more than one respect Islam influenced Europe and subsequently the rest of the world with its system of education, including universality and its methods of teaching and granting diplomas.
The influence also came in the form of the many translated books of Islamic scholars which formed the core of European education in their first universities (Montpellier, Bologna, Paris, Oxford…), which all were founded in the twelfth-thirteenth centuries. [1]
Jamia means at once both mosque and school, even when they are separate buildings, most often distant from each other. Finally, `Jamia’, the word for university in Arabic derives from Jami, mosque. No similar derivation exists in any other language or culture; no better association between Islam and higher learning than this.
These 'Ulama were the most enlightened thinkers of their time and saved Islamic culture from deterioration in a thousand ways. The 'Ulama who sought for knowledge “even though it were in China”.
Islamic Civilizations' Impact upon Europe
Western writers have often used the word Arabs or Muhammadans for Muslims and Arabic civilization for Islamic Civilization. In other instances, the words Saracen and Moor are also used for Muslims (Arabs and non-Arabs) from various parts of Europe, Africa, Arabia and Asia. During 800-1500 C.E. essentially all scientific works were written in Arabic. It is only after colonization of Muslim lands that this practice became less prevalent and in many instances was eliminated.
During the Middle Ages the Islamic World had a very significant impact upon Europe, which in turn cleared the way for the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. In the Medieval age, Islam and Muslims influenced Europe in a number of different ways. One of the most important of these subjects was Science.
Ever since Islam was born, Muslims had made immense leaps forward in the area of Science. Cities like Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo and Cordoba were the centers of civilization. These cities were flourishing and Muslim scientists made tremendous progress in applied as well as theoretical Science and Technology. In Europe, however, the situation was much different. Europe was in the Dark Ages.
Islamic contributions to Science were now rapidly being translated and transferred from Spain to the rest of Europe. Ibnul Haitham’s works on Optics, (in which he deals with 50 Optical questions put to Muslim Scholars by the Franks), was translated widely. The Muslims discovered the Principle of Pendulum, which was used to measure time. Many of the principles of Isaac Newton were derived from former Islamic scientific contributions. In the field of Chemistry numerous Islamic works were translated into Latin. One of the fields of study in this area was alchemy. The Muslims by exploring various elements, developed a good understanding of the constitution of matter. Jabir ibn-Hayyan (Geber) was the leading chemist in the Muslim world, some scholars link the introduction of the ‘scientific method’ back to him. A great number of terms used in Chemistry such as alcohol, alembic, alkali and elixir are of Islamic origin.
Medicine was a key science explored by Muslims. Al-Rhazes is one of the most famous Doctors and writers of Islamic History. Every major city had a hospital; the hospital at Cairo had over 8000 beds, with separate wards for fevers, ophthalmic, dysentery and surgical cases. He discovered the origin of smallpox and showed that one could only acquire it once in one's life, thus showing the existence of the immune system and how it worked. Muslim doctors were also aware of the contagious qualities of diseases. Hundreds of medical works were translated into Latin.
All of this knowledge transferred from the Muslims to the Europeans was the vital raw material for the Scientific Revolution. Muslims not only passed on Greek classical works but also introduced new scientific theories, without which the European Renaissance could not have occurred. Thus even though many of the Islamic contributions go unacknowledged, they played an integral role in the European transformation.
While historians have written many books on the high level of sophistication and learning of the Muslims compared to the Europeans during the dark ages, few have thought to make the connection between Muslim science and the scientific explosion that was to occur later in Europe. The dependence of the latter on the former, however, is immense. It is proved that the scientific revolution that took place in 17th Europe could not have occurred without the help of the Muslims.
The maelstrom brought upon Europe by the intellectual tradition taken from the Muslim world had far-reaching consequences on European life. Slowly as education spread throughout Europe, with Universities arising in the major cities, the authority of science grew exponentially. Even the powerful Church of Rome would soon go down as it foolishly tried to challenge rationality and scientific proofs with superstitions and the fading doctrine of papal authority. [2]
The crusades, in terms of human losses, were one of the most lopsided military campaigns in history, with the exception of the savage massacres of Muslim civilians by the Christian armies. However, the crusades, initially being a crushing defeat for the Christian World, would introduce them to the enormity of the gap between them and the Muslims.
At the same time, Europeans scholars were learning at the hands of the Muslims in Spain. The translated Greek works would introduce the Europeans to an indigenous intellectual tradition they never knew existed. This helped spark a new self-confidence among the scholars of Europe. Unfortunately, the scholars of Europe were torn between their intellectual loyalty and the strong hatred of their teachers present in their culture. Karen Armstrong explains:
"The Arabs in particular were a light to the Christian West and yet this debt has rarely been fully acknowledged. As soon as the great translation work had been completed, scholars in Europe began to shrug off this complicating and schizophrenic relationship with Islam and became very vague indeed about who the Arabs really were… There is an unhealthy repression and doublethink about people who are at one and the same time guides, heroes, and deadly enemies. This is very clear in the scholarship about Islam". [3]
Another factor that plays alongside the long-standing hatred of Islam in Europe is the phenomenon known as Orientalism. This concept was first articulated by Edward Said in his landmark book Orientalism, which is now considered required reading for anyone studying Middle Eastern culture or history. Orientalism is the result of the elaboration of the imaginary distinction between East and West: geographically, culturally, morally, and intellectually. The result of Orientalism are claims that go along the lines of " ‘We’ are like this, but ‘they’, for unexplainable reasons, are fundamentally different, and in due course, inferior." This in turn serves as justification for "Us" to rule "Them", to exploit "Them", to guide "Them" to our enlightened ways. Academic orientalism gave rise to arrogant, seemingly humanistic ideals which drove imperialism, whose effects are felt very painfully in the Muslim, as well as most of the third, world. [4]
While the "occidental-oriental" dichotomy of recent centuries identifies the World of Islam as separate and `Eastern,' that world, is inextricably linked with the West. In general, however, "Westerners - Europeans - have great difficulty in considering the possibility that they are in some way seriously indebted to the Arab [Islamic] world, or that the Arabs [Muslims] were central to the making of medieval Europe" [5]
"No historical student of the culture of Western Europe can ever reconstruct for himself the intellectual values of the later Middle Ages unless he possesses a vivid awareness of Islam looming in the background." [6]
"The Arab has left his intellectual impress on Europe, as, before long, Christendom will have to confess; he has indelibly written it on the heavens, as anyone may see who reads the names of the stars on a common celestial globe." [7]
"Because Europe was reacting against Islam it belittled the influence of Saracens [Muslims] and exaggerated its dependence on its Greek and Roman heritage. So today an important task for us is to correct this false emphasis and to acknowledge fully our debt to the Arab and Islamic world" [8]
"One of the hallmarks of civilized man is knowledge of the past - [including]the past of others with whom one's own culture has had repeated and fruitful contact; or the past of any group that has contributed to the ascent of man. The Arabs fit profoundly into both of the latter two categories. But in the West the Arabs are not well known. Victims of ignorance as well as misinformation, they and their culture have often been stigmatized from afar" [9]
"Too often science in Arabia has been seen as nothing more than a holding operation. The area has been viewed as a giant storehouse for previously discovered scientific results, keeping them until they could be passed on for use in the West. But this is, of course, a travesty of the truth. Certainly the Arabs did inherit Greek science - and some Indian and Chinese science too, for that matter - and later passed it on to the West. But this is far from being all they did" [10]
An eminent mid-20th century scholar, George Sarton (Harvard University.), traces the "roots" of Western intellectual development to the Arab tradition, which was "the outstanding stream, and remained until 14th century one of the largest streams of medieval thought." Further, "The Arabs were standing on the shoulders of their Greek forerunners, just as the Americans are standing on the shoulders of their European ones. There is nothing wrong in that." Then Sarton criticizes those who "will glibly say `The Arabs simply translated Greek writings, they were industrious imitators...' This is not absolutely untrue, but is such a small part of the truth, that when it is allowed to stand alone, it is worse than a lie" [11]
We can list some of the medieval European scholars who were influenced directly or indirectly by the writings of Islamic scholars like Adelard of Bath, Peter Abelard, Robert Grossetteste, Alexander of Hales, Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventura, Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon, Marsilius of Padua, Richard of Middleton, Nicholas Oresme, Joannes Buridanus, Siger of Brabant, John Peckham, Henry of Gant, Williams of Occham, Walter Burley, William of Auvergne, Dante Algheri, Blaise Pascal, and numerous others.
The well-known early 12th century Englishman, Adelard of Bath, often proudly acknowledged his debt to the Muslims - "trained (as he says) by Muslim scientists....I was taught by my Arab masters to be led only by reason, whereas you were taught to follow the halter of the captured image of ancient authority [i.e., authority of the Church]" [12]
George Sarton's pays tribute to Muslim Scientists in the 'Introduction to the History of Science,' "It will suffice here to evoke a few glorious names without contemporary equivalents in the West: Jabir ibn Haiyan, al-Kindi, al-Khwarizmi, al-Fargani, al-Razi, Thabit ibn Qurra, al-Battani, Hunain ibn Ishaq, al-Farabi, Ibrahim ibn Sinan, al-Masudi, al-Tabari, Abul Wafa, 'Ali ibn Abbas, Abul Qasim, Ibn al-Jazzar, al-Biruni, Ibn Sina, Ibn Yunus, al-Kashi, Ibn al-Haitham, 'Ali Ibn 'Isa al-Ghazali, al-zarqab, Omar Khayyam. A magnificent array of names which it would not be difficult to extend. If anyone tells you that the Middle Ages were scientifically sterile, just quote these men to him, all of whom flourished within a short period, 750 to 1100 A.D."
Robert Briffault states in the 'Making of Humanity' "It was under the influence of the arabs and Moorish revival of culture and not in the 15th century, that a real renaissance took place. Spain, not Italy, was the cradle of the rebirth of Europe. After steadily sinking lower and lower into barbarism, it had reached the darkest depths of ignorance and degradation when cities of the Saracenic world, Baghdad, Cairo, Cordova, and Toledo, were growing centers of civilization and intellectual activity. It was there that the new life arose which was to grow into new phase of human evolution. From the time when the influence of their culture made itself felt, began the stirring of new life.
"It was under their successors at Oxford School (that is, successors to the Muslims of Spain) that Roger Bacon learned Arabic and Arabic Sciences. Neither Roger Bacon nor later namesake has any title to be credited with having introduced the experimental method. Roger Bacon was no more than one of apostles of Muslim Science and Method to Christian Europe; and he never wearied of declaring that knowledge of Arabic and Arabic Sciences was for his contemporaries the only way to true knowledge. Discussion as to who was the originator of the experimental method....are part of the colossal misinterpretation of the origins of European civilization. The experimental method of Arabs was by Bacon's time widespread and eagerly cultivated throughout Europe.
"Science is the most momentous contribution of Arab civilization to the modern world; but its fruits were slow in ripening. Not until long after Moorish culture had sunk back into darkness did the giant, which it had given birth to, rise in his might. It was not science only which brought Europe back to life. Other and manifold influence from the civilization of Islam communicated its first glow to European Life.
"For Although there is not a single aspect of European growth in which the decisive influence of Islamic Culture is not traceable, nowhere is it so clear and momentous as in the genesis of that power which constitutes the permanent distinctive force of the modern world, and the supreme source of its victory, natural science and the scientific spirit.
"The debt of our science to that of the Arabs does not consist in startling discoveries or revolutionary theories, science owes a great deal more to Arab culture, it owes its existence. The Astronomy and Mathematics of the Greeks were a foreign importation never thoroughly acclimatized in Greek culture. The Greeks systematized, generalized and theorized, but the patient ways of investigation, the accumulation of positive knowledge, the minute method of science, detailed and prolonged observation and experimental inquiry were altogether alien to the Greek temperament. Only in Hellenistic Alexandria was any approach to scientific work conducted in the ancient classical world. What we call science arose in Europe as a result of new spirit of enquiry, of new methods of experiment, observation, measurement, of the development of mathematics, in a form unknown to the Greeks. That spirit and those methods were introduced into the European world by the Arabs.
"It is highly probable that but for the Arabs, modern European civilization would never have arisen at all; it is absolutely certain that but for them, it would not have assumed that character which has enabled it to transcend all previous phases of evolution." [13]
Arnold and Guillaume in "Legacy of Islam" mentions the success of Muslims in science and medicine, "Looking back we may say that Islamic medicine and science reflected the light of the Hellenic sun, when its day had fled, and that they shone like a moon, illuminating the darkest night of the European middle Ages; that some bright stars lent their own light, and that moon and stars alike faded at the dawn of a new day - the Renaissance. Since they had their share in the direction and introduction of that great movement, it may reasonably be claimed that they are with us yet." [14]
The Muslims made numerous advances in many fields, one the most important being physics. They received the physics texts of the Greeks, then translated, corrected, and expanded on them greatly. The basis of the study of optics can be attributed directly to the Muslims. Al-Hassen bin Al-Haythem is considered the founder of this field. He and Al-Beirouni also logically came to the conclusion, in disagreement with Aristotle, that the speed of light is constant and that light is composed of extremely small particles moving at extremely high speeds, which is the basis of the quantum nature of light, an endlessly celebrated tribute to 20th century science [15]
The Muslims made monumental strides in the practice and study of medicine. Ibn Sina’s text the Canon of Medicine, was used as a text in Europe for centuries later, and its popularity dwarfed the books of Galen and Hippocrates. Physicians like Abul Qasim al-Zahrawi, Ibn Sina, and Ali Abbas, wrote texts on surgery that would form the foundations of Western Surgery [16]
Reviving the Islamic Civilization
It is the prime and urgent need of the Muslim Ummah to once again revive the glorious past of the universal Islamic civilization. But the Muslim Ummah faces various challenges in this field. I stress on the importance of the below-mentioned proposals to face the challenges in reviving the Islamic civilization.
1- Expounding the Contribution of Islamic Civilization
But the recent trend in the West is to belittle the debt the West owes to Islam and the Muslims. Students in Western Universities might have heard that Muslims were once leaders in science, but their accomplishments are often belittled. While cultural bigotry plays a major role in this distortion of the facts, the achievements of the Muslims have been left out of Western historical records as a result of the hatred of Islam embedded in the Judeo-Christian Western world, which shall be traced to many factors.
The aim of explaining the contribution Muslim scholars is to restore confidence to the Muslim Ummah, to remind believers what is needed to be great again. The Muslims ruled from France to India, not only because of being blessed with the true message, but also of being superior to the conquered people in all other "worldly" ways.
Studying the lives of the Muslim scholars also provides modern-day Muslims with a portrayal of modern scientist. He is one who devotes his efforts to discovering Allah’s signs in this world and who tries to direct his or her discoveries those that produce social benefit.
2- Facing the Challenges of Modernism
When we use the term "modern", we mean neither contemporary nor up-to-date nor successful in the conquest and domination of the natural world. Rather, for us "modern" means that which is cut off from the transcendent, from the immutable principles which in reality govern all things and which are made known to man through revelation in its most universal sense. Modernism is thus contrasted with tradition (al-din); the latter implies all that which is of Divine Origin along with its manifestations and deployments on the human plane while the former by contrast implies all that is merely human and now ever more increasingly subhuman, and all that is divorced and cut off from the Divine Source.
The period of the domination of modernism stretching from the Renaissance in Western Europe in the 15th century to the present day appears as no more than the blinking of an eye. Yet, it is during this fleeting moment that we live; hence the apparent dominance of the power of modernism before which so many Muslims retreat in helplessness or which they join with a superficial sense of happiness that accompanies the seduction of the world.
A second trait of modernism, closely related to anthropomorphism, is the lack of principles which characterizes the modern world. Human nature is too unstable, changing and turbulent to be able to serve as the principle for something. That is why a mode of thinking which is not able to transcend the human level and which remains anthropomorphic cannot but be devoid of principles.
Modern science, therefore, and its generalizations, like other fruits of that way of thinking and acting which we have associated with modernism, suffer from the lack of principles which characterize the modern world, a lack which is felt to an even greater degree as the history of the modern world unfolds.
The Muslim intellectual saw revelation as the primary source of knowledge not only as the means to learn the laws of morality concerned with the active life. Finally he accepted the power of reason to know, but this reason was always attached to and derived sustenance from revelation on the one hand and intellectual intuition on the other. The few in the Islamic world who would cut this cord of reliance and declare the independence of reason from both revelation and intuition were never accepted into the mainstream of Islamic thought.
The mainstream of modern Western thought rejected both revelation and intellectual intuition as means of knowledge. In modern times even philosophers of religion and theologians rarely defend the Bible as a source of divine knowledge.
How futile have been and are the efforts of those modernistic Muslim "reformers" who have sought to harmonize Islam and modernism in the sense that we have defined it. If we turn even a cursory glance at the Islamic conception of man, at the homo islamicus, we shall discover ,the impossibility of harmonizing this conception with that of modern man. [17]
The Islamic conception of man envisages that man is a being who lives on earth and has earthly needs but he is not only earthly and his needs are not limited to the terrestrial. He rules over the earth but not in his own right, rather as God's vicegerent before all creatures. He therefore also bears responsibility for the created order before the Creator and is the channel of grace for God's creatures.
The Islamic conception of man removes the possibility of a Promethean revolt against Heaven and brings God into the minutest aspect of human life. Its effect is therefore the creation of a civilization, an art, a philosophy or a whole manner of thinking and seeing things which is completely non-anthropomorphic but theocentric and which stands opposed to anthropomorphism which is such a salient feature of modernism.
In modernism, Islam is in direct confrontation with modern secular thought. The characteristics of modern thought discussed earlier, namely its anthropomorphic and by extension secular nature, the lack of principles in various branches of modern thought and the reductionism which is related to it and which is most evident in the realm of the sciences are obviously in total opposition to the tenets of Islamic thought, as the modern conception of man, from whom issue these thought patterns is opposed to the Islamic conception of man. This opposition is clear enough not to need further elucidation here.
Utopianism seeks to establish a perfect social order through purely human means. It disregards the presence of evil in the world in the theological sense and aims at doing without God, as if it were possible to create an order based on goodness but removed from the source of all goodness.
Moreover, the Muslim remained always aware that if there is to be a perfect state madinat al-fadilah, it could only come into being through Divine help. Hence, although the idea of the cyclic renewal of Islam through a "renewer" (mujaddid) has been always alive. It is also basic to distinguish between the traditional figure of the mujaddid and the modern reformers.
There is finally one more characteristic of modern thought which is essential to mention and which is related to all that has been stated above. This characteristic is the loss of the sense of the sacred. Modern man can practically be defined as that type of man who has lost the sense of the sacred, and modern thought is conspicuous in its lack of awareness of the sacred. Nor could it be otherwise seeing that modern humanism is inseparable from secularism. The Islamic tradition can never accept a thought pattern which is devoid of the perfume of the sacred and which replaces the Divine Order by one of a purely human origin and inspiration. The confrontation of Islam with modern thought cannot take place on a serious level if the primacy of the sacred in the perspective of Islam and its lack in modern thought is not taken into consideration. Islam cannot even carry out a dialogue with the secular by placing it in a position of legitimacy. In conclusion, it is necessary to mention that the reductionism which is one of the characteristics of modern thought has itself affected Islam in its confrontation with modernism.
But the intellectual challenges posed by modernism in the form of evolutionism, rationalism, existentialism, agnosticism and the like can only be answered intellectually.
The successful encounter of Islam with modern thought can only come about when modern thought is fully understood in both its roots and ramifications and the whole of the Islamic tradition brought to bear upon the solution of the enormous problems which modernism poses for Islam. At the center of this undertaking lies the revival of wisdom hikmah or Haqiqah, which lies at the heart of the Islamic revelation and which will remain valid as long as men remain men and bear witness to Him.
3- The Challenge of Clash of Civilization
A small gathering at the American Enterprise Institute in October 1992 was the first to hear Samuel P. Huntington express an idea that would eventually become his now-famous article "The Clash of Civilizations?", which was published in the summer 1993 issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. But even before the article appeared in Foreign Affairs, its argument was also set forth in an Occasional Paper prepared for the Olin Institute’s project on "The Changing Security Environment and American National Interests". These details are important because they tell us a great deal about the institutional and personal affiliations and support behind this otherwise flawed description of the present global situation, as well as provide clues to the invisible hands behind its global projection that would take its author around the world. The article has since been expanded and "documented", and the resulting book has drawn attention from every continent and been translated into almost all major languages.
Is a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West inevitable? Those Muslims desperately trying to avert one miss a crucial and obvious point: a full-scale war against Islam and Muslims, driven by the West's inexorable drive for global domination, has been underway for several decades, perhaps centuries. This war is being waged not only with guns and bullets – more than two million Muslims have been slaughtered in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the last decade alone – but by every other instrument at the West's disposal, from political manipulation and propaganda to economic and cultural warfare. The West's message is clear: accept western hegemony or else.
It is too late now to trying to avert a "clash of civilizations", for it is well under way, not through any action of Muslims, but because of the West's determination to have all mankind subordinate to their exploitative hegemony.
The fallacy of the notion of a ‘clash of civilizations’
At the most superficial level, a clash of any kind, especially of civilizations, has to be a confrontation wherein there are comparable aggressive intentions in the two opposing civilizations, along with comparable material resources available to carry out the aggression. No such conditions exist today. Thus one cannot really speak of a clash of civilizations; only of the aggression of one civilization bent upon wiping out all other ways of living. This is not merely a play on words, nor a distinction based merely on semantics; it is a logical consequence of historical reality.
We know that civilizations evolve, decay and disintegrate, but does a belief system also go through the same process? What is the belief system upon which contemporary Western civilization is based? Where did it come from? And what are the belief systems of the other civilizations with which the Western civilization is said to be clashing? Where did they come from?
To begin with, let us note that the belief system that produced the contemporary Western civilization first emerged in Europe around 1500 AD and since then has gone through numerous internal transformations. Its geographical expansion took it to North America, Australia and New Zealand. It is also to be noted that there are, indeed, various shades and hues of values, customs and beliefs in the societies and cultures which make up the fabric of contemporary Western civilization, but the concerns and values common to people who live in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and North America – the geographical region of Western civilization – have similarities which make these societies a civilizational unit, based on a specific belief system. The diversity of the contemporary West, then, is a diversity that is constrained within the broad framework of a common belief system.
Let us look next at the formation of this belief system. It arose through two revolutions: one in the natural sciences; the other through a reconstruction of Christianity. The former sought to achieve control over the physical world, the latter redefined values, ethics and worldview in order to establish a Kingdom of Man on earth. These two revolutions are intertwined. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and the accompanying movement that sought to replace the older manifestations of Christianity with a new constructions, both originated in Europe, crossed the Atlantic and begat the contemporary West.
The real nature of the "clash"
This transformed belief system now operative in the West, and the civilization that is based upon it, claim universality for themselves. This claim to universality asserts that the cultures, values and ideals that have come into existence on the basis of this belief system are the most advanced form of human achievement. Furthermore, it claims that its political, economic and social systems, and institutions are the destiny of mankind. This claim is neither a localized phenomenon, nor a tacit or passive self-understanding; it is an aggressive contention that is expressed at various levels, through many means by the ideologues, politicians and intellectuals of this civilization.
This self-assessment, and the ingrained self-righteousness it engenders, are accompanied by a multi-billion dollar effort to spread the "fruits" of the Western civilization to the rest of the world through domination, control and occupation. This, the most massive and aggressive march of any civilization that human history has ever witnessed, is also viewed as the most natural outcome, as if the self-proclaimed fittest civilization has a birthright to extinguish all other civilizations as a process of natural selection. This extrapolation of the doctrine of "the survival of the fittest" into the domain of civilizations is based on the assumed superiority of three basic doctrines held sacrosanct by the West: democracy, individual liberty and free-market economy. It is these three components of the Western civilization which are now being exported to the rest of the world by force and hegemony.
America is not alone in asserting the universality of the Western civilization. This assessment is shared by all countries that perceive themselves as being part of Western civilization. Their mutual differences exist only in the realms of methods, strategies and tactics. Thus no one should be deluded by these superficial differences about how the propagation of the Western civilization should be achieved.
The root of the real "clash" that is a current global reality lies in two claims to universality. We have already seen how the belief system that sired the modern Western civilization claims to be universal; another belief system with a similar claim is Islam. Islam’s claim to universality is simply expressed in the Qur’anic statement that it is a message for all people (7:158). It should also be noted here that the Holy Qur’an claims to be the continuation of, and completion of, earlier Divine Revelations, and places itself in the grand tradition of other Revealed Books, with the important distinction that it was revealed to complete all earlier manifestations of a single Divinely ordained religion, al-Islam, and that it corrects the erroneous beliefs and practices that have crept into earlier belief systems through the corruption of the revealed messages or through their eclipse.
The civilization that came into existence on the basis of the message of the Holy Qur’an – the Islamic civilization – now does not possess military and economic strength comparable to the West, but it still holds that its belief system is the only valid one, and that it is for all of humanity. This claim is not presently asserted through any material prosperity and strength, but simply on the basis of the Qur’anic claim that it is a protected message, eternally safe in the "well-guarded tablet" (85:22), accessible to all through the "uncorrupted and incorruptible Book", the actual Words of God, addressed to all human beings. This belief is simply unshakeable. Hence a materially superior West finds itself face to face with a civilization that had its golden days of strength and power but is now much reduced, yet refuses to accept the universalist claim of a civilization stronger in military and economic terms by several orders of magnitude. That is not all. This exhausted polity, now standing in the way of a universal expansion of Western civilization, itself believes that it will achieve a similar universal expansion because of a Divine promise that, in the end, it is the Truth that prevails. This, then, is the dialectic foundation of the contemporary conflict, erroneously called a "clash of civilizations".
As far as Muslims are concerned, they cannot afford to view the present conflict as a "clash of civilizations", because this construction automatically puts them at a massive disadvantage because Islamic civilization is presently so much weaker in material and worldly terms compared to the Western civilization. It is precisely due to this false construction that many Muslims today feel hopeless and helpless against the onslaught by the West; an attitude that breeds defeatism which has now become a deeply entrenched attitude in the ruling classes in the Muslim world. They forget that civilizations are not primary entities and can therefore change and decay, and yet regain their strength, as long as they remain attached to the unchanging, Divinely-revealed truths.
It allows us to open ways to the message of the Holy Qur’an and to the noble example of His Messenger (saw) for all humanity – ironically, through its own devices, the Western civilization has opened ways for the spread of this universal message to all humanity. The inherent truth and power of Divine Revelation as manifested in the Holy Qur’an can guide us to a straight path. The Western civilization has produced a crumbling world, beset with myriad social and moral problems. Although Muslims face a global terror today, we have a fortification that is beyond the reach of the most sophisticated weapons: our faith.
4- Resolving the Crisis in Humanity
The discussion about "the concept of humanity" is a relatively new term in human history. It is part of the increasingly global outlook that many people have been adopting in recent decades. In any case, the concept of humanity today implies a common sense of existence and fellowship, or shared identity and shared habitation on a single planet, which is fairly new in human history.
Humanity is bigger and more complex, but of course Muslims are part of that humanity and are living within its precepts in one way or another.
This question needs to be asked in ever-widening circles, culminating in humanity as noted above, to avoid heading in the wrong direction, since what happens in one part of humanity does have an impact on other parts. Addressing the question of humanity that is different from that of the usual global slogans, such as "information age," or those various ways of undermining humanity that are at bottom cruel or exclusive.
Muslims only see Islam as the true way of humanity, and believe that the crisis of humanity in the modern world is simply a matter of "being far away from Islam."
The technological futurists are taking the idea of human "progress" to an absurd conclusion, opining in fantasies of the Star Trek sort that people will one day be able to transcend death or the earth, or be able to upload themselves into orbs and transverse the universe. In a way, these sorts of fantasies are the strongest indication that some people have already become severely dehumanized.
The problem, from a certain perspective, is that the life many people live today is a dehumanizing life. This has been most forcefully argued by some of those most deeply embedded in the modern bureaucratic mega-technic society; but that sort of society is spreading globally, like a virus.
Islam is profoundly humanistic, not in the sense of secular humanism, but in the sense of learning to live the way humans lived for thousands of years, before the modern period. That way of life supposed close contact with nature and time to contemplate one’s existence.
Yes, some of the problems of modern technological societies began in the West, but the pathologies of dis-humanity are going global fast, and that is why it is necessary to step back and ask how the meanings of being human have been altered, by "the West" and by the lifestyles that people have adopted, especially the sort of lifestyle that separates them from those essential features of being human, namely a connection to nature, a connection to the world of the unseen, and a connection to one’s fellow humans.
Regarding the issue of secular humanism, which came about in the West during the Renaissance period, it has displaced the centrality of God with the centrality of humanity, "to celebrate our humanity," as it is often put today. Given the inversion of reality imposed by the narrow secular view of humanity, it may be asked how Muslims can contribute to the discussion of humanism from an Islamic perspective.
One major problem related to the lack of humanity in modern technological societies is selfishness. Many people, including Muslims, don’t seem to have time to help others, or they use various restrictions as excuses to keep them in their own worlds rather than being out helping others – they want to ignore the other people around them.
The busy lifestyle of modern technological societies (which is ironic, since technology was supposed to give humans more time for reflection) is not limited to the West but it is part of the problem. That lifestyle, in the way of understanding humanity developed above, is responsible in part for creating a sense of dis-humanity among everyone.
Ivan Illich’s books, Deschooling Society and Medical Nemesis, in which he talks about the effects of educational and medical bureaucracies. In these and other books, Illich makes a good case that modern education, health care, transportation and urban life have become dehumanizing, and that modern bureaucracies and institutions are distorting people’s humanity. After that, in order to gain some historical perspective, one can move on to The Pentagon of Power and The Myth of the Machine by Lewis Mumford, both of which trace the roots and development of what he calls "mega-technic society" from Pharaonic Egypt to modern America, making startling parallels between the two. This course of reading can be rounded out be looking at works that develop the environmental perspective, such as Nature and Madness and Thinking Animals by Paul Shepard, which argue that the further from nature and animals that modern man has travelled, the more insane he has become.
Muslim writers who have reflected on these issues, one can recommend The Machine in Captivity of Machinism by Ali Shariati and Occidentosis by Jalal Ale-Ahmed, both of which discuss the impact of "machinism" and addictions to technology on humanity. To gain a sense of the metaphysical dimension of this discussion, one can consult Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man by Seyyed Hossein Nasr.
The works mentioned above can help open a way of understanding the crisis of humanity, and after reading them Muslim seekers can then go back into the Islamic tradition, in whatever shape or form they prefer – or any tradition for that matter – and look at it anew, and ask fresh questions, with new eyes, and, Insha’Allah, develop a deeper sense of humanity.
5- Revealing the Real Nature of Western Civilization
I recently read in a pro-Western Muslim website from USA that "civilization" was like a "caravan" and that different peoples have led the caravan. At present the caravan of civilization is led by the West, and especially by the Americans, and he insisted that Muslims have two choices: they can join the caravan and play their proper role in it, or they can remain as they are now, like "dogs barking on the sidelines."
First of all, there is not, never has been, and never will be a single "caravan" of civilization; for most of human history there have been multiple civilizations existing simultaneously, and these civilizations rise and fall through the ages. The idea of a single civilization ascending through the ages and leading the others is a central dogma of 19th-century European colonialism, and has remained in much of Western thought, especially in its contemporary American form. Instead, the West has co-opted what it wants from other civilizations and destroyed what it does not want, constructing a self-serving image of leadership in a unipolar, unilinear world order.
Today the discourse on civilization is hopelessly convoluted. Thus, during the Cold War, "civilization" became anything that communism was not, and nowadays a new definition sees Islam as civilization’s defining opposite. Thinking this way, creating definitions from imagined opposites, is a legacy of Euro-American white supremacy, itself rooted in the Judaic idea of a "chosen people" and militantly infused with the missionary zeal of Christianity.
Without paying attention to what is meant by civilization one runs the risk of speaking as a colonizer, ignoring the outlooks and ideas of different cultures in the way their languages frame reality. So one could end up praising a "civilization" noted for its urban accomplishments, political structure and organized military whose people are living a hedonistic lifestyle ruled by homosexual Satanists. By tossing around the word "civilization" without attention to its significance in different conceptual systems, one is imposing a single definition.
It is useful to take a look at the legacy of this civilization today. If the West is now leading the "caravan of civilization," which Muslims are being told to join and support, it is first necessary to look at its roadmap.
The 20th century is instructive in this project. Most supporters would argue that it is the crowning achievement of civilization, in terms of science and other forms of human development. However, one does not have to look far for the sad reality. The 20th century was marked by several totally destructive wars, all fought in the name of "civilization." The first world war destroyed much of Europe and claimed the lives of some 20 million people. So horrific was the frenzy of death and destruction, including the use of chemical weapons, that some proponents of civilization lamented that it had ended, or that the "the decline of the West" was imminent. The West had barely recovered from its "Great War" when it plunged itself again into an even more destructive war, once again devastating Europe and this time costing more than 60 million human lives. The second world war had the added achievement of the American atomic-bomb attack on Japan, leveling two of its non-combatant cities and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.
For 50 years thereafter the world had to live in terror while the US and the USSR squared off. That did not happen, yet the ‘cold war’ claimed millions of lives in the ‘third world’; the American war in Southeast Asia alone killed nearly four million people. One could easily number 100 million people killed in the 20th century by the wars fought in the name of Western civilization.
So how about its great inventions? Automobile fumes are choking the atmosphere of major cities worldwide, and car accidents have become the greatest cause of catastrophic injury in many countries. Television has turned people into fat zombies, fragmented families and spread uniform images of hedonism and violence globally. Computers provide an illusion of knowledgeability, while really being merely a processing and storage technology that denies the validity, value, relevance and usefulness of non-digital bodies of knowledge, understanding, insight and feeling. Biotechnology threatens to release little-understood life forms into less-understood ecosystems, not to mention atrocities such as the greed-motivated patenting of cells and seeds.
Maybe the West is best at economics, some may suggest. Neo-liberalism is supposed to be the crowning achievement of Western economic thought, but to the ‘Third World’, it is looking like a disaster or, as some put it, a "doomsday machine". Deregulated global corporations are constantly on the prowl for cheaper resources and labor in order to make even greater profits at the expense of local cultures and sustainable systems. Meanwhile, American-style consumerism is endangering global environments and ecosystems. That brings to mind space-exploration, with rockets blasting off in search of interplanetary gold mines and garbage dumps, while Millennarianists pin their hopes on extraterrestrial domiciles once they have destroyed the earth. The billions of dollars spent on such fantasies seem criminal in the face of increasing global poverty.
How about culture, ethics and politics? Mindless pop music, violent movies, sex as entertainment, consumerism run wild, women reduced to dolls for the pleasure of male ogling ...it seems that, if modern Western culture is any indication, then civilization is in recession.
The Treaty of Versailles after the First World War in 1919 was supposed to bring world peace, but actually it prepared the stage for a century of world war and global strife, causing some historians to name it the turning-point at which the West gave up all ethics in favor of greed, treachery, revenge and other decidedly "non-civilized" behaviors. Democracy? Bush stole the American presidential elections of 2000 while the electorate was asleep. Human rights? America’s uncritical support for Israel disposes of that claim.
After the WTC-Pentagon attacks on September 11, 2001 Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy, proudly proclaimed that Western civilization was superior to Islam. But where is its superiority? What are its achievements? It is a ‘civilization’ of mass-murders of the Aborigines of Tasmania and the Indians of North America, for instance, and today the Palestinians, Afghans and Iraqis and the Muslims of the Balkans and a ‘civilization’ of rape and torture. Perhaps that is the great achievement of Western civilization: its persistent denial of its horrific past, living in historical amnesia of its own atrocities, while proclaiming to the world that it and it alone is the crowning achievement of humanity, the end and crest of human development. Surely that must be the single greatest accomplishment of Western civilization: its success in fooling the world into believing that it alone deserves to rule.
Samuel Huntington hypothesized a "clash of civilizations" in his infamous policy article in 1993. Now, with the American "war on terrorism" being fought in the name of "civilization", it seems that part of Huntington’s prescription has come true. But the war, like the West, is a sham, and when Muslim speakers extol the virtues of a "caravan of civilization" they are either suffering from amnesia, along with the West they venerate, or they are part of a post-cold war plan to intimidate and cajole the rest of the world into the American sphere of influence.
6- Curbing the Influence of American Culture
American culture is behaving like a disease agent and poisoning human minds. The new model suggests that some causal factors emanate from outside the individual; in other words, researchers are discovering the socio-cultural causes of mental illness. With these insights to hand, many are beginning to point an accusing finger at American culture.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has found that schizophrenia has increased worldwide by nearly 50 percent since the Second World War. Women seem to fare the worst under modernity. A recent WHO study looked at over a dozen countries and found women consistently having depression at rates double men’s. People born since 1950 are much likelier to suffer mental illness than their parents and grandparents, who grew up in the first half of the century: suggesting a connection with the rise of American-style consumerism, which began in the 1950s.The globalization of American culture and consumerism is the most probable culprit.
The hypothesis of the American cultural basis of mental illness is further supported by projections from the WHO, which are that by the year 2020 heart disease and depression will be the two most debilitating illnesses worldwide. Unlike the most debilitating diseases of the 20th century, which were caused primarily by bacteria, viruses and other organisms, the new diseases are caused by cultural behaviors.
As more people realize the debilitating effects of American culture, globalization will come to be recognized as the latest wave of Western imperialism, which has always wrought havoc, death and destruction on the peoples falling under its sway.
7- The Challenge of Islamophobia
It is no secret that the media and political establishment in North America and Europe are viciously anti-Islamic. This pervasive fear of Islam has been described as "Islamophobia" by many Muslim commentators.
While the pervasiveness of Islamophobia is unquestionable, there is much confusion in the Ummah about its root cause. Some Muslims attribute the North American and European establishment’s Islamophobia merely to lack of proper education about Islam; others insist that Islamophobia is the result of too much Jewish influence in America and Europe. How far do these theories explain the extent and intensity of Islamophobia?
Islamophobia is not limited to those who are uneducated about Islam. Most members of the establishment who are well versed in comparative religion are just as antagonistic to Islam as their less knowledgeable compatriots.
There is one factor which principally accounts for Islamophobia in North America and Europe is the corporate greed. Western power elites sees Islam as the new threat because it threatens their financial and material interests. Islam’s insistence on social justice threatens the vested interests of western capitalists. Although Islam allows private ownership of businesses, the Shari’ah mandates that such ownership be managed for the public good of the stakeholders (i.e. workers and the local community). As Allah tells all the people of the earth, and not just a wealthy few, "It is He who hath created for you all things that are on earth . . . " (the Qur’an: 2:29).
Printing of the sacrilegious and blasphemous cartoons insulting the Holy Prophet of Islam (S.A.W.) by the Western mass media is the clear example of intense Islamophobia inherent in the West.
8- Facing the Challenge of Western Hegemony
Samuel Huntington admits that one of the causes of tension in the modern world is that the west must speak for everyone, its voice having become the self-proclaimed "voice of the world community," as in the war against Iraq.
The western challenge to other peoples to domesticate or be exterminated has historical phases, and the current phase is to promote domestication by way of dialogue and cooperation, but with the threat of extermination always implicit. Examples of this policy can be found throughout western history in its encounters with the outside world.
The West's drive for economic supremacy destroyed the Third World during the cold war. The cold war is over, the west's need is to bring the Third World into the sway of the First World. In order to implement their 'New World Order' the West is now employing "dialogue or die".
Then leads to an 'Enlightenment' and on into the end of the nineteenth century when a philosopher like Nietzsche, could claim that 'God is dead!' In a sense, they killed God - it took about a thousand years or so, but, in Western minds, astaghfirullah, they killed their deity. Deicide is one of the legacies of Western civilization.
This led to the development of exploitative and destructive relationships with nature because it was thought to be inherently evil and dirty, and at best something to be dominated and used. With this attitude, a driving force, the West developed industries, economies, and cultural practices that are completely destructive. They have forgotten survival is a partnership with the natural world. All this can be seen in the wasteful habits of use, and the culture of consumerism that emanates from America. The American legacy to the world at the end of this millennium is wanton consumerism writ large, wasteful of the environment - a form of ecocide institutionalized into the culture.
Women constitute the first wholesale victims of genocide in Western civilization. In America, they make fun of the witch-hunts, with a holiday called Halloween. But it's not so much fun when one realises that they murdered millions of women in Europe in this millennium. This was really the first holocaust of Western civilization. Eventually, the genocidal mentality flows out of the West with the age of expansion, and begins to engulf millions of Africans dumped overboard from slave-ships or worked to death in the colonies: another form of genocide. They needed so many Africans to work in their plantations because European conquest and disease wiped out the Indians. Such genocide continued into the twentieth century with the legacy of minorities in Europe being wiped out, which is continuing to this day. Deicide, ecocide, fratricide, and genocide.
We can go on by talking about homicide. Since the great achievement of the West is in warfare, the culture is infused with violence, even down to an individual level. People have their own wars on the street with each other, drug wars and gang wars. Then there's infanticide, which the Holy Qur'an forbade 1400 years ago. There's a sex-obsessed culture in the West that makes forms of infanticide seem like a rational choice.
Look at what Pope Urban II said in his famous speech at Clairmont in 1095: the faithful Christians must 'exterminate the vile races' of Muslims from the face of the earth. The effort failed, but the mindset continued. And Western civilization institutionalizes this extermination by developed unprecedented war-machineries. Remember -- the Chinese had gunpowder long before Europe, but they did not develop weapons of mass-destruction as developed by Western countries.
But the ethos of extermination had a catch. They could not exterminate everybody because people resisted being exterminated, and because that would leave no slaves to rule over. When extermination was not an option, the second choice was to domesticate. One of the major theological debates in Christianity, sparked by Columbus' misadventure in the Americas, was that they debated whether the Indians are inhuman and therefore should be exterminated or human and therefore should be domesticated.
At first, domestication got intertwined with slavery. The West believed that they were helping people by enslaving them. In the time of chattel slavery, missionaries began to redefine local cultures. Later on, colonial education carried on the work of dismantling and redirecting local forms of thinking and acting, which was another form of domestication. Of course, for those who resisted domestication, there was always the option of extermination. This two-prong effort served the West for centuries.
One of the goals behind the extermination and domestication movement in the West is to liquidate people's assets, be they cultural, land or natural resources. The assets of exterminated people could simply be confiscated, whereas domestication usually resulted in people giving away their assets. A later version of the extermination and domestication debate involved Thomas Jefferson and other framers of the US Constitution, revolving around whether the Indians were rational and therefore able to sell their land, or irrational and therefore not entitled to own land.
Why do Muslims even consider renewing their allegiances to Western political, economic, and educational systems, when those systems have become outdated and are likely to be abandoned or changed in the West itself? On the contrary, now is the time to make room for varieties of viable Islamic visions, before the West institutionalizes another form of savage barbarism. By emulating the West, the Muslims will become stunted in their theological and cultural understanding of Islamic civilization.
The Western world by their educational system have gradually redefined other people's ontology and epistemology. Fundamental understandings of how human beings relate to the Divine, each other, the world, and knowledge have been almost completely redefined for Muslims by Western educational systems.
Part of the solution involves studying the Islamic tradition for the numerous relevant teachings. For instance, there are several very telling hadith which discuss the nature of knowledge and what an educated person ought to be like.
The third area in which we need to liberate ourselves is methodology. Muslims to based their methodologies on Islamic criteria.
Muslims need to take the time to work through the Qur'an and the Sunnah to locate and rediscover the profound guidance that is embodied in these fundamental teachings. Ontology, epistemology, methodology - we must seize control of these three areas, because they underlie our studies and struggles in the political, economic, and social realms for reviving the glorious past of Islamic civilization.
Globalization means not merely uniformity but also conformity to the dominant, primarily American culture. This applies as much to food as it does to music and clothes. A major role in this globalization campaign is played by the English language.
Culture is not value-free. It brings with it such other baggage as feminist rhetoric, concern about environmental issues, drugs, the 'freedom' to indulge in homosexuality and lesbianism, the 'right' to have an abortion and to have children out of wedlock. Selective concern for narrowly-defined human rights and democracy are some of its other pet projects.
Economic globalization has meant that the rich have become richer and the poor poorer. Even the trickle-down theory has not held true.
Global culture means that human diversity will be swept by the tide of America's culture of nudity and vulgarity. It was Oscar Wilde who had said that America is a country that has gone from barbarism to decadence without the stage of civilization.
The cultural imperialism is predicated on the same arrogant belief in the superiority of its value system that propelled colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When the West talks about cultural, economic or political globalization, it simply means that other societies must be open to Western penetration. The West must be free to exploit the resources of other lands: be it cheap labor, raw materials or energy.
Conclusion
The Islamic world, despite distances between its parts and differences in sects and policies, represents a unique historical unit. The political differences among its states and governments do not prevent their meeting on the popular and civilization levels.
Islam builds the foundations of Islamic civilization and distinguishes between the good and bad elements of civilization, defending its discipline and origins. The morals of individuals and the unity of the nation and the preservation of the Islamic Nation depend on this faith. The principles of Islam are capable of yielding strong elements that may confront all political regimes and philosophical ideologies that try to harm Islam and stand fast before the march of materialistic, capitalistic and secularist theories.
In the light of what has been said, it is understood that any pious and God-fearing Muslim should look into the Seerah and the Sunnah of the Holy Prophet (S.A.W.) to seek guidance and to model their conduct according to that of the Holy Prophet (S.A.W.) in the course of his own life.
Therefore Muslim politicians, reformists, activists, economists, and military commanders should turn to the Seerah, to seek guidance from the Holy Prophet’s way of conduct in their respective fields of activity.
Muslims conscious effort to derive, deduce and outline the spirit, the direction, the attitude, and the mood of the Holy Prophet’s practice in every individual instance mentioned in his blessed Seerah, and then inject this spirit into our modern life.
The lost identity of the Muslim Ummah and the past glory of the Islamic civilization cannot be regained through power or wealth but through the refined values taught and practiced by the Holy Prophet of Islam (S.A.W.).Insha'ALLAH.
References:
[1] John W. Draper, History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Harper & Row; Vol.2, 1876 & 1904; p.40.
[2] Eaton, Gai. "Islam and the Destiny of Man". The Islamic Texts Society: Cambridge, 1994.pp 32-33.
[3] Armstrong, Karen. "Holy War: The Crusades and their Impact on Today’s World". Doubleday: New York, 1991.pp 64-65, 225-226.
[4] Said, Edward. "Orientalism". Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1978.
[5] Maria Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History; 1987; p.13.
[6] Pierce Butler, "Fifteenth Century of Arabic Authors in Latin Translation, in the McDonald Presentation Volume; Freeport, N.Y., 1933; p.63.
[7] John W. Draper, History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Harper & Row; Vol.2, 1876 & 1904; p.42.
[8] W. Montgomery Watt, Islamic Surveys: The Influence of Islam on Medieval Europe; Edinburgh, England; 1972; p.84.
[9] John Hayes, The Genius of Arab Civilization: Source of Renaissance; MIT Press, 1983; p. 2.
[10] Colin Ronan, Science: Its History and Development among World's Cultures; New York; 1982; p.203.
[11] George Sarton, A Guide to the History of Science; Mass.; 1952; pp.27-28).
[12] Tina Stiefel, The Intellectual Revolution in Twelfth Century Europe; St. Martin's Press, N.Y., 1989; pp.71, 80.
[13] Robert Briffault, "The Making of Humanity," London, 1938.
[14] T. Arnold and A. Guillaume, "The Legacy of Islam," Oxford University Press, 1931.
[15] Davies, Paul. "Super force: The Search for a Grand Unified Theory of Nature". Penguin: London, 1995. p 29.
[16] Shustery, A. M. A. "Outlines of Islamic Culture". Sh. Muhammad Ashraf: Lahore, 1976.pp 152-153.
[17] L. Schaya, "Contemplation and Action in Judaism and Islam," in Y. Ibish and I. Marculescu (eds.), Contemplation and Action in World Religions, Seattle and London, 1978, p. 173.
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