Muslims between Past, Present and Future

Roots & Hypothesis

Many scholars have discussed and studied the reasons of economic and political failure of Muslims across the globe in this era, especially after the great change in balance of power after first industrial revolution that started at 18th century. We don’t aim through these series of articles to further explore the reason behind this great shift and we will leave it for the reader.

Some of those scholars are Malek Bennabi and Mohammed al-Ghazali who had an amazing publications about the root causes of Islamic civilization decline after it was a global power and a beacon for humanity in middle-ages. Among these books that are highly recommended are: Islam and the Modern Economy, The problem of ideas in the Islamic world, Renaissance conditions, Muslim in the world of economics. Some of these books offer also a vision of the authors on how we can recover our position as a leader again.

This documentary is also very good to get a quick idea about this important topic: Rise and decline of science in Islam

Conclusions

All these resources have some common perceptions about the great shift in the Ummah. There is a great consensus that the decline happened gradually over long period of time and it is mainly driven by big cultural changes. This cultural change happened mainly because of deep inner conflicts, the selfishness and greed of the weak generations especially Muslim ruling elites and war lords who came after the great generations. Selfishness without minimum knowledge that could prevent treason and inner crack of the Ummah, the treason that has been exploited by foreign powers to induce severe damage to Muslims culture, humiliate them, putting them inline and takes away their abilities to think critically.

Those Muslim credible intellectuals agreed that without developing the required self-awareness, there will be no hope to address our limitations and find applicable solutions to regain our leading position in the world. This self-awareness requires that we need first to start questioning everything we have been taught and have a deep understanding of the factors that led to this continuous decline since 14th century.

Raise and fall of Nations

To summarize findings, main factors that contributed to the rise of Islamic golden age:

• a just/balanced political system that created a fertile land for intellectuals from all fields to think, invent and criticize.
• Open-mindness that allowed excellent connection with outside world and knowledge transfer of other civilizations.
• The great space that given to rational thinking that incited a revolution in all fields: Math, Geometry, Medicine, astronomy etc.. which ultimately established the Islamic world as a leader through its soft power before military power.
• The Quraan as a book was in the core of this renaissance as it was the engine that inspired the different scholars in these old ages to understand the mysterious scripts within it. These factors combined created a collective special spirit on intermittent periods of political stability, this spirit that was taking the whole society in specific direction toward the future with clear vision about their objective and the nature of their existence.

On the other hand, main factors that contributed to the decline of this civilization:

• political instability, Where Muslims in these ages couldn’t develop a sustainable political system that guarantee the inclusion of the people and a smooth transition of rulers and accordingly this hindered the continuous development of societies.
• Economic decline that correlated also with political instability.
• Mass migration of brains and skills that once fuelled the Islamic societies.
• Repression of critical thinking and the big underestimate of rational thinking.
• Putting rational thinking in a second rank after religious studies that focused a lot on rituals on cost of Quraan scripts that once was the stimulus for rational thinking

The striking thing now that we see in the west, the same signs that led to the fade of Islamic golden age, for example a great interest is given now to trivial matters such as definition of the gender, the gradual fall of education, the absence of clear purpose of human being existence, etc.. Even though, the west has still a good political system that guarantee stability and doping the economies with the right talents, the issue that prevented a quick fade of western civilization until now.

Questions

This brings us to another question, Why we should really care about Ummah and what does it really mean bringing back the greatness of this Ummah to normal people like us? How can this have a better impact on us as individuals? What is the shape of this greatness? How it will be the relation between this new born nation with other nations? What are the strengths that we possess as a Muslims to pursuit this purpose? How can we utilize these strengths? Tens of questions that need a self-reflect, we will try to answer in the next articles.