Book Review: Rise and decline of Islamic
civilization
By Muhammad Khan
The Crisis of Islamic Civilisation.
By Ali A Allawi, London: Yale University Press,
pp287, 2009, PB, £18.99
Muslim Civilisation: The Causes of
Decline and the Need for Reform. By M Umer
Chapra, Leicester: The Islamic Foundation,
pp225, 2008, PB, £12.00
The birth of Islamic civilisation was a sudden,
unexpected and unparalleled event in the history
of humanity.
Back in the seventh century, there were two
superpowers in the world, namely the Holy Roman
Empire (its eastern wing was known as the
Byzantine Empire) and the Persian Empire. At the
time, these two superpowers considered Arabia to
be a strategically unimportant, economically
impoverished and politically insignificant part
of the world. The Bedouins of the desert were
regarded by the prosperous and cultured Persians
and Byzantines to be illiterate, uncivilised and
a backward people whose presence would not have
been mentioned even by the historians.
At that time, a child was born in the Arabian
citadel of Makkah in 570CE, who was destined to
transform the course of human history forever:
his name was Muhammad (peace be on him).
Described as a ‘luminous light’ by the Qur’an,
the Prophet blazed a trail which transformed the
fortunes of Arabia and thereby inspired the
desert Arabs to become the pioneers of history’s
greatest civilisation. Within a century after
the death of the Prophet, the Arabs had reached
as far as Spain in the West and the Indus Valley
in the East, swiftly overtaking the Persian and
Byzantine Empires, to become the powerful force
in the world. The emergence of Islam as a
religious, political and economic force went
hand in hand with its educational, cultural,
artistic and spiritual depth and power. In the
unfolding of human history, there has never been
another global civilisation like it.
After nearly a thousand years of unrivalled
innovation, contribution and achievements in all
spheres of human endeavour, during the
eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
the Muslim world began to experience serious
decline and disintegration. The emergence of
leading European powers, coupled with their
subjugation and colonisation of a large part of
the Muslim world, marked a serious setback to
Islamic progress and advancement.
This state of affairs inspired scores of Muslim
intellectuals and reformers to emerge during the
eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries
in order to reawaken the Muslim world from its
sleep and slumber. ‘Amir al-Bayan’ Shakib Arslan
(1869-1946), was one such intellectual and
reformer. An associate of both Muhammad Abduh
and Rashid Rida, he write a series of articles
in the famous al-Manar journal under the title
of Li Madha Ta’aakhkaru al-Muslimun wa Li Madha
Taqaddama Ghayruhum (Why Muslims are Backward
and why Others have Progressed?) during the
early part of the twentieth century. In these
articles, Arslan argued that the main causes of
Islamic decline were the Muslim unwillingness to
take initiative, be proactive and the absence of
intellectual creativity (ijtihad) within the
Islamic world. Not much has changed since. No
wonder then that Ali Allawi and Umer Chapra have
written their books to explore this issue in
considerable detail.
Allawi was educated in the UK and US and became
a Minister in the Iraqi post-war governments.
His first book, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning
the War, Loosing the Peace (1997), was a
thoughtful reflection on the present condition
of his country and its future direction. Now a
Visiting Ffellow at Princeton, Allawi’s book
under review is a challenging and ambitious
effort on his part to tackle the question Arslan
attempted to answer nearly a century ago.
However, unlike Arslan who was an imminent
Islamic reformist and scholar, Allawi is a
former politician who hails from a wealthy Iraqi
family and this book appears to be his first on
an Islamic subject. Also, whereas Arslan spoke
of ‘decline’ and ‘backwardness’ in relation to
Islamic civilisation, Allawi’s approach is more
apocalyptic, that is to say, he thinks the
Islamic civilisation is currently going through
a serious ‘crisis’ and it is highly likely that
this crisis could lead to the demise of Islamic
civilisation unless serious steps are taken to
resolve this crisis.
Unlike Allawi, Chapra’s analysis of the current
condition of the Ummah (global Islamic
community) is more academic and less alarmist.
What, however, appears to be true is that,
unlike Arslan, both Allawi and Chapra’s
discourse on the ‘crisis’ or ‘decline’ of the
Ummah has been invariably influenced by the
‘clash of civilisation’ discourse first
initiated by Bernard Lewis in 1990 and
subsequently popularised by Samuel Huntington in
1993 and 1998.
However, in 2002, Lewis published his What Went
Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in
the Middle East and, in this book, he wrote,
“What went wrong? For a long time people in the
Islamic world, especially but not exclusively in
the Middle East, have been asking this question.
The content and formulation of the question,
provoked primarily by their encounter with the
West, vary greatly according to the
circumstances, events, and duration of that
encounter and the events that first made them
conscious, by comparison, that all was not well
in their society. But whatever the form and
manner of the question and of the answers that
it evokes, there is no mistaking the growing
anguish, the mounting urgency, and of late the
seething anger with which both question and
answers are expressed.” (p3)
Both Allawi and Chapra’s books appear to be two
different responses to the same issue raised by
Lewis. Given the desperate existential condition
of Iraq at the moment, it is not surprising that
Allawi’s discourse is tinged with great urgency,
if not, alarmism. “The crisis of Islamic
civilisation,” he argues, “arises partly from
the fact that it has been thwarted from
demarcating its own pathways into contemporary
life. The western mould of modernity has been
superimposed on its worldview, and Islam has
been unable to relate to the modern world except
through this awkward and often painfully alien
framework…The unease as to where Islamic
civilization is heading, or is being pushed,
provides the underpinning for the stream of
projects to ‘reform’ or ‘revitalise’ Islam.
These have continued uninterrupted from the
early nineteenth century to the present. They
all relied on a reinventing of Islam by
secularising, liberalising, historicising or
radicalising Muslims’ understanding of their
religion. All these schemes have so far failed
to stop the erosion of the vitality of Islamic
civilization. One can only conclude, therefore,
that individual and societal regeneration in
Islam has either passed the point of no return
or its roots must be sought elsewhere than in
the prescriptions of Islam’s would be
reformers.” (pp9-10)
In other words, Allawi is of the opinion that
Islam as a spiritual force is alive and well but
its external manifestation or practical
dimension is currently suffering from an
unprecedented crisis. In his own words, “There
is little doubt that the civilization of Islam
is undergoing a monumental crisis. In one form
or another, this crisis has been going on for
well over two hundred years…The world which
Islam had built over the centuries – its
civilization in the broadest sense of the word –
has been seriously undermined. How this came
about and whether the damage inflicted on
Islamic civilization is terminal or not is the
subject of this book.” (p1)
Although Allawi’s book consists of eleven
chapters of roughly equal length, he begins by
providing a brief historical overview of Islam’s
encounter with the West, followed by
consideration of changes which took place as a
result of this encounter, and finally he
assesses the impact of western domination of the
Muslim world and its erosive consequences on the
practical dimension of Islam as a political
power, economic might and cultural force.
Even though Allawi does acknowledge that his
book is not an academic work, he fails to
clearly define what he means by ‘Islamic
civilization’ as a distinct spiritual force on
the one hand and an outer or practical
expression on the other – and what the
relationship between the two dimensions are is
in the context of his analysis.
Nevertheless, Allawi’s central argument appears
to be that Islam as a political, economic and
cultural force is spent, and the only way it can
be regenerated again is by focusing on its
spiritual dimension which he says has remained
alive and well.
He is of the opinion that the prescriptions
suggested by the secular humanists as well as
the ‘Islamic fundamentalists’ are not the real
solutions to the problems of the Muslim world;
instead, he argues that the views of the
Traditionalist School is a possible panacea.
Inspired by the writings of Rene Guenon, and
popularised by Frithjof Schuon, Titus
Burckhardt, Martin Lings and Seyyed Hossein
Nasr, the proponents of this School argue that
all major world religions, if practised in their
original forms, are equally valid and could lead
to salvation in the hereafter. They are also
highly critical of the modern world and the
philosophies which influenced modern thoughts
and ideas (see Nasr’s Knowledge and the Sacred,
New York, 1989, for more details).
Allawi’s endorsement of the ideas and thoughts
of this School without subjecting them to
critical analysis prove (if proof was required)
that his book is a rushed effort.
Unlike Allawi, Chapra is an acclaimed economist
and Islamic scholar whose Towards a Just
Monetary System (1985) won him both the Islamic
Development Bank Award and King Faisal
International Award in 1990. If Allawi (a former
politician) is prone to seeing things in
political terms, then Chapra is prone to seeing
things in economic terms. Influenced by Ibn
Khaldun’s theory of the rise and decline of
civilization, Chapra begins his book by raising
‘Some Critical Questions’ (pp1-16). “One of
these,” argues Chapra, “concerns the factors
that have led the Muslim world to this weak
position after having enjoyed a glorious
past…Efforts to answer this question bring into
focus another important question about the
factors that enabled Muslims to perform
extremely well in the earlier centuries of
Islam. Did Islam play a positive role in the
earlier rise of Muslims? If this earlier rise
was due to Islam, then why has it now become
ineffective in enabling the Muslims to improve
their condition? Could it be that while Islam
was able to contribute to their rise in the
past, it is no longer capable of enabling them
to respond successfully to the newer challenges
they face in modern times? If, however, Islam is
not the cause of Muslim malaise, then what is to
blame?” (p2).
In other words, Chapra is of the view that the
cause(s) of Muslim decline need to be determined
first before consideration can be given to the
question of reform and regeneration.
After outlining Ibn Khaldun’s theory of the
development and decline of civilisation, Chapra
provides a historical, political, economic and
sociological overview of the conditions which
led to the decline of the Muslim world. As
expected, his analysis of the economic condition
is much more powerful and convincing than his
historical, political and sociological analysis;
indeed, his views concerning the role of Sufism
in the decline of the Muslims is not only weak
but also unsubstantiated.
After 163 pages of analysis of the different
reasons for the decline of Muslims, the author
devotes barely 30 pages to the highly pertinent
topic of ‘Need for Reform.’
In fact, both Allawi and Chapra are strong on
analysing the cause(s) of ‘decline’ or ‘crisis’
of the Islamic world but they are very weak on
suggestions for reform or regeneration. This is
because it is easier to analyse the past in
order to highlight its glories or criticise its
failings than explore the present condition in
order to make suggestions for improvement in the
future. The former process is carried out almost
entirely on the basis of historical facts and
data while the accomplishment of the latter is
largely dependent on innovative solutions
fostered by intellectual creativity and fresh
thinking. And, as we known, today the Muslim
world is desperately suffering from a chronic
shortage of fresh and creative thinkers in all
fields of human knowledge and endeavour.
Nevertheless, as both Chapra and Allawi
repeatedly point out, the ‘sense of the
transcendent in Islam’ has remained intact to
this day and this, in the words of Allawi,
should enable Muslims to “reclaim those parts of
their public spaces which have been conceded to
other worldviews over the past centuries. A new
Islamic civilization can only be carved out from
a harsh reality of years of inactivity,
lassitude and indifference. And, if it is to be
achieved, this will be only after overcoming
conditions of great imbalance and adversity. The
creative impulses of civilization are now all in
the domain of another world order. The
challenges are not insurmountable. But they will
test to the limit the Muslim’s commitment to
Islam as a complete way of life.” (p270)
One may not agree with everything the authors
have to say, yet it was a joy to read these two
thoughtful, pertinent and informative books, and
I have no hesitation in recommending them to
others, Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
Muhammad Khan
M Khan is currently writing a book titled The
Muslim Heritage of Bengal; he is author of The
Muslim 100 (2008)
courtesy: The Muslim News, UK
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