I once told an American friend : when Islamic law returns to govern our lands, it will not be a repetition of the brutality of Al-Qaeda or ISIS. Rather, it will revive the civilization that built the palaces and mosques of Cordoba, the House of Wisdom in Cairo, and that once excelled in numerous scientific fields :
- Scientists advanced the fields of algebra, calculus, geometry, chemistry, biology, medicine, and astronomy.
- Many forms of art flourished during the Islamic Golden Age, including ceramics, metalwork, textiles, illuminated manuscripts, woodwork, and calligraphy.
The beasts who disguised themselves as Muslims in Iraq and Syria through Al-Qaeda and ISIS in no way represent the radiant face of Islamic civilization, which flourished for nearly six centuries under the rule of Sharia, and only declined after the Battle of Lepanto II, which marked the beginning of the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
The reasons for that decline were primarily internal, rather than solely the result of Western Crusader or Renaissance aggression. We failed to address our own deviations and weaknesses that accompanied the West’s civilizational rise.
We were the ones who froze ijtihad (independent reasoning), and the authority of religious scholars -whose duty was to correct the rulers’ deviations – was weakened. The Crusader occupation of our Islamic world only hastened an already ongoing collapse. We sank into a swamp of passivity and a loss of will.
The result was that everyone suffered from the corruption and degeneration of the Arab-Islamic world. After our nominal independence, we lived in a state of schizophrenia – abandoning our moral values while trying to imitate the West’s flaws rather than its virtues.
And thus, what happened, happened. But God’s sun will rise again, God willing.
