Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson claimed that Muslims were at fault because Muslim scholars allegedly rejected the German printing press when it was invented, arguing that the sacred word of God should not be printed by a machine. In his book *The Dream of Rome*, he asserted that there is “something in Islam that hinders development.”
What Boris Johnson and others like him in the Western world deliberately ignore is that Western colonialism bears historical, political, and economic responsibility for stopping the natural trajectory of development among Muslims. The Crusades, followed by direct Western military occupation, contributed significantly to halting the growth and evolution of Muslim societies according to their own doctrinal, intellectual, and moral frameworks. With the suspension of the Islamic civilizational process, the Muslim mind became paralyzed, and all tools of knowledge, thought, and critique stagnated. As a result, we entered a tunnel from which we have not yet emerged.
The decline we witnessed before the arrival of Western invading forces would not have continued indefinitely; every civilization experiences rises and falls, and its historical trajectory naturally includes curves, slopes, and turning points. Yet the momentum of civilization and the vitality of the Muslim intellect would have remained alive and would not have disappeared. The Western colonial invasion of our lands, however, had a destructive effect: the invaders came with a predetermined intention to deprive us of every source of strength and progress, turning us into dependent and underdeveloped nations…
We have come to derive our very reasons for existence from them, and that rupture between our historical–civilizational continuum and the period following the direct military occupation by a rising, materially driven civilization caused us to detach from our historical identity and to be negatively shaped by the dominant power. As a result, the Muslim individual has become something whose features are no longer clearly defined.
