ISLAM AND CIVILIZATION

ISLAM AND CIVILIZATION

Contents :
• Islamic Civilization
• The Characteristics of Civilization
• Seven Stages to Process of Rise and Fall
• Factors behind Rise and Fall
• Fall of Islamic Civilization from the Quranic Perspective


Islamic Civilization

• Meaning :Islamic Civilization

• It is called “al-Tamaddun” ( التمدن) , “al-Madaniyyah” ( المدنبة) or “al-Daynunah” ( الدينونة ) from the Arabic word “dana” ( دان ) – “din” ( دين ) (religion) and “madinah” means city.



• Tamaddun from the Islamic perspective has the element of (din) religion embedded in it. If it is not founded upon the spirit of Islam, then such a civilization is not an Islamic Civilization.

• Civilizations composed of two components, internal and external.

• The external component is referred to the physical achievement of the civilization as building, sophisticated equipment and machineries, architecture etc.
• The internal refers to the moral and ethical values, the spiritual and religious foundation that served as the basis of the civilization.

• Each civilization has a body and a soul.

• The body - material achievement such as buildings, factories machines and all that is related to the various and luxurious pleasures of worldly life.

• The soul - the set of ideologies, concepts, moral value, manners and traditions that are embodied in the behavior of individuals, groups and their interrelations.

• What is Culture?
• Bennabi sees culture as consisting of two aspects: material and adaptive.

• While material culture includes the material objects, the means of action and its products.

• Adaptive culture comprises the non-material things of social life such as beliefs, ideas and concepts, language and customs.



The Characteristics of Civilization.


• The Characteristics of Civilization:
• Unity
• Rationality
• Tolerance
• Balanced and Integrated civilization
• Needed to further Islamic awakening and work with seriousness and determination.
• Integration between science and faith in Islam


• Unity (Tawhid)

• Unity of faith, religion, purpose, unity of mankind and unity of the final destiny.

• No civilization without unity such as unity of faith, religion etc. .


• The constitute elements, whether material, structural or relational or integral are an bound by tauhid in Islam.

• Tauhid or ultimacy of Allah implies that Allah s.w.t is worthy of worship of service. A person should lead his faith, actions and lifestyle according to this principle.


• Rationalism

• Constitutive of the essence of Islamic civilization.

• - It consists of 3 rules or laws:

1. Rejection of all that does not correspond with reality.

• Muslim must be willing to reject old practices, ideas and opinions which do not have sound and solid argument

2. Denial of ultimate contradictories

3. Openness to new approach, protects him against fanaticism, conservatism.

• Must be willing to explore new ideas, approaches within framework of syariah and should not be rigid.


• Tolerance

• Means the acceptance of the present until its falsehood has been established

Tolerance in worship, religion and its functions, service of man and having interaction between one to another.

•

Balanced and Integrated Civilization Project with identity and Mission

• Balance means following a middle course between 2 extremes of action.

• This also means “the righteous way”


• “Middle course” which should not transgress or fall short in the balance as Allah states. Allah says

• وَالسَّمَاءَ رَفَعَهَا وَوَضَعَ الْمِيزَانَ(7)أَلَّا تَطْغَوْا فِي الْمِيزَانِ(8)وَأَقِيمُوا الْوَزْنَ بِالْقِسْطِ وَلَا تُخْسِرُوا الْمِيزَانَ(9)

• Transgression -the tendency towards excessiveness.

• To fall in the balance - the tendency towards negligence.

• Balanced should be in faith, actions, religion, worship, dealing, services, social interaction and other aspects of life.

• Allah swt says :

• كُنْتُمْ خَيْرَ أُمَّةٍ أُخْرِجَتْ لِلنَّاسِ تَأْمُرُونَ بِالْمَعْرُوفِ وَتَنْهَوْنَ عَنْ الْمُنكَرِ وَتُؤْمِنُونَ بِاللَّهِ وَلَوْ آمَنَ أَهْلُ الْكِتَابِ لَكَانَ خَيْرًا لَهُمْ مِنْهُمْ الْمُؤْمِنُونَ وَأَكْثَرُهُمْ الْفَاسِقُونَ(110)

• Integrated civilization project means spiritual, material, cultural and moral dimension, pertaining to worldly life and here after as well as science and faith.

• Islam emphasized of the purity of means it implies in parallel with the nobility of the end and never accepts noble ends through impure or dirty means.

• It rejects achieving truth trough falsehood, even establishing mosque and school.

•

Needed to further Islamic awakening and to work with seriousness and from determination.

• -Transforming the Islamic nation from weakness to power
• - from poverty to prosperity
• -from chaos to system
• -from jester to seriousness

• -from destruction to construction

• -from disintegration to supporting and co-operation on goodness and piety.

• -from financial under development to integrated progress(material & moral

• Awakening is able to do more in recruiting its abilities and potentialities for active work. Allah says (surah al-Ra’d : 11)
•
• إِنَّ اللَّهَ لَا يُغَيِّرُ مَا بِقَوْمٍ حَتَّى يُغَيِّرُوا مَا بِأَنفُسِهِمْ




Integration between science and faith in Islam

Humanity need a new civilization, which has a different philosophy and message from western civilization:

- To restore its faith in Allah, His message, day of reckoning, His Justice and the sublime value without which man loses his humanity and life.

• Encompasses all things man craves, religion, science, faith, reason. Spirit and matter.

• Man’s way to paradise and guide him to avoid the way of hell.

• To enjoy his life to the fullest with the limitations.

• Man is guided by the light of both divine truth and human intellect.

• In this civilization man should have a feeling that Allah is the All knowing, All wise , who knows everything.
Rise and Fall of Islamic Civilization
•


Rise and Fall of Islamic Civilization :
• i. Seven Stages to Process of Rise and Fall

• ii. Factors Behind Rise and Falls

• ii. Fall of Islamic Civilization from the Quranic perspective


Seven Stages to Process of Rise and Fall
• Seven Stages to Process of Rise and Fall

• Mixture
• Gestation
• Expansion
• Age of conflict
• Universal empire
• Decay
• Invasion

Seven Stages to Process of Rise and Fall
• Mixture

• Period of Mecca (13 years) & beginning of Medina.

• Emphasized on Aqidah and demolished syirik towards Allah swt.

• Allah didn’t revealed them with specific rituals comprehensively
(such as obligations- duties and rights- , economic, law & legislative, politic, etc)

• Gestation

• Period of Medina (10 years) – The life of prophet s.a.w & Abu Bakr al-Siddiq

• Muslim were struggling to form laws & organize people under the banner of Islam.

• Performed Islamic missionary (dakwah) & jihad among Arabs.

• Expansion

• Period of Umar al-khattab & Uthman ibn Affan

• When they started to extend the Muslim for spreading Islamic Hukumah (Islamic State)

• Arab & non Arab converted to Islam

• Age of Conflict

• Period of Uthman, the period of Ali & the period of the beginning of Umayyad.
• Because :
– Of misunderstanding between Uthman and other companions.
– Misunderstanding between Ali and Aisyah, Ali and Muawiyah and so on
• Appeared groups - syiah, khawarij, etc

• Universal Empire
• Period of the Ummayad, Abbasid ,Ottoman Empire and also Mughul Empire

• Built Islamic civilization & culture – knowledge, scientific knowledge, human sciences, etc. e.g:Baitul Hikmah (Baghdad)

• Muslim contributions on natural sciences, human siences & law and jurisprudence

• Invasion

• From the end of the Ottoman Caliphate to the contemporary time, where Muslims are victimized by superpower.

• Among Muslims : conflict, disunity, etc

•

The main process of rise and fall can be concluded into three era;

i. Rise Golden Age from 8th – 11 Century.
ii. Decline and Fall Era : 12 century
iii. To rise again / Renaissance – 19 Century


Factors Behind Rise and Fall
•
Factors of Rise :

• Inspiration from al-Quran
• Expansion of Islamic land
• The Role of khalifah in emphasizing on scholarly activities.

1) Inspiration from the al-Quran

• The Muslim were inspired through verses of Quran arguing them to think, reflect, ponder and investigate into the nature of universe and human life.

• Emphasizing of the importance of knowledge (96:1-5)

• Allah will raise up the ranks who have belief and knowledge (58:11)

• Islam is called the straight way and should not be regarded as something static, The instructions and guidance given in the Ouran are methods by which continuous progress can be achieved. (84:19), (19:36), (17:9), (11:56-57), (14:19)

• Islam cannot ever be obsolete, But it is true that Muslims will have to replace the naiveand superficial understanding of Islam with a deeper and more sophisticated one. They will have to transfer their attention from the forms to the essence, from the letter to thespirit, from the vessel to the contents.

2) Expansion of Islamic land

• In its early years, Islam spread rapidly. Within a century, Islam had conquered Persia, Palestine, Egypt, and had swept across North Africa and into Spain. The reason for this expansion were partly a matter of conquest, especially on the part of the Umavyad caliphs, who ruled from Damascus.

• Ability to transcend nations and races, its provision of a common language and its moral code which provided a great advance over tribal culture, assisting commercial relations, trade and trust between traders.

• They were faithful, committed and discipline Muslims practicing what they knew. They had a balance personality between the worldly and hereafter.

• People often described about themselves as “horseman by day and ascetics by night”.

3) The role of the Khalifah in emphasizing on the scholarly activities.

• The Abbasid dynasty, which ruled from Baghdad from 750 to 1258, provided the peak of Islamic civilization.

• Open intellectual environment of early Islam, gave rise to the wealth of its civilization.

• In the 9th century the collective sayings and interpretation of the early caliphs were recorded in the hadith. The Abbasid's greatest achievements were in the area of philosophy, science and mathematics.

• They studied, preserved and translated the Greek classics.

• The Muslim world is justifiably proud of its achievements in this regard. Muslim scholars provided major contributions to mathematics, algebra, trigonometry, chemistry, physics and medicine.

• Once they got in contact with other civilizations, they took knowledge translated them into Arabic, assimilated them within the framework of Islam, improvise upon them and transformed them to become knowledge based on certainty (which derived from the Quran)

•

Factors of fall :

• The Mongol invasions
• The closing of the door of Ijtihad
• Distinction and division between sciences
• Failure of continuing the strength of Islamic administration.
• The emergence of western power.

1) The Mongol invasions

• In 1258 Baghdad fell to the invading Mongols and the empire collapsed.

• The spread of the Black Death- the hosts of Chenghiz Khan through Hulegu’s Mongol forces, in their terrific inroad, destroyed the most important universities, massacred the learned men, and burned and plundered the city.

• AI-Mu’tasim, the last Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, was a weak leader and he proved no match for when they attacked Baghdad. After having laid siege to the city, the Mongols entered it in February 1258 and al-Mu’tasim together with 300 of his officials were murdered.

2) The closing of the door of Ijtihad

• The scholarly activities were fully stagnant as the Islamic scholars (ulama') of the medieval ages declared that the door of the Gate of Ijtihad (independent analysis by individual Islamic scholars) is closed.

• Strict criteria of Mujtahid were listed. As such no new interpretation is possible to be made and no Muslim is allowed to make new interpretation from those apart those already establish by previous scholars.

• At this period, the ulama' believed “that all possible human problems have been answered, and decreed that henceforth only education by imitation would be permissible").

• Thus, the codes of human conduct, covering all aspects of life, must only be examined according to four mazhabs or ‘schools’ of moral moral and legal interpretation developed by Imam Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, and Hanbali.

• At this point, a cultural shift began to occur. While Islamic scholarship stagnated and departed further and further from the Qur'anic spirit.

3) Distinction and division between sciences

• The emergence of distinction between the "religious sciences" ('ulum shar'ivah) or traditional sciences" ('ulum 'aqliyah) and the "rational or secular sciences" ('ulum 'aqliyah ) or ghayr shar'iyah)

• Within this distinction, the rational/secular science was placed as the "step child" of scholarly activities.

• Some might say: "since knowledge is vast while life is short, one must fix priorities, and these Will naturally be in favor of the religious sciences, upon whose acquisition one’s success in the hereafter depends•."

• Knowledge also divided into fard 'ain (the knowledge which every Muslim is obliged to pursue) and fard kifayh (the knowledge which should not necessarily be acquired by every individual but which must be known by certain members of the community).

• As a consequence of these distinctions, the scholarly activities were directed under the belief that the sacred sciences_(shar’iyah) are superior" to the profane sciences (ghayr shar'iyah which have been discovered either by reason (e.g. arithmetic), experiment (e.g medicine), and hearing (e.g. Ianguage).

4) Failure of continuing the strength in Islamic administration

• The early Islamic community failed to continue in its fullest strength. The institutional structure of Arabian society was too fragile to sustain the new principles of lslamic political and social organization.

• The prevalence of injustice, tyranny, corruption and all forms of moral degradation in the government's administration.

• Nepotism (reestablishing the hereditary kinship in governing the Islamic empire) emerged together with the weak leadership lead to the process of political democratization was suspended and the masses were excluded from political participation.

5) The emergence of western power

• The French Revolution was a critical development in 18th century Western history. This event stimulated the worldwide dissemination of the ideas of civil liberty human rights, and liberal democracy, which introduced a new way of life, based on secular ethics.

• This event was ironic; while the Muslims abandonment of religion led to the decline of Islamic civilization, the Western Enlightenment" emerged when European succeeded in their liberation from the religious domination of the Catholic Church.

• Western sciences then developed independently from the Church. Secularization took place as the Church's authority to regulate the "world" shrank.

• Reason and science became the gods of the Enlightenment thinkers.

• The Industrial Revolution emerged from a foundation of scientific discoveries.

• The emergence of western imperialism and colonialism.



Fall of Islamic Civilization from the Quranic perspective
•
Fall of Islamic Civilization from the Quranic perspective:

• The ignorance of small sins

2.Committing great sins by individual as well as leaders of the society with mentality of arrogance

3. Oppression and persecution ( zulm)

4. Luxurious life

5. Obsession with power, such as the nation of ‘Ad.

6. Moral decadence

7. Scale cheating in business or fraud in weight and measure

8. Lack of empiricism with reason in developing sciences, medicine, mathematics, geography.

• Lack of overall systemization .

• -The lack of comprehensive systemization in classical works of jurisprudence
• -The problem of analysis of the hadith
• - Lack of proper understanding
• -The effects of space time on concrete system
• - Lack of Muslim political thought

• -Lack of ijtihad
• -Lack of understanding of the nature of usul in the absence of necessary adjustment
• - Lack of Muslim educational system
• - Lack of Muslim military weapons.
• -Lack of availability of the best possible scientific and objective impute.

• See also :

• Civilization in the Book
• Islamic Civilization
• Appraising a Civilization
• Islamic Golden Age
• Caliph

• Wassalam .