Audio of full article:
The principle behind dominance and slavery
Government, rulership, dominance, and ascendancy are of two kinds:
- one, intellectual and moral dominance;
- the other, political and material dominance.
The first kind of dominance is that one nation advances so far in its intellectual powers that other nations come to believe in its ideas; its imaginings, its beliefs, and its theories come to dominate minds; mentalities are cast in its mould; civilization is its civilization; knowledge is its knowledge; its research alone is taken to be real research; and everything that it declares false is itself held to be false.
The second kind of dominance is that one nation becomes so strong in terms of material power that other nations are unable to preserve their political and economic freedom in the face of it, and wholly or in some degree it comes to seize the wealth and resources of other peoples and to dominate their systems of government.
In contrast to this, subjugation and enslavement are also of two kinds:
- one, intellectual subjugation;
- the other, political subjugation.
Take the characteristics of these two kinds to be simply the reverse image of the characteristics described above for the two kinds of dominance.
These two kinds are, in one respect, separate from one another. It is not necessary that wherever there is intellectual dominance there must also be political dominance, nor is it necessary that wherever there is political dominance there must also be intellectual dominance. But the law of nature is this: the nation that uses reason and thought, and takes the lead in the path of research and discovery, receives along with intellectual progress material progress as well. And the nation that ceases to compete in the field of reflection and contemplation falls into material decline together with intellectual degeneration.
Then, since dominance is the result of strength and subjugation the result of weakness, those nations which are helpless and weak intellectually and materially become, in proportion to their increase in helplessness and weakness, ever more ready for slavery and subjection. And nations that are strong both intellectually and materially come to rule over both their minds and their bodies.
The current situation of the Muslims
Today Muslims are afflicted by this double slavery. In some places both forms of slavery are fully imposed, and in others political slavery is less and intellectual slavery greater. Unfortunately, at this time there is no Islamic population that is, in the true sense, completely free both politically and intellectually. Even where they possess political independence and self-rule, they are not free from intellectual slavery. Their schools, their offices, their markets, their associations, their homes—indeed even their very bodies—bear witness through their mute condition that Western civilization, Western ideas, Western sciences and arts are ruling over them. They think with the West’s mind, see with the West’s eyes, and walk on roads made by the West—whether they are conscious of it or not. In any case, this assumption is imposed upon their minds: that truth is what the West regards as truth, and falsehood is what the West declares false. Truth, veracity, civilization, morality, humanity, refinement—every standard of these, in their view, is the same as that fixed by the West. They test their religion and faith, their ideas and imaginings, their civilization and refinement, their morals and manners, all by that same standard. Whatever meets that standard they regard as correct; they are satisfied with it; they take pride in the fact that such-and-such thing of ours has measured up to the Western standard. And whatever does not meet that standard they consciously or unconsciously take to be wrong. One rejects it openly; another inwardly frets over it and tries somehow to stretch and force it into conformity with the Western standard.
If this is the condition of our “free” nations, then there is no need to ask what the condition of the intellectual slavery of those Muslim nations must be that are politically subject to Western peoples.
Causes of the slavery
What is the cause of this slavery? To explain it fully would require the scope of an entire book. But briefly it can be stated in a few words.
The foundation of intellectual dominance and ascendancy is, in reality, independent intellectual exertion and scholarly research. The nation that takes the lead on this road becomes the leader of the world and the guide of nations, and its ideas spread across the world. The nation that falls behind on this road has no choice but to become an imitator and follower. In its ideas and beliefs there no longer remains the power to keep hold over minds. The flood of the strong ideas and beliefs of the nation of mujtahids and researchers sweeps them away, and they no longer possess enough force to remain firm in their own place.
So long as Muslims kept advancing in the field of research and ijtihad, all the nations of the world remained their followers and imitators. Islamic thought remained dominant over the thinking of all humankind. The standard that Islam fixed for beauty and ugliness, good and evil, wrong and right, was consciously or unconsciously accepted throughout the world as the standard, and deliberately or under compulsion the world kept shaping its ideas and practices in accordance with that standard. But when among Muslims people of thought and people of research ceased to be produced; when they stopped thinking and discovering; when they grew weary and sat down on the road of acquiring knowledge and exerting thought—then it was as though they themselves had resigned from the leadership of the world.
Evolution of Western Thought
On the other side, Western nations moved ahead in this field. They began to employ the powers of reflection and thought; they probed the secrets of the universe and searched out the hidden treasuries of nature’s concealed powers. The inevitable result was exactly what it had to be. Western nations became the leaders of the world, and Muslims had to bow their heads before their authority just as once the world had bowed before the authority of the Muslims.
For four or five hundred years Muslims kept sleeping comfortably on the bed laid out by their elders, while Western nations remained busy at their work. Then suddenly the flood of Western power rose and in the course of a single century spread over the entire face of the earth. Drowsy from sleep, rubbing their eyes, Muslims rose and saw that Christian Europe was armed with both pen and sword, and with both powers was ruling the world. A small group tried to put up resistance, but it had neither the force of the pen nor the force of the sword. It kept being defeated. As for the great mass of the nation, it acted according to the custom that has always been the custom of the weak. The ideas, theories, and principles that came from the West, accompanied by the force of the sword, the strength of argument, the support of scholarly proofs, and a dazzling beauty and attractiveness, were given the rank of faith by comfort-loving minds and overawed mentalities. The old religious beliefs, moral principles, and civilizational norms, which had remained standing on merely traditional foundations, were swept away in the current of this new and powerful flood. And in an imperceptible way this assumption settled in people’s hearts: that whatever comes from the West is truth, and it alone is the standard of soundness and correctness.
Among the nations that came into collision with Western civilization, some were those that possessed no independent civilization of their own. Some had a civilization, but not one strong enough to strive to preserve its distinctive characteristics in the face of another civilization. Some had a civilization whose principles were not in any very great degree different from those of the incoming civilization. All such nations were very easily colored in the dye of Western civilization, and no severe collision came to pass.
But the case of the Muslims is different from all of them. They are the possessors of an independent and complete civilization. Their civilization has its own complete code, which encompasses all branches of life both intellectually and practically. The fundamental principles of Western civilization stand in total opposition to this civilization. This is why at every step these two civilizations are colliding with one another, and from this collision an extremely destructive effect is falling upon every branch of Muslim creedal and practical life.
The materialistic roots of the western philosophy
Western civilization has been nurtured in the lap of a philosophy and science that for the last five or six hundred years have been moving toward materialism, atheism, irreligion, and denial of God. From the very history in which it came into being, its struggle with religion began; indeed, it would be more accurate to say that it was precisely the struggle of reason and philosophy against religion that gave birth to this civilization. It is true that the observation of the signs of the universe, the investigation of their secrets, the discovery of their general laws, reflection on their phenomena, and arranging them so as to derive conclusions through analogy and proof—none of these things is the opposite of religion. But by ill fortune, when Europe’s new scholarly movement appeared in the age of the Renaissance, this movement encountered those Christian clergy who had established their religious beliefs on the foundations of ancient Greek philosophy and wisdom, and who imagined that if the slightest tremor were to occur in those foundations as a result of new scholarly inquiry and independent intellectual effort, then the whole edifice of religion itself would crumble into dust.
Under the influence of this mistaken idea, they opposed the new intellectual movement and used force to block it. Religious courts—the Inquisitions—were established, in which the standard-bearers of this movement were subjected to harsh, savage, and terrifying punishments. But because this movement was the result of a genuine awakening, it did not subside through coercion; rather, it went on increasing, until the flood of freedom of thought brought the end of religious authority.
At first, the battle was between the standard-bearers of free thought and the Church. But since the Church was fighting against freethinkers in the name of religion, very soon this battle took the form of a war between the Christian religion and free thought. After that, religion itself—whatever the religion might be—was taken as the adversary of this movement. To think in a scientific way came to mean that this way of thinking was the very opposite of the religious way of thinking. Whoever would consider the problems of the universe scientifically was required to turn away from the religious outlook and make his own separate path. The basic conception of the religious worldview is that the cause of all the phenomena and manifestations of the physical world is some power that transcends this world. Since this view was the view of the enemies of the new scientific movement, the leaders of the movement thought it necessary to try to solve the riddle of the universe without positing God or any supernatural being, and to declare unscientific every approach in which God’s existence had been assumed when examining the problems of the universe. Thus among the philosophers and thinkers of the new age there arose a prejudice against God, spirit, spirituality, and the supernatural—a prejudice that was not the result of reason and argument but purely the result of inflamed emotion. They did not repudiate God because evidence and proof had established His non-existence or the impossibility of His existence; rather, they were alienated from Him because He was the deity of their enemies and of those who had opposed their freedom of thought. In the five centuries that followed, however much work their intellect and their scholarly striving accomplished, that same irrational emotion remained operative at the base of it.
When Western philosophy and Western scientists began their journey, even though their direction was completely opposite to God-centeredness, nevertheless since they were still surrounded by a religious environment, at the beginning they continued for a time to combine naturalism with belief in God. But the further they went in their journey, the more naturalism prevailed over theism, until the very conception of God—and with God the conception of everything above the physical world—completely disappeared from them. They reached the extreme where nothing remained truly real for them except matter and motion. Science came to be regarded as synonymous with naturalism, and the faith of philosophers and thinkers came to rest on the theory that whatever cannot be measured and weighed has no reality at all.
The history of Western philosophy and science bears witness to this:
1. Descartes (d. 1650), who is considered the Adam of Western philosophy, on the one hand was a strong believer in God and also accepted the independent existence of the soul alongside matter. But on the other hand, he was the very one who began to explain the phenomena of the natural world in a mechanical manner and laid the foundations of that mode of thought which later became outright materialism.
2. Hobbes (d. 1679) went a step further. He openly opposed the supernatural, declared the entire system of the universe and everything in it to be capable of mechanical explanation, and believed in no psychic, spiritual, or rational force acting in this material world. Yet even so, he accepted God—in the sense that belief in a First Cause was a rational necessity.
3. In the same period arose Spinoza (d. 1677), the greatest standard-bearer of rationalism in the seventeenth century. He made no distinction between matter, spirit, and God; he combined God and the universe into one whole and did not acknowledge God’s absolute sovereignty within that whole.
4. Leibniz (d. 1716) and Locke (d. 1704) both believed in God, yet both inclined toward naturalism.
This was the philosophy of the seventeenth century, in which theism and naturalism were going along side by side. In the same way, science too had not, up to the seventeenth century, assumed the full color of complete atheism. None among Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and the other pioneers of science was a denier of God. But in the quest for the secrets of the universe they wished to discover those forces that were operating this system and those laws under which it was running, while deliberately setting aside the divine point of view. It was precisely this setting aside of the divine point of view that was the seed of that godlessness and naturalism which later grew from the tree of intellectual freedom. But the thinkers of the seventeenth century were not aware of this. They could not draw a line of distinction between naturalism and belief in God, and kept assuming that the two could continue together.
In the eighteenth century it became plain that any mode of thought which would seek the system of the universe while ignoring the being of God could not but end in materialism, irreligion, and atheism. In this century arose John Toland, David Hartley, Joseph Priestley, Voltaire, La Mettrie, Holbach, Cabanis, Denis Diderot, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and other similar freethinking philosophers and thinkers, who either openly denied the existence of God or, if some of them did still admit Him, granted Him no greater status than that of a constitutional monarch who, after once setting the universe in motion, withdrew into retirement and now has no part in running the system. These men were not prepared to accept the existence of anything outside the world of nature and the domain of matter and motion, and in their view only those things were real that come within our observation and experience. Hume, through his empiricism and skeptical philosophy, gave powerful support to this way of thought and insisted that experience alone should be the standard even for the validity of rational concepts. Berkeley made a desperate effort to resist this growing current of materialism, but could not stop it. Hegel tried to promote idealism over against materialism, but subtle idea did not become an object of devotion in the face of solid matter. Kant found this middle way: that the being of God, the survival of the soul, and the freedom of the will are not among the things that can enter our knowledge. These things cannot be known, though one may believe in them, and practical wisdom requires that one should believe in them. This was the final effort at reconciliation between theism and naturalism, but it failed. For once the misguidance of reason and thought had reduced God to a mere product of illusion—or at most to an inactive and powerless being—then to believe in Him, fear Him, and seek His pleasure merely for the protection of morality was plainly an irrational act.
In the nineteenth century materialism reached its peak. Vogt, Büchner, Czolbe, Comte, Moleschott, and other thinkers and philosophers declared false the existence of everything except matter and its properties. Mill promoted empiricism in philosophy and utilitarianism in ethics. Spencer presented with full force the theory of philosophical evolution, the spontaneous coming into being of the cosmos, and the self-arising of life. The discoveries of biology, physiology, geology, and zoology, together with the progress of applied science and the abundance of material means, firmly established in hearts the idea that the universe came into being on its own—nobody created it; that it is running by fixed laws of itself—nobody runs it; that it has of itself continued to pass through stages of development—no supernatural hand is at work in this self-moving machine; that life does not enter lifeless matter by anyone’s command, but that when matter itself advances in organization, life appears within it; that growth, voluntary movement, sensation, consciousness, and thought are all properties of this developed matter; that animals and human beings alike are machines operating under natural laws; that according to the arrangement of the parts of these machines, corresponding acts proceed from them; that there is in them no choice and no free will; that the disruption of their system and the exhaustion of their energy is their death, which is equivalent to total annihilation; and that once the machine is broken apart, its properties are abolished, so there remains no possibility of resurrection or being brought into existence again.
Darwin’s theory of evolution contributed more than anything else to giving this naturalism and materialism stability, and to conferring upon it the status of a reasoned and organized scientific theory. His book Origin of Species, first published in 1859, is regarded as a book that caused a revolution in the world of science. By a method of argument that, to the scientific minds of the nineteenth century, was the strongest possible kind of proof, it stamped its seal of confirmation on the theory that the business of the universe can proceed without God; that the signs and phenomena of nature require no cause other than the laws of nature themselves; that the evolution of beings from the lowest stages of life to the highest is the result of the gradual working of a nature devoid of the substance of reason and wisdom; and that there is no Wise Maker who created man and the other species of animals, but rather that the same living machine which once crawled in the form of a worm, through the struggle for existence, the survival of the fittest, and natural selection, appeared at last in the form of the conscious and speaking human being.
The fundamental difference between Islamic and the Western civilization
This, then, is the philosophy and science that gave birth to Western civilization. In it there is no room for fear of an All-Knowing and All-Powerful God; no weight is given to the guidance of prophethood, revelation, and inspiration; there is no concept of another life after death; no anxiety about accountability for the deeds of worldly life; no question of man’s personal responsibility; no possibility of any aim or ideal higher than the animal purposes of life. It is a purely material civilization. Its whole system is empty of those concepts of God-consciousness, uprightness, truthfulness, love of truth, morality, integrity, trustworthiness, goodness, modesty, piety, and purity upon which Islamic civilization has been founded. Its outlook is the exact opposite of the outlook of Islam. Its road goes in exactly the opposite direction from the road chosen by Islam. The very things upon which Islam builds human morality and civilization are the things which this civilization seeks to uproot from their roots; and the very foundations upon which this civilization erects the structure of individual character and collective order are such that the structure of Islam cannot stand upon them even for a moment. Islam and Western civilization, in other words, are like two boats traveling in entirely opposite directions. Whoever boards one of them must necessarily leave the other; and whoever tries to ride both at once will be split in two.
A simultaneous attack from West's pen and its sword:
What else can one call it but misfortune that the very century in which this new civilization reached the furthest limits of its materialism, atheism, and godlessness was exactly the same century in which all the Islamic lands from Morocco to the Far East were overcome by the political power and ruling domination of Western nations. Against Muslims came at one and the same time the attack of both the Western sword and the Western pen. For minds already overawed and terror-struck by the political dominance of Western powers, it became difficult to remain safe from the awe and pressure of Western philosophy and science and the civilization nurtured by them. The condition was especially delicate for those Muslim peoples that fell directly under the rule of some Western empire. In order to protect their worldly interests they were compelled to acquire Western learning. And because this acquisition of knowledge was not undertaken purely for the sake of knowledge itself, and because, moreover, they had knelt respectfully before Western teachers with an already overawed mentality, the new generations of Muslims absorbed Western ideas and scientific theories with special intensity. Their minds went on being moulded in a Western cast. The penetration of Western civilization into their hearts continued to increase. They never developed that critical outlook by which they might distinguish right from wrong and adopt only what was right. They did not develop the capacity to think with freedom and independence and to form any opinion through their own ijtihad. The result of this is what we are seeing: the foundations upon which Islamic civilization stands have been shaken. The very mould of mentality through which one could think and understand in the Islamic way has been spoiled. The structure of a mind that thinks in the Western way and believes in the principles of Western civilization is in itself such that the principles of Islam do not fit properly into it. And when the principles themselves cannot be contained in it, then the appearance of all sorts of doubts and ever-new misgivings in the branches is not at all surprising.
There is no doubt that the great majority of Muslims still believe in the truth of Islam and still wish to remain Muslim. But minds, under the influence of Western ideas and Western civilization, are becoming estranged from Islam, and this estrangement is steadily increasing. Quite apart from political dominance and control, the intellectual and scholarly pressure and dominance of the West has spread over the mental atmosphere of the world and has changed the angles of vision in such a way that it has become difficult for those who see to see with the eye of a Muslim, and for those who think to think in the Islamic way. This difficulty will not be removed until independent thinkers arise among Muslims.
Islamic Renaissance - The Need of the Time
Islam needs a new renaissance. The capital left by the old Islamic thinkers and researchers can no longer suffice. The world has now moved ahead. It is not possible to lead it back, retracing its steps, to the stages through which it passed six hundred years ago. Guidance in the field of knowledge and action can be given only by one who moves the world forward, not backward. Therefore, if Islam can once again become the guide of the world, then there is only one way for it to do so: that among Muslims there should arise thinkers and researchers who, by the power of thought, vision, research, and discovery, demolish the very foundations upon which the edifice of Western civilization has been built; who lay the foundation of a new philosophical system through observation of the signs and the search for realities, on the method of thought and vision taught by the Qur’an; who raise up a new natural science on the groundwork laid by the Qur’an; who break the atheistic outlook and establish the basis of thought and research upon the divine outlook; and who build this structure of modern thought and research with such strength that it comes to prevail over the entire world, and in the world, instead of the material civilization of the West, the true civilization of Islam shines forth.
To understand the purpose and intent of what has been said, consider it in the form of an analogy:
The world is like a railway train which is being driven by the engine of thought and research, and the thinkers hand researchers are the drivers of that engine. This train always travels in the very direction in which the drivers take it. Those who are sitting in it are compelled to go in that same direction in which the train is moving, whether they wish to go there or not. If there is some passenger in the train who does not want to go in that direction, he can do no more than turn the direction of his seat while still sitting in the moving carriage—backward instead of forward, or to the right, or to the left. But by merely changing the direction of his seat he cannot change the direction of his journey. There is no way to change the direction of travel except by taking control of the engine and turning its movement toward the desired side.
At present, those who have control of the engine are all people who have turned away from God and are devoid of Islamic thought. Therefore the train, carrying all its passengers, is racing toward atheism and materialism, and all the passengers, willingly or unwillingly, are continuing to move farther and farther away from the destination intended by Islam. Now, in order to change this course, what is needed is that from among the God-fearing there should arise some courageous men who struggle and wrest the engine from the hands of those atheists. Until that happens, the direction of the train will not change; and despite all our irritation, anger, and outcry, it will continue to travel on the very path on which the God-unaware drivers are taking it.
(Tarjuman al-Qur’an, Jumada al-Akhirah 1353 AH / August 1934)