What we speak of when we discuss “Civilization”
Human societies have always exhibited varying degrees of complexity and advancement; even today, some hunter-gatherer societies continue to exist while others are technologically advanced. When a society achieves and sustains a distinct and relatively advanced level of complexity and advancement across multiple fields, it is often referred to as a “Civilization”. Sometimes the word is also used to mean the process of becoming complex and advanced, but we will disregard that particular usage here.
As Islam encourages us to acquire both a rich understanding of history and to have an inspiring vision for humanity’s future, it is important for us Muslims to familiarize ourselves with this important term. Doing so not only helps develop a deeper understanding of the past, it also helps us participate more fruitfully in efforts to envision and shape humanity’s future.
Here are some examples of past societies that are usually referred to as civilizations: Ancient Egypt, Ancient China, Ancient Greece, The Roman Empire, The Persian Empire and The Indus Valley Civilization. These societies exhibited all or most of the following features: urbanization, organized government, complex cultural features including distinct belief systems and art forms, the use of writing and record-keeping, complex economic patterns of surplus production and long-distance trade, forms of division of labour and social stratification, and notable technological advancements in various fields ranging from architecture and tools to agriculture and medicine. Additionally, these societies were durable and despite experiencing various ups and downs, endured over relatively long spans of time.
Thus, the term “civilization” is usually used when speaking of any society that exhibits relatively high levels of complexity and advancement in multiple domains over a considerable period of time. With this brief background, we can attempt to offer a useful definition for this term: A civilization is the sum total of all social beliefs, processes, patterns and networks that constitute a distinct advanced human society, and the various kinds of non-material and material outputs that emerge from it. In fact, when speaking of human societies, there is no term that is more general in relation to, and more widely encompassing of, the various inter-connected fields of the human social sphere than the term “civilization”, and this width and richness of meaning makes it particularly useful.
In contemporary Arabic, the term الحَضارة conveys a similar meaning while in Persian and Urdu, the term تَمَدُّن plays this role.
Islamic Civilization
One of the most important examples of a civilization is The Islamic Civilization. This term is mostly used in one of two senses – one general, and the other specific. When used in a general sense, Islamic Civilization is more or less synonymous with terms like “Muslim Ummah” or “The Muslim World”, albeit with an emphasis on the cultural interconnections that exist between its constituent societies, and which, when taken as a whole, constitute a faith-based unit, a global community of believers which is in many important ways different from other sections of mankind. In this sense, the Islamic Civilization came into existence soon after the establishment of the Islamic State in Medina back in the 7th century AD and has existed ever since, thus being one of the most durable, culturally diverse and geographically widespread civilizations mankind has ever known. However, it appears that the following, specific, usage is both more widespread and more appropriate.
When used in a specific sense, the term Islamic Civilization usually describes a particular historical phase of the Muslim Ummah that lasted for at least about five centuries, that is between the 2nd and 7th centuries AH (8-13th centuries AD). This was a time when cities such as Baghdad (Iraq), Ray (Iran), Damascus (Syria), Cairo (Egypt), Cordoba (Spain) and various oases in Central Asia were by far the world’s leading centres in nearly every single civilizational sphere: learning and knowledge, science and technology, trade and industry, art and architecture, with every sphere infused to a considerable degree by the spirit and teachings of Islam. People, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, flocked to Muslim lands to learn, to trade and to prosper in general. Working within expansive Islamic paradigms of ontological unity and epistemological integration, scholars and polymaths such as al-Fārābi, Ibn Sīnā, al-Khwārizmī, al-Bīrūnī, al-Rāzī, al-Ghazzālī, Sheikh al-Ṭūsī, Khwāja Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, Ibn al-‘Arabī and countless others made enormous contributions to diverse fields such as philosophy, gnosticism, Qur’anic exegesis, jurisprudence, ethics, mathematics, astronomy and medicine. While driven primarily by the teachings of Islam, the widespread study of knowledge produced in earlier centuries by Greece and India acted as a further catalyst for this process. Arabic was the world’s leading language of knowledge and power, and working within the Islamic worldview of knowledge and progress, intellectual contradictions which the world has struggled with in the last couple of centuries such as those between Religion and Science, between Faith and Reason, and between the Secular and the Sacred were not of any particular concern. Furthermore, ideologies based on Moral Relativism or Nationalism did not exist.
It is, however, important to consider that this period was no utopia; owing in large part to the persecution of the Ahlulbayt (as) and their followers, notable instances of systemic weakness and injustice did exist throughout this phase, particularly in the arenas of government and social justice. Even so, guided and inspired by the infallible Imams (as), the Shi’a and their scholarship were able to play a disproportionate role in building this impressive civilizational edifice, one that was far superior both in terms of expanse and in terms of depth to anything prior or contemporary to it in the entire breadth of human experience up until that time.
This period of exceptional civilizational flowering, which is also referred to as the “Golden Age of Islamic Civilization/Islam” gradually came to an end due to a multitude of internal and external factors. While there is disagreement among historians about when exactly this period can be said to have drawn to a close, by the 8th century AH (14th century AD), decline had begun to set in. While it would be an exaggeration to say that the subsequent centuries witnessed nothing but stagnation and decay – after all, they also witnessed valuable contributions made by the likes of ʿAllāmah al-Ḥillī, Sayyid Ḥaydar al-Āmulī, Ḥāfiẓ al-Shīrāzī, Mullā Ṣadrā and Shaykh al-Bahāʾī, in addition to the integration of South and Southeast Asia into the Islamic civilizational sphere – a perceptible reduction in the overall brilliance of the Islamic civilizational complex did occur. But by then, this golden age had already deeply impacted the life of the majority of the world’s population, including by helping to trigger the subsequent civilizational transformation in Europe that came to be known as The Renaissance, which in turn eventually came to impact every corner of the world.
Western Civilization
In part because of the deep impression created by the knowledge and other civilizational fruits of the Golden Age of Islamic Civilization, scholarly and other elite circles in Southern Europe in and around the 14th century AD, began to develop new tastes, interests and ideas that were frequently at odds with the priorities and red lines established by the powerful Roman Christian religious establishment of the time. As can be seen in the works of Dante, Petrarch, Da Vinci and Michaelangelo, a new orientation began to emerge, one that placed man and the mundane, this-worldly aspects of his existence at the centre of thought and concern, nudging out the divine and other-worldly aspects of human life that had hitherto occupied this prime position. At about the same time, with the integration of Christian Byzantine into the Muslim Ummah, Western Christianity had a kind of greatness thrust upon it overnight, as it suddenly became the primary civilizational pole within Christendom. A gradual change too came about in the perception of Europe’s pre-Christian Greco-Roman heritage; it now began to be seen as glorious and embraced as worthy of imitation, rather than rejected as being pagan and profane. The Renaissance had begun.
While this shift in orientation at first manifested itself in the literature and art of Southern Europe, it soon appeared in all other civilizational spheres and in every other part of the continent. The Renaissance was followed in the 16-17th centuries by what came to be known as The Scientific Revolution. This featured the widespread adoption of the Scientific Method and the Mathematization of Knowledge as standards of knowledge production through the contributions of figures such as Copernicus, Galilei, Bacon, Hume and Newton across varied fields, especially within the natural sciences such as cosmology, physics and medicine. The universe now came to be imagined as a giant, complex but ultimately mundane machine, entirely knowable through systematic observation and measurement. With the Protestant Reformation, Europe’s religious sphere too began to change profoundly; religious authority and institutions in the Christian world were set on a seemingly endless trajectory of diminishment and fracture. These changes coincided with the European discovery and plunder of the Americas, and the opening of direct sea routes to South and East Asia, each of which fuelled various changes in Europe and elsewhere for centuries to come. The initial signs of the rise of a new civilization were unmistakeable.
Building on the works of Descartes and Locke, and on the new Westphalian political order established after decades of European bloodshed, a new generation of thinkers in the 17-18th centuries such as Hume, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Voltaire and Kant, began to argue for the retreat of religion from public life and the establishment of constitutional government. They emphasized individual liberty, free markets and insisted that human reason had the capacity to determine what is right and good without divine guidance. Faith began to be seen as irrelevant to human progress, if not antithetical to it. This came to be known as The Age of Enlightenment, which played an important role in laying the groundwork for the momentous events of the French Revolution that further transformed all of Europe. This period also marked the beginning of the establishment of the rapacious global processes that came to be called Colonialism. By the close of the 18th century, Western Civilization, also called “Modernity”, had clearly come into its own.
Subsequently, it was in the 19-20th centuries, that the world fully experienced the enormous impact of this powerful new force as the combined changes wrought by the interconnected phenomena of the Industrial Revolution and Colonialism, fuelled by various Western ideologies such as Capitalism, Nationalism and Communism swept over the world in wave after wave of economic, ecological, political and social violence. Darwinism, Positivism and post-modern currents of thought further ravaged the world’s epistemic and intellectual spheres, while the Western establishment engaged in wanton slaughter through war and colonialism, dropped atom bombs on cities, wreaked havoc on the world’s natural environment and also landed on the moon.
It was in this period that global patterns of power and poverty that endure to this day were institutionalized, with the West coming to brutally dominate the rest of the world not just technologically and economically but also politically, and most importantly, intellectually. Patterns of capital and trade, labour and migration, language and education, knowledge production and intellection, the world’s network of major global institutions such as the UNO, all came to acquire a distinctly West-centric focus, a feature that is easily visible even today (for example, you are probably reading this article in English!). In fact, even the primary opposition to Western exploitation was ultimately Western itself, with various strands of Marxist or Hegelian thought challenging the status quo!
Powered by a relentless this-worldly, anti-teleological focus on the mundane, driven by a seemingly irresistible power to desacralize, debase and secularize everything it touches, exhibiting an insatiable appetite to absorb and consume, armed with impressive scientific and technological abilities, and wielding an alluring discourse of progress, freedom and rights, what had begun as a new trend in the arts and letters back in 14th century Europe, had by the middle of the 20th century emerged as the most impactful civilization the world had ever known. No corner of the world and no aspect of human life remained untouched by Modernity. In fact, when Western powers fought amongst themselves, their wars were termed “World Wars”, with more people losing their lives outside the European heartland than in it! And when towards the close of the 20th century the Cold War ended in victory for one part of the collective West, “The End of History” was blithely announced, and the world was told that, led by the victorious American Empire, mankind had reached the pinnacle of human progress and could in fact go no higher.
Today, “The West” or “Western Civilization” are no longer geographical designations but civilizational terms; societies can be located far away from Europe or North America, but in civilizational terms can still be essential constituents of the West, such as can be seen in the case of Australia and Japan. Every single major society today is so infused with Modernity to some substantial degree or another that for many people it’s difficult to appreciate that such a civilization even exists, leave alone that it comprehensively envelops them. Modernity’s forward march seems unrelenting and unstoppable.
So what has the history of the relationship between Western Civilization and the Muslim world been like? And what is the future likely to bring? These and other topics will be examined in the following part, Insha Allah.
