Western Civilization and The Muslim World
While European Christians had launched multiple Crusades against Muslim lands in the 12-13th centuries, these attacks predated the emergence of the above-mentioned Western Civilization. Therefore, it would be accurate to say that the West’s attack on the Muslim world in fact began in the 18th century, at a time when the Ummah was beset by various weaknesses and crises, and when its civilizational heyday had long since passed. Rather than take the path of outright genocide, dispossession and population transfer as in the Americas, The West deployed the matrix of colonial modernity to achieve dominance over the Muslim world in geographies as diverse as India, Egypt, Palestine, Iran and the Ottoman lands. Through a combination of exploitative trade arrangements, loans, deindustrialization, political interference, military conquest, and above all, the intellectual and moral subjugation of Muslim societies, the West was able to subdue and shatter the Ummah. By the start of the 20th century, any pockets of even weakened and limited forms of Islamic Civilization ceased to exist. This meant that while Muslims continued to constitute a large – and in fact, growing – share of the world’s population, Islam had retreated from every single important civilizational arena such as politics, economics and knowledge production, and was limited to worship, ritual and a few individual aspects of life. Humiliated, impoverished and bewildered, the Ummah was forcibly integrated into the West-centred, deeply exploitative world order, both as a provider of raw materials and labour, and as a market for finished goods, a pattern that largely endures till today. Over time, the role of Modernity’s primary “Other” was also assigned to it.
Modernity’s violent advance into Muslim societies encountered constant resistance. For the first century or so, this was local, piecemeal and knee-jerk in its character, with the global and intellectual aspects of this conflict mostly ignored by the Muslims. However, starting with the efforts of Syed Jamaluddin in the closing decades of the 19th century, Muslims began to gradually acquire a deeper understanding of the nature of Western Civilization, and consequently, the well-considered use of Qur’anic terms such as “Jahiliyyah” to describe it began to gain currency among them. While various strands of Nationalism and Marxism too found followers in Muslim societies and played important roles in their anti-colonial struggles, growing circles of Muslim Resistance in various Muslim societies gradually began to acquire a stronger intellectual component and a distinct Islamic religious and civilizational flavour throughout the 20th century. They learnt to appreciate that far more important than the West’s multiple projects of genocide and politico-economic domination is its powerful this-worldly and amoral restatement of man’s nature and his place in the Universe. Thinkers like Muhammad Iqbal in India, Sayyid Qutb in Egypt, and Imam Musa al-Sadr in Lebanon helped sections of the Ummah realise that the West presented an entirely new – attractive yet utterly devastating – discourse about what the meaning and purpose of life was and what success looked like. Muslim thinkers began to see that in Modernity’s worldview Man was ultimately just another animal, albeit an advanced tool-making species, or in the best case, a social animal, all of which were far removed from Islam’s own lofty conception of man as Khalifatullah or God’s viceregent. They also learnt to recognize the complex, frequently innocuous and sometimes attractive, web of tools used to ensure humiliation and colonial subjugation, such as through Orientalist knowledge production about Islam and Muslims, and began to think of how to counter them in comprehensive and systematic ways.
The Islamic Revolution Turns the Page
The year 1979 was a watershed. That was when the Islamic Revolution in Iran led by Imam Khomeini managed to establish a new kind of popular Islamic polity based on Shi’a ideology and jurisprudence. With the establishment of The Islamic Republic in Iran, Muslim resistance the world over acquired a powerful new role model and fulcrum around which to organize itself intellectually and materially. It also acquired a distinct Shi’a-led character, a quality that has only strengthened since. These and other developments have led to the emergence of a transnational network of allies that is now called The Islamic Resistance Axis which is today by far the most consequential unit within the Ummah, with its sophistication, influence and popularity growing continuously.
The decades since the victory of the Islamic Revolution have witnessed a relentless intensification of the conflict between the West and the Muslim world, and while there have been advances and setbacks on both sides, the overall trend is unmistakeable: inspired and led by Iran, the Islamic Resistance Axis today is far stronger than it used to be four decades ago, while the American-led matrix of Western hegemony and client regimes is close to collapse, at least in West Asia. Here the extraordinary role of the Palestinian people and their epic resistance in dramatically accelerating the pace of this trend since the 7th of October 2023 must be recognized and acknowledged.
It is important to emphasize that the aims of the resistance movements led by the likes of Hizbullah in Lebanon or Ansarullah in Yemen go far beyond simply ending the foreign occupation of their lands or securing genuine national sovereignty for their countries. Through these struggles of national liberation, they also knowingly seek to recover the meaning of fundamental concepts such as freedom, community, success, power, dignity and progress. They aim to rescue these and other vital concepts and values from the narrow, materialistic meanings foisted upon them by modernity, and to restore their inclusive, transcendental and sacred character, thus transforming these concepts from being tools of colonial domination to being the enablers of genuine and expansive human emancipation. In fact, they seek to play important roles in restoring the rightful place of mankind in the Universe.
Even so, it is important to keep in mind that despite the impressive gains made by the Islamic Resistance over the past few decades, this is not yet a clash between two civilizations. This is because the overwhelming majority of Muslim societies, including in many ways Iran too, continues to be embedded within and dependent upon Western civilizational frameworks and structures across important spheres of social life such as governance, economics, law, education and culture. It is only when at least substantial sections of the Ummah have developed and sustainably adopted their own Islamic frameworks and structures in important arenas of social life – with the Iranian constitutional structure being one important example of success – that it would become accurate to claim that another Islamic Civilization has emerged. Till such time, it would be better to describe the growing trends within the Muslim world as the rise of a transnational Islamic resistance movement with a civilizational outlook, one that happens to be Shi’a-led as well. However, considering trends clearly visible across the Muslim world and beyond, it is reasonable to expect that this movement may achieve civilizational stature in the decades to follow. If that happens, the world may witness a unique phenomenon – the reemergence of a major world civilization after centuries of humiliating decline and disappearance. It is to this exciting possibility that we now turn.
A New Islamic Civilization
Imam Khamenei, who is both the leader of the Islamic Resistance Axis and its chief theoretician, has posited a five-stage process culminating in the eventual reemergence of what he has termed “The New Islamic Civilization” (تمدن نوین اسلامی). The first stage is termed “Islamic Revolution” and the second, “Islamic System”. Both of these were achieved in Iran in 1979 with the toppling of the country’s puppet monarchy followed by the establishment of a new constitutional order based on the Shi’a jurisprudential principle of the Guardianship of the Jurist (ولایت فقیه). Since then, Iranian society has been on the path to achieving the third stage, a stage he terms “Islamic Government”.
What he means by the specific use of this term is a condition wherein all the policies and systems of the State are thoroughly Islamic in a substantive sense, not just in a technical, procedural or minimal way. This requires the authentic Islamic theorization and the subsequent development and successful application of commensurate social systems in fields as diverse as economics, education and media. The achievement of this stage will in turn pave the way for the subsequent and fourth stage, a stage he calls “Islamic Society”. This would be a stage in which those living under the abovementioned Islamic Government will be able to lead all aspects of their lives in a substantively Islamic way. At that time, conditions will be ripe for the achievement of the fifth and final stage, the stage he terms “Islamic Civilization”.
While the five-stage process mentioned above lays down a path for Iranian efforts to culminate in the establishment of an anticipated new Islamic Civilization, it leaves a number of questions unanswered. For example: Is this the only recommended path for all Muslim societies to follow in the Ummah’s journey towards the reemergence of Islamic Civilization, or does each society need to theorize its own unique path based on its own conditions? Should all Muslim societies play similar roles in the Ummah’s movement forward, or should each society play a unique but complementary role in the global movement? How should each Muslim society’s relationship to the core of this civilizational movement – which at present manifests itself in The Islamic Republic of Iran – be defined so as to mutually reinforce progress towards the fifth stage? It is only when scholars belonging to various Muslim societies take these and other important questions up for serious academic consideration and research that substantial answers to them can be found.
While there continues to be ambiguity about certain important details of the Ummah’s journey towards the second major flowering of Islamic Civilization in the future, it is nonetheless possible to make a few educated guesses about certain important aspects of it, especially by comparing it to the first Golden Age that drew to a close almost a thousand years ago. Firstly, with Islam and Muslim societies covering a much greater part of the world than before, the coming Islamic Civilization is likely to be have much greater geographical expanse, covering an even greater diversity of cultures and ethnicities. Secondly, it seems very likely that it will bear a far more distinct Shi’i imprint than the previous one, with the Shi’a vanguard playing a greatly disproportionate role both in role-modeling for the rest of the Ummah, and in providing it with the intellectual and leadership resources it needs to achieve and sustain the coming civilizational breakthroughs. Thirdly, being Shi’a-led, and coming on the back of centuries of heightened discourse around rights and freedom, it is reasonable to expect that The New Islamic Civilization will consider the following to be a major priority for itself: the establishment of a strong Islamically-grounded discourse on social justice, and the achievement of continuous, meaningful progress on the ground on its various parameters.
Looking Ahead
The world today is poised on the cusp of a major change. Geopolitical discourse says that mankind is undergoing a shift in the balance of power, with a new global world order yet to replace the frayed older one. Muslims in general, and the Shi’a in particular, have in these changes and trends, clear signs of a rare opportunity for this generation to play a momentous role in moving the Muslim Ummah and the rest of humanity closer towards the Qur’anic ideal of al-ḥayāt al-ṭayyibah (the goodly life). With the window of change that has emerged, and with The Islamic Resistance Axis leading the way, they have the kind of opportunity that was not available to those that went before them, the opportunity to participate substantially in building an era in which mankind will achieve genuine human progress across the material and spiritual domains at levels hitherto never experienced, not even in the much-vaunted Golden Age of Islamic Civilization.
The establishment of The New Islamic Civilization appears closer at hand than most people imagine, a stage that will in turn bring the apogee of human history even closer – the reappearance of Imam Mahdi (a) and the remarkable flowering of Islamic Civilization under his infallible leadership, inshaAllah.
Syed Akif Zaidi
Saffar Al-Muzaffar 1447; August 2025
