Culture, Science, and Technology How To Respond to Contemporary Challenges

Abstract

The Case
The Ummah was built on the foundation of tawhid, istikhla! the pursuit of knowledge, and personal and communal responsibility. Although it was once a leading creator of and contributor to human civilization, over the last few centuries it has become weak and backward to the point of crisis.
The awareness of the Ummah's regression is almost 1,000 years old, dating back far beyond the challenges of European colonization and west­
ernization. We can trace this back to Abu Hamid al-Ghazali's lhya' · Ulum al-Din (Revival of the Knowledge and Sciences of Religion) and Tahafat al­Falasifah (The Incoherence of the Philosophers). Since then, the Ummah has produced dozens of revivalist personalities and movements, such as Ibn Hazm, fbn Taymiyyah, fbn 'Abd al-Salam, fbn 'Abd al-Wahhab, the Muwahiddun, the Murabitun, the Mahdis of Sudan, the Sanusis of Libya, the Ottoman sultan Salim lll, Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi, Muhammad 'Ali, Jamal al-Din al-Afgani, Rashid Rida, Muhammad 'Abdu ofEgypt, Shah Waliullah and Muhammad Iqbal of India, Amir 'Abd al-Qadir and Ben Bad is of Algeria, and many others.
All of these individual efforts and movements helped minimize and slow down the Ummah's deterioration, and without them the Ummah's condition and chances of survival could have been much worse. Despite ...