The spirit of the Quran granted the ummah a significant moral and intellectual boost, which cannot be measured by any temporal or situational substitute. This boost contributed to organizing the energies of individuals, the community, and society, resulting in a cultural achievement that lasted for 10 centuries, known as the Civilization of Uprightness, or the "Islamic Civilization." This civilization provided the Western civilization with the essentials of its scientific renaissance, a fact that is clear to anyone, whether fair-minded or not.
Despite the ummah possessing large, extensive, and diverse human resources, it has not produced a successful project in contemporary times after abandoning the Quran. It has not been able to overcome the issues of backwardness, disease, and ignorance, despite importing Western technological means and adopting secular systems in culture and education for over a century. The question here is: Why has the ummah not produced this project during its adoption of secular systems for over a century?
The answer is that the ummah lost its vitality by removing the spirit of the Quran from its movement and development. This spirit served as the fuel for its vitality, guiding its path, shaping its actions, and assisting in its struggles. Instead, it turned, either willingly, ignorantly, or under manufactured coercion, to secular models for inspiration in thought, emotion, behavior, and systems. As a result, it found no good, remaining classified as part of the third world, unable to advance even a single inch. The Western model has divided the world and determined the fates of the ummahs within its orbit, based on a system of dependency, monopoly, and subordination, rather than competition, participation, equality, or human dignity.
The Holy Quran is the source of that vitality for the ummah, its fuel, and its unparalleled drive. This Quranic spirit enabled major intellectual shifts in the world of civilization, granting the ummah strength through its higher energy, which interweaves with earthly energy in humans, thus creating the driving moment for the ummah and achieving its presence and witness over people. However, in the absence of this Quranic spirit, the psychological energy of the ummah has been entirely drained, its strengths dissipated, and it has surrendered to temporal substitutes that neither satisfy nor suffice. Its strengths have been wasted and misdirected.
The Squandering of Islamic Intellectual Effort
The extinguishment of the ummah's vitality and the dissipation of its energy, spending it in the wrong areas, has led to a significant waste of intellectual and research effort in academic institutions and research centers. These efforts have been directed towards models that are alien to the reality of the ummah in an attempt to solve its problems, while in fact, they address imported issues that are irrelevant to the ummah's context. This has led to a situation where the Muslim research intellect is torn between its belonging and the adopted knowledge model, widening the gap between it and the reality it lives in.
The Quran has brought about three major intellectual shifts in the human mind (1) :
-The Conceptual and Creedal Shift: This includes conceptual values such as divinity, comprehensiveness, balance, monotheism, dynamism, positivity, and realism, which intertwined to form a unique intellectual framework.
-The Epistemological Shift: This appears in the cognitive transformation of the mind, providing it with the ability to engage with the universe, the world, and existence.
-The Methodological Shift: This allowed the Muslim mind to realize and shape itself according to its principles and insights, extending in three directions: causality, historical law, and the empirical research method.
In light of these transformations, the Muslim intellect produced a revolution in the fields of cosmic and human sciences, which continued for nearly 10 full centuries. Modern Western civilization built upon this legacy when it adopted the empirical method from the Quranic civilization, but separated it from its divine context. Over the past two centuries, Muslim researchers have been unable to revive the movement of Quranic civilization.
We attribute the inability of Islamic research efforts to the exclusion of the Quran from academic research methodologies, especially in the social sciences. This exclusion has produced researchers without identity, who are indecisive, neither aligning with one side nor the other, lacking civilizational ambition. Their sole ambition is to obtain a degree or certificate, by any means, whether legitimate or not, as the Quranic epistemological approach has not infiltrated their minds and hearts, nor have they discovered the Quran's epistemological and scientific value.
Research work in the field of social sciences relies on three paths:
First Path: Working under the dominance of Western methodology and tools, consciously, intentionally, and with the desire to empower this methodology in the academic scene. This path has turned social research into something resembling a dubbing of original works, essentially echoing the Western methodology without presenting an Arab Islamic voice capable of offering new knowledge to solve societal problems.
Second Path: Relying on randomness and lack of methodology, governed by blind imitation of previous studies and research, regardless of their methodology and references, without understanding the knowledge model behind these studies and the implications on the Arab research mind and the knowledge generated from it.
Third Path: Identifying with heritage and prioritizing human opinions over the Quran, the original reference for all Islamic thought. This identification has turned Arab Islamic research into a preaching format, unable to offer real solutions to research problems, social issues, or scientific methodology. This is because it discusses new problems with old methodologies tied to their specific spatial, temporal, and intellectual contexts.
Due to this loss and the inadequacy of Islamic research efforts, Arab Islamic social sciences have lost the ability to provide genuine solutions to our societal problems and even the contemporary world's issues. Moreover, they have failed to shape a civilization's human, leaving our researchers trapped either in dependency or in severe intellectual poverty, or both. Consequently, we do not find researchers who innovate in knowledge production or construct ideas that drive reality and society forward. This is primarily because they either flounder in intellectual or scientific randomness or base their thinking on a reference that contradicts their society's reference, ideas that oppose their community's foundations, and principles that conflict with the principles of their identity and ummah. All these elements - reference, idea, and social principle - are fundamental in social research, which essentially aims to provide solutions to societal problems or formulate human models that align with the current or anticipated development and progress in their society. However, the duality of dependency and intellectual poverty of the researcher has deprived us of such solutions and formulations.
What we want to emphasize to the Arab Islamic research mind is that the success of borrowed ideas in their environment does not mean their success in other environments. In fact, there might be an impossibility of application, or these ideas might lose their essence when transferred from their social and civilizational context to a different one, not to mention their expected theoretical and practical effects, as they lead to intellectual paralysis by relying on the importation of ready-made ideas and programs prepared abroad.
Borrowed ideas cannot be applied within the context of our lives; instead, we mimic them in the form in which others apply them in their lives. This makes us reluctant to use all our capabilities in building our economy, as we want to imitate the economy of others as they construct it with their specific advanced means, which are not available to us at our stage of development. Thus, we lose some of our capabilities when we fail to recognize their value behind the words intended for the specialist who planned for us, and time is also wasted in this process (2) .
Even if borrowed ideas are successful in their Western countries, this success is conditional on the psychological and social conditions in which they originated and thrived. The cultural framework and social environment where society's 91ideas meet from one side and its local activities for its needs from the other side produce renaissance ideas. It is the civilizational specificity that was and is still missing from the visions of those importing these ideas.
All types of socially formulated solutions we borrow from other countries, where they have proven effective, are indeed correct in those countries. However, when applied in our countries, they require complementary elements that do not accompany them and cannot accompany them, as they cannot be confined or separated from their social environment in their countries; they cannot be separated from their spirit (3).
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(1) Imad al-Din Khalil, Reconstructing the Muslim Mind.
(2) Malik Bennabi, Reflections, p. 55.
(3) Malik Bennabi, The Birth of a Society, p. 103.
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