The Challenges of the Civilizational Integration of Muslims: Take Control by Alix Eze

By Ahmed Sarirete

   

     Today, the world is increasingly interested in Muslims' behavior, and all suspicious eyes are on Islam, the source of their culture, so this essay is basically intended for Muslims to give them new elements of reflection so that they can review their vision of the world in the light of their civilizational challenges to be faced, and in order to enable them to succeed in their efficient civilizational integration and to play their real expected role in the community of nations.

     However, it is intended for anyone, who has an interest in the culture of faith and in Islam in particular, in order to enlighten them, invite them to understand this religion more and to change their attitude of distrust towards educated people in this culture of faith.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BadPress
• Release date: Mar 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781071581629

Book preview

Introduction

Up to now, the integration of Muslims' culture in the ongoing process of civilizational development, in an efficient way and as a human heritage drawn from a culturally specific Islam around faith, has not been a visible reality!

Doubtless, from the perspective of economic culture, Muslims have remarkably evolved, thanks to their wealth in natural resources in the Arab Gulf countries or even in human resources in the Asian part of the Muslim world. However, the impact of the repercussions of the fall of their nation and of the decadence of its civilizational model on their contemporary reality has not yet been measured and analyzed with relevance and objectivity.

A century after this actual fall, analyzes of the Muslim world's status quo do not yet seem to decide on the real causes of this historic fall, and Muslims find themselves without a real cultural project regarding their faith. They have no means whereby they can contribute as believers to human civilizational work and meet the various challenges of the civilizational reality shaped by the Western nation.

Unfortunately, despite the ease and wealth of many Muslim countries, socially and culturally, the situation of Muslims does not improve much.

It seems that a curse has struck the contemporary Muslims, especially the Arab countries where their expected progress is moving further away to give way to disorder, if not chaos.

For the present, no indications of a new promising situation for all Muslims in the world are perceptible. This entails that we still must search further and dig deeper into the depths of the evil that is plaguing these Muslim peoples, and which makes the situation in which their states have engulfed themselves hard to manage.

There is no need to recall the nature of these analyses[1], since the conclusion is grim. Apparently, Muslims do not sufficiently grasp the extraordinary change in the modern world and its enormous impact on their reality and on the nature of the new challenges that they will have to face desperately. Thus, they are sorely absent in terms of the civilizational dialogue desired between great nations.

In this light, the role of Islam, however, and the challenges that Muslims face, to confront the requirements and conditions of their integration into the current civilizational process, still need a look away from prejudices and a new realistic approach.

The Islamic religion's glorious past allowed a people without a real civilizational anchoring to build for the first time in history a civilizational model based on faith and extended over the centuries towards an unfinished universality. This extraordinary past can only incite us to understand the causes of the decadence of the nation that was its product and gave so much to humanity.

In this respect, as a Muslim intellectual and Algerian thinker, I propose reflecting deeply on the best possible approach to reassess the entire process of the civilizational development of Muslims.

Indeed, it is very important to calmly conduct this reflection and to situate its framework, by redefining the priorities and the real contemporary challenges to which we should consecrate our understanding efforts.

This is because it is crucial to show those who think that Islam cannot allow believers to succeed in their integration into contemporary civilization in a peaceful manner that their doubts about the capacities of this religion to contribute once again to humanity's progress are unfounded. This essentially applies to areas in which the Western civilizational model has failed to develop or to convince other nations in search of moral and spiritual salvation.

As the world is increasingly becoming interested in Muslims' behavior, and as all suspicious eyes are on Islam, the source of their culture, this essay is basically intended for