I. Introduction
In 2002, the doyen of Middle Eastern studies, Professor Bernard Lewis published his classic What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East. Underlying the discourse of the fall of Islamic civilization is the assumption that all societies follow a cyclical pattern of “rise and fall.” Herodotus perceived a “divine” historical cycle in human affairs, Ibn Khaldun identified asabiyyah as the mechanism behind cyclical change, and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire cemented the idea that the story of Rome is the fate of all political orders.
The principle of rise and fall only explains the dynamics of societies that belong to the same category. During a paradigm shift, societies can be overrun by a rival with a qualitative advantage. Agricultural societies expanded because farming yielded food surplus – not because hunting-gathering communities suffered internal crises.
During the past five centuries, Islamic civilization has not declined. Rather, the West has succeeded because it pioneered superior means of generating wealth and projecting power.
II. Western Military Hegemony
On the eve of Age of Exploration, Europe represented 15-20% of global population and 7% of landmass. By 1800, Europe had circumnavigated the globe, discovered a new continent, conquered 35% of the world’s landmass, and was in control of all the seas. In the second half of the 19th century, European powers carved out the continent of Africa and forced open Japan and China, using industrial era weapons. In 1914, before the start of WWI, Europe was in control of 84% of the world’s landmass.
In establishing their military hegemony, Europeans overpowered scattered tribal communities and continental-sized empires, won battles in all geographical settings and climatic conditions, were victorious against all ethnic groups, and defeated followers of every religion. No other empire in history, from Cyrus the Great to Genghis Khan, achieved this feat.
Military ascendancy of the West does not conform to the historical pattern of rise and fall. West vanquished its enemies not when they were weak, but when they were at the height of their power. In 1683, the Ottomans attacked Vienna and were pushed back. Since their failure to take the city in 1529, the Ottomans had gone through the Köprülü era (1656–1683) reforms and were confident in their victory. It was the Europeans who appeared weak because of religious and political divisions. When the East India Company started expanding its influence after the death of emperor Aurangzeb in 1707, the Mughal empire was at the peak of its territorial expansion. British embassy arrived in China in 1793 during the reign of emperor Qianlong who had nearly doubled the size of the empire and presided over the wealthiest and most populous nation in the world.
Western military superiority was the result of unique combination of developments in tactics, gunpowder technology, use of scientific knowledge in warfare, discipline and training, and the ability of the European states to maintain large standing armies and naval fleets. Europe’s rivals, who operated in the traditional paradigm, were unable to replicate the European military system. Only a European nation was able to halt the advance of a fellow European – whether during the global rivalry between France and England or the conflict between the Axis and the Allied powers.
Some military historians have described Europe’s ability to project disproportionate power despite numerical inferiority as a “military revolution.” The concept, first formulated in the 1950s, was developed in the wider context of changes in the European warfare system by Professor Geoffrey Parker in his 1988 book The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800.
The outcomes of military engagements, however, depend upon peculiar circumstances and chance occurrences. It is difficult to reach consensus about recurring factors leading to Europe’s unbroken chain of military victories. The idea of a European military revolution, thus, never gained currency outside a small circle of academicians despite strong historical evidence.
III. Western Economic Ascendency
Around 1700 the respective shares of India, China, and Europe in global GDP were comparable with each other, ranging from 22% to 25%. By 1950, India’s share had dropped to 4% while that of China to 5%. In contrast, the share of Europe and its offshoots in global output had increased to nearly 57%. During the 250 years, the economies of India and China did not suffer any breakdown. The total output of India grew 2.4-fold while that of China 2.9-fold. The percentage shares of India and China dropped because total global output during this period grew 14-fold from US$371 billion to US$5.3 trillion[1] and nearly all of this was contributed by Western countries which were undergoing the industrial revolution. The West’s share of global manufacturing, around 25% before the industrial revolution, jumped to more than 80% by 1914.
As a result of the industrial revolution, real per capita GDP, which remained stagnant at US$2-3 per day throughout history for all societies, started to rise in England, countries of North-West Europe, and the United States. Real wages that had historically remained slightly above subsistence level doubled. The percentage of labor force employed in agriculture plummeted. Some economic historians have labelled the phenomenon of Western countries pulling ahead of their counterparts as the “great divergence.” While East Asian economies have managed to close the gap during the last 50 years, the economic gap in per capita GDP between Western countries and Islamic nations has continued to grow.
Today non-oil producing members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) are roughly 15 to 25 times poorer than the average G7 nation when measured by nominal GDP per capita. This disparity exists because the agricultural economies of Muslim majority countries have reached the limit of productive capacity. They have not become poorer in absolute terms, nor have their wealth rankings changed vis-à-vis each other. Collectively, however, a gap has opened between Islamic countries and the West, caused not by the economic slowing down of the Muslim majority countries but by the exponential industrial growth of the West.
IV. Rejuvenation of the Chinese Civilization
At the start of the last millennium, China and the Islamic world were the two centers of wealth, power, learning, and cultural influence. Both civilizations faced the Mongol threat in the 13th century but recovered quickly. In the 16th century, both confronted challenges by European nations but succeeded in maintaining the balance of power[2]. A modernizing Europe quietly overtook its rivals, militarily in the 1700s and economically a century later. By 1850s, both East Asia and Islamic world lay prostrate before Europe.
When the Chinese suffered military defeat at the hands of the Europeans in the First Opium War (1839 – 42), their reaction was to learn as much as they could about this new enemy. Imperial official Wei Yuan compiled the Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Kingdoms in 1842–1843 to “learn the advanced skills of the foreigners to control them.” Fukuzawa Yukichi, the foremost Meiji-era reformer, promoted similar views in his 1866 book Conditions in the West, arguing that Japan could only preserve itself by adopting Western tools. In little over four decades, Japan became a modern power and defeated Russia in 1905. China ended its century of humiliation in 1949 and is now one of the great military powers and the world’s largest industrial economy in PPP terms.
During the century after Suleiman the Magnificent (d. 1566), as the Ottomans started suffering from dynastic instability, rebellions, halting of territorial expansion, military stagnation, and financial difficulties they turned to Ibn Khaldun’s cyclical theory of history to find answers to empire’s problems[3]. After more than three centuries of failed reform efforts, Muslim mind still considers West’s rise as a cyclical event and continues to search for reasons for its own decline.
In engaging with the modern West, Chinese intellectuals employed the Confucian dichotomy of Ti (substance) and Yong (function). Western learning, technology, and institutions could be adopted for their functional utility without jeopardizing the essence of Chinese culture. Chinese reformers popularized the idea of “Chinese learning as the substance, and Western learning as the function.” This distinction allowed them to formulate Western challenge as a political and economic problem, paving the way for civilizational rejuvenation.
Muslims, on the other hand, could not make a distinction between historical and revealed elements of their civilization. Western challenges to them appeared as a threat to their faith. The rise of the West came to be regarded as a negation of Islam’s divinity. The program of society’s modernization became mired in theological, moral, and metaphysical debates. Instead of deciphering the secrets of Western success, Muslims began scrutinizing their own past to understand the causes of the “great divergence.” After more than three centuries, Islamic civilization still finds itself in an intellectual cul-de-sac.
The response of a non-Western civilization to the challenge of modernity is determined by its understanding of reasons behind Western ascendency. If Western superiority is believed to be the result of a paradigm shift, then the solution tends to focus on learning from the West. If one’s weakness is perceived as an episode in the cycle of “rise and fall,” then emphasis gets placed on identifying and correcting past mistakes. East Asian civilization opted for the former course and has succeeded in rejuvenating itself. Islamic civilization finds it difficult to fathom the presence of superior attributes in modern West and continues to debate the reasons for its own decline.
V. Conclusion
A civilization is a symbiosis between a system of production and a system of society of sufficient complexity. Islam was revealed in the 7th century when agriculture was the system of production of all societies. Guided by their religion’s moral vision, Muslims forged a new civilization by appropriating the agricultural techniques, methods of warfare, and administrative structures of their time. This civilization was Islamic in its essence, but it belonged to the agricultural civilizational archetype in material terms.
Modern West is sui generis. It is the first civilization to have industry as its basis of production. Muslims can never catch up with the West through piecemeal reforms. Just as the light bulb is not the improved version of a candle, similarly an industrial civilization is not the advanced variant of an agricultural civilization. The two belong to different civilizational archetypes.
Muslims must use the tools of the modern world and forge for themselves a new civilization where industry is the source of production and Islam is the guiding principle of the system of society. Failure would mean that West and the Islamic world would continue to grow apart as the two civilizations advance on their respective evolutionary paths. Islam will not cease to exist as a faith, but Muslims will no longer be a force in world history.
About the Author:
Syed Sardar Ali
Chairperson of Crescent Foundation Pakistan
*Ideas expressed in this document are those of Syed Sardar Ali and Crescent Foundation Pakistan and do not in any way reflect the views or official position of Islam and Liberty Network or the host.
[1]All GDP figures are in 1990 international dollars obtained from the Historical Statistics of the World Economy: 1-2008 AD; https://www.rug.nl › data › md2010_horizontal
[2] In 1520s, Ming navy prevailed during hostilities with the Portuguese fleet in the Pearl River Delta. A century later Chinese inflicted similar defeats on the Dutch. Ottomans suffered their first major defeat against Christian Europe during the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 but were able to quickly recover.
[3] The first official historian of the Ottoman empire, Mustafa Naima, in his seminal work Tārīḫ-i Na’īmā (Annals of the Turkish Empire) completed circa 1704, used Ibn Khaldun’s cyclical five-stage theory to explain the military, political, and financial challenges faced by the Ottomans covering the years 1591 to 1659. This framework was later used by his successor Raşid Efendi who covered the late 17th century, including the events of the Great Turkish War (1683 – 1699).