The state of the Muslims

The argument moves from the condition of a people to a verdict on their religion. The movement feels natural, and it does not survive inspection.

The inference

Run the same logic elsewhere and watch it work. Christianity is falsified by the Thirty Years’ War, secular rationalism by the twentieth century’s industrial slaughters, Buddhism by any period of decline in any Buddhist polity. Every tradition, religious or otherwise, has presided over a nadir. If a community’s worst centuries refute its creed, every creed on earth is refuted, and the argument proves too much to prove anything.

What the decline actually is

The malaise is real, and Muslim thinkers have diagnosed it more sharply than the polemic does. The educational imbalance is a leading account: Muslim societies pour their effort into fard al-kifayah (collective duties, the technical and professional knowledge a community needs) while leaving fard al-‘ayn (the knowledge binding on each individual person) at an infantile level. The result, in al-Attas’s description, is an adult who knows a great deal about the world and almost nothing about his religion, and leaderships whose comprehension of Islam is stunted at the level of immaturity — so that Islam itself is made to appear undeveloped, or left to stagnate.

That is a diagnosis of Muslims who abandoned their own intellectual tradition. During the centuries when a lay Muslim was educated in at least the basics of aqidah (creed) and usul al-fiqh (legal theory), and scholars were held in esteem for knowledge across the sciences, the problems now cited as evidence were marginal.

The distinction the argument needs and lacks

A religion and the condition of its adherents at a given hour of history are two different objects. Judging the first by the second requires showing that the teaching produced the decline, and the record runs the other way: the decline tracks the abandonment of the teaching, its educational system, and its scholarly culture. The observation is genuinely damning. It is damning of a civilisation’s stewardship, and the polemic has aimed it at the wrong target.