The Decline of Knowledge and the Rise of Ideology in the Modern Islamic World

Throughout the twentieth century, Muslim scholars called for a revival of
the Islamic intellectual tradition in order to address the moral and spiritual
malaise which has too long afflicted Muslim peoples the world over. Both
Sunnìs and Shìþites, from the heartland of medieval Islamic civilization such
as Syria, Egypt, and Iran, to its later lands such as Malaysia and West Africa,
to its most recent penetrations into Europe and America, have long decried
the intellectual decrepitude of modern Islamic civilization. To many scholars of Islam, both Muslim and non-Muslim, the rise of violence, punctuated
by the events of September 11, 2001, are the latest symptoms of an underlying illness, a cancer which has been eating at the collective moral and intellectual body of the international Islamic community. In retrospect, such
events were not a surprise but a painful indication of how deep this crisis
has become. Unfortunately, the solutions sought by the American-led coalition involve significant risks, and to the minds of many condone senseless
violence and wanton killing as a just response to senseless violence and
wanton killing. Critics of the policy maintain that such a response rarely
does more than beget the same violence from whence it was begotten. If
this is correct, removing one or two more heads from the hydra of religious
extremism will only succeed in breeding more of the same. In any case,
what is needed is to strike a fatal blow to the heart of this beast, a beast
whose name is ignorance.