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Presented by Professor Omar Hasan Kasule MB ChB (MUK), MPH (Harvard), DrPH (Harvard) at the Global Madani Forum 2024 under the theme ‘Catalyzing Muslim civilization revival for the next 100 years.
THE EUROPEAN RENAISSANCE: Start
- European Renaissance (14th-17th centuries): Initiated around 1300 AD as a revival of Greco-Roman culture, art, philosophy, and other aspects of classical antiquity, following the Dark Ages that ensued after the fall of the Roman Empire.
- The Renaissance was triggered by contact with a more advanced Muslim civilization during the Crusades (11-12th centuries). The Crusaders took back to Europe Greco-Roman knowledge that Muslims had preserved and improved.
THE EUROPEAN RENAISSANCE: Transfer of knowledge to
Europe
- Muslim books were translated from Arabic into Latin and triggered an intellectual awakening. - Abu Rayhan Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Albiruni (973-1048) was called the second teacher after Aristotle. He preserved and wrote commentaries on Greek logic.
- Crusaders also took back advanced ideas, the most important being evidence-based knowledge and freedom of thought. These have Quranic origins in tadabbur and tafakkur.
IMPACT OF RENAISSANCE
- The Renaissance started as an art and architectural movement in the Italian cities.
- Humanism: Humanism, the harbinger of secularism, emphasizes the centrality of man
- Reformation: protestant movement criticizing restrictive doctrines of the catholic church, which in turn also underwent internal reforms
- Enlightenment age of reason in the 18th century, reason vs superstition, science vs blind faith.
- Age of scientific discovery: dissection of the body, alchemy became a science of chemistry, explanation of combustion, discovery of oxygen.
EUROPE IS BECOMING THE DOMINATING POWER OF THE WORLD DUE
TO TECHNOLOGY
- The agricultural revolution introduced new scientific methods, increased food production, and population growth.
- The Industrial Revolution transformed the economy from agrarian to large-scale manufacturing and gave Europeans a military advantage to colonize Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
- Follow up revolutions: communication revolution, transport digital revolution, internet revolution, artificial intelligence..
- The summary is that the rise of Western Europe to world dominance started as an epistemological revolution triggered by contact with Muslims in the Near East. The epistemological revolution led to a knowledge revolution.
THE EUROPEAN RENAISSANCE: LESSONS FOR MUSLIMS
- Two lessons for Muslim countries like Malaysia on the path of development:
- Positive lesson: epistemology is necessary for knowledge generation. The Europeans returned to their Greco-Roman origins. We cannot return to the same origins, but to our own Islamic origins. We need to conceive an integrated epistemology that combines 2 sources of knowledge: ilm aqli and ilm naqli
- Negative lesson: The Europeans took a bad copy of the Islamic civilization. They took the empirical spirit and the scientific knowledge, but not the tauhidi paradigm that provides an integrated and balanced approach.
PROBLEMS OF THE WORLD TODAY
- The problems of Europe today (also problems of the world because Europeans control it) are a lack of purpose (ghaiyyat), a lack of balance (mizan), and a lack of corrective reaction (tadafu’u).
- I could give many examples of positive developments in one dimension accompanied by regression in the other dimensions: heavy manufacturing vs. environmental degradation, high material consumption vs. human misery and loneliness, individual freedom vs family destruction, high standards of material living vs population contraction.
- The solution to these is an integrative tauhid paradigm