of the

As a result, the West would eventually destroy itself, a position that was easy to understand after the First World War, which could be seen as the collective suicide of Europe. Muslims therefore had a vital mission to witness to the divine dimension of life, not by retiring from the world to engage in contemplation, but by an activism that impleme

Iqbal had been deeply influenced by Western thought and had received a Ph.D. in London. Yet he believed that the West had elevated progress at the expense of continuity; its secular individualism separated the notion of personality from God and made it idolatrous and potentially demonic.

modernity

To the west they faced

The loss of Palestine became a potent symbol of the humiliation of the Muslim world at the hands of the Western powers, who seemed to feel no qualms about the dispossession and permanent exile of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Nevertheless, in the very early days, some Muslims were

But it is never possible to go back in time. Any “reformation,” however conservative its intention, is always a new departure, and an adaptation of the faith to the particular challenges of the reformer’s own time.

It was an attempt to get back to the primitive simplicity of the ummah when all Muslims had lived as equals.

Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi (d. 870) was the first major Faylasuf or “Philosopher” of the Muslim world.