The Iranian Muslim sociologist Ali Shariati says, "Westerners said to us, 'Your ancestors worked hard, they accomplished great things that you can be proud of, you don't need to work, we don't have such successes in our past, so we have to work' and they put the Muslim peoples to sleep for centuries." Indeed, we went so far in boasting about the achievements of our ancestors that we fell into complacency by saying, "We are the grandchildren of a ancestor who shook the world, if the whole world came together, nothing could happen to us." Muslim peoples became blind by defining themselves through their national identities, and acting with their ignorant arrogance, they could not see the abyss in front of them. Our history was constructed in such an exaggerated way that we could not come out of the heroic stories of the past and come to the present, believing that there was no need for it, and we fell into heedlessness. The honorable legacy that our grandfathers left us is of course important, but if we are not inspired by their success and build the present, the words we pronounce will have no meaning. We had to gain strength from their honorable stance and make progress in the political, social, scientific, philosophical and technical fields and be equipped to deal with the problems we experienced. But we were so immersed in a sweet dream that we avoided waking up and facing ourselves.
Being proud of the successes achieved in the past and not being able to see the present is one of the most important reasons for the backwardness of Islamic societies. Our ancestors supported scientific activities that will shed light on humanity and achieved unprecedented success in the political, social, artistic, scientific and technical fields. However, unfortunately, they could not protect the scientific values they produced and lost their knowledge to the West. As a matter of fact, Westerners, not Muslims, ate the bread of scientific studies that continued until the 16th century in the Islamic world, and they gained power by building on this knowledge. The Middle Ages, which was a dark period for Europe, was a period in which Muslims made progress in medicine, astronomy, mathematics, geometry, physics, philosophy and history, but these precious savings fell into the hands of Western scientists and were turned into a poisonous knife.
Undoubtedly, the fact that the Islamic societies could not make progress in the scientific field, besides the complacency of the administrators and the intellectuals, the fact that the Islamic institutions that were established broke away from their essence and that the scholars narrowed the halal framework of religion instead of producing solutions to the needs of the society had a great impact. Unfortunately, the science of fiqh could not be dealt with in a way to cover the problems of the age, our jurists confined themselves to a narrow field and could not find solutions to current problems. Our scholars, who emphasized the complacency of Muslims and questioned how we should proceed to solve our problems, were severely punished or martyred. Scholars, whose voices were silenced and suppressed, could not come up with grounded solutions for what we should do here and now, and fiqh could not be made a living way of thinking, all of which caused Islamic thought to become static and remain unsolved in the face of the problems of the age.
Islam has clearly stated the limits of harams, but it has kept the borders of halals wide and evaluated every legitimate thing that will benefit the society in terms of halal. But unfortunately, our scholars acted with extremely reactive reflexes on this subject and narrowed the field and hindered scientific studies.
Today, Islamic societies are oppressed under the domination of the West and do not have the strength to resist the occupations. Our Muslim administrators, scholars, intellectuals and thinkers, on the other hand, are blocking the ways that can be a solution by marginalizing each other instead of coming together and considering the problems. First of all, Muslims must overcome this problem and seek ways of liberation in the political, economic and scientific fields. Otherwise, we will not be able to move forward with this broken walking stick.