Main Challenges of the Islamic Civilization

The most fundamental questions and challenges of the
Muslim thinkers in the contemporary world are as follows:

1 " The Threat of Alienation of the Society from Islamic-Indigenous Identity

The arrival of the concepts and terms of the alien culture
in the Islamic societies and their acceptance by the scholars, who were
disappointed at the dictatorial rulers - who had distanced themselves from the
religious-indigenous culture " was spreading so quickly and irrationally that
the danger of the destruction of cultural identity became quite palpable. On the
other hand the approach of the Western culture to such human values as freedom,
justice, citizenship rights and the definitions of these concepts was basically
different from that of the Eastern Muslim man. Therefore the masses in the
Muslim societies were alien to these concepts, which were interpreted through a
Western outlook.

In every society, the scholars are the representatives and
delineators of the course of movement of the society towards the future and they
are the ones who intellectually feed the society. Therefore if they distance
themselves from the society, a gap will appear between them and the masses. If
this happens, the cultural foundations of the society will be weakened and such
a culture will lose its power of progress and fruition and therefore cannot meet
the needs of the society. Under the circumstances, the identity and originality
of the society are gradually eroded and a society without an identity cannot
take any action to reform its body. The Muslim scholars had realized that
without a scientific study of the basic concepts and principles of their own
Islamic culture, and without revival and theoretical elaboration of such
concepts as Islamic brotherhood, Islamic ummah, freedom and justice in Islamic
viewpoint, etc. vis-à-vis the alien concepts and terms of the Western culture,
Muslims will not find their answers within their own indigenous culture and the
end result will be stagnation of growth, dynamism and development of Islamic
thought. Inevitably such a man will resort to the alien culture and ultimately
as a result of conflict between indigenous cultural attractions and those of the
alien culture, his mentality will be more and more split.