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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

From Renaissance Light to Modern Stagnation

The Lost Brilliance of Islamic Thought

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

When we think of the Renaissance, we see Europe's great awakening after the long medieval sleep: Florence, Michelangelo, Galileo, and the rebirth of reason and beauty. But centuries before Europe stirred from its slumber, the torch of knowledge was already blazing in the East.

Long before Copernicus and Leonardo, there was Baghdad, Córdoba, Cairo—cities where books were copied by the thousands and knowledge was treated as a sacred duty. The Islamic world of the early Middle Ages was not merely a guardian of ancient wisdom. It was its inventive heir.

From the 8th to the 13th century, the Muslim world produced the most advanced scientists, philosophers, and physicians of its time. In Baghdad's legendary House of Wisdom, Greek, Persian, and Indian texts were translated and refined. Mathematician Al-Khwarizmi gave us the very word “algorithm.” Astronomer Al-Battani calculated the solar year with remarkable precision. Avicenna (Ibn Sina) wrote the Canon of Medicine, the standard medical textbook of both East and West for half a millennium. Averroes (Ibn Rushd), in Muslim Spain, championed Aristotle as the philosopher of reason, influencing Thomas Aquinas and shaping the intellectual scaffolding of Christian Europe.

It's an irony of history: the European Renaissance was, in part, a rebirth of ideas that had survived thanks to Islamic scholars. Without their translations, commentaries, and innovations, much of classical knowledge would have been lost.

But where Europe's Renaissance became the springboard for the Enlightenment, the Islamic Golden Age eventually dimmed. A civilization that once dazzled the world with scientific curiosity and tolerance entered a long period of intellectual stagnation.

Why?

The Moment the Light Turned Inward

The great Islamic philosopher Al-Ghazali, writing around the year 1100, represents a turning point. In his famous work The Incoherence of the Philosophers, he attacked the rationalism of thinkers like Avicenna, arguing that human reason could never reach ultimate truth without revelation. His ideas triumphed. Philosophy began to yield to theology; the independent mind was replaced by the obedient one.

This wasn't a sudden collapse but a gradual shift in the intellectual climate. Scholars began to view the speculative sciences with suspicion. The concept of ijtihad—the freedom to reinterpret religious texts—was said to have closed. Instead, imitation (taqlid) became the norm.

There is a tragic irony here: the very religion that once made the pursuit of knowledge a divine act (“Seek knowledge, even unto China”) became wary of it when that knowledge seemed to challenge orthodoxy.

In contrast, Europe went the other way. After centuries of dogma, it reopened its eyes to nature, reason, and individual experience. The Enlightenment declared that truth could be tested, not just believed. For Islam, the gates of ijtihad closed roughly when Europe was prying open the doors of scientific inquiry.

The Wounds of History

When the Islamic world later encountered modernity, it did so under duress. From Napoleon's invasion of Egypt to Britain's and France's colonization of the Middle East, the balance of power reversed dramatically.

Koert Debeuf, in What You Need to Know to Understand the Middle East, is right to insist that this psychological reversal—from confident teacher to humiliated pupil—still defines much of the region's mindset. For centuries, Muslims had seen themselves as heirs to the world's most advanced civilization. Suddenly, they found themselves under foreign control, their societies dissected by imperial powers, their borders drawn by others.

The humiliation was not just political; it was existential. The very people who had once introduced the West to Aristotle and algebra were now being lectured by European colonizers about civilization and progress.

Debeuf emphasizes this sense of cultural humiliation as a key to understanding today's Middle East. But humiliation alone doesn't explain the intellectual paralysis that followed. Colonization certainly exploited weakness—but it didn't create it. The deeper problem was that by the time Europe arrived, much of the creative vitality that had once animated Islamic civilization had already ebbed away.

Between Memory and Modernity

Modernization efforts in the 19th and 20th centuries—under Atatürk in Turkey, Nasser in Egypt, the Shah in Iran—tried to catch up by imitating the West's technology and education. But they rarely touched the roots of intellectual culture. The result was an uneasy duality: Western science without Western freedom, modern industry without modern philosophy.

In much of the Islamic world, intellectual innovation remains hostage to political authority and religious conservatism. Questioning the sacred or challenging established interpretations can still invite censure or worse. In the Arab world, where youth unemployment is high and social mobility low, creative thinkers often emigrate. The “brain drain” is not just economic—it's spiritual.

And yet, memory endures. Every educated Muslim knows that their ancestors once led the world in learning. The contrast between that golden past and the anxious present fuels both pride and pain. Some respond with nostalgia, dreaming of restoring the Caliphate. Others turn to fundamentalism, mistaking rigid purity for renewal. Still others quietly continue the humanistic tradition that made the Golden Age shine.

The Forgotten Spirit of Inquiry

It is easy—and lazy—to speak of “Islam” as if it were a single, monolithic entity. In truth, the early Islamic world was astonishingly diverse. Baghdad in the 9th century had Christian, Jewish, Persian, and Hindu scholars debating under the same roof. The Qur'an itself encouraged reflection on nature as a sign of divine wisdom. The problem is not with Islam's origins, but with its historical evolution.

Every civilization faces a moment when its old certainties no longer work. For Islam, that moment may be now. The world is changing too quickly for inherited answers to suffice. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, ecological collapse—these demand a moral and intellectual response on a global scale.

The Muslim world cannot merely imitate Western models, nor can it retreat into nostalgia. It must rediscover its own capacity for critical thought—its own rationalism, not imported but reborn. The Golden Age shows that such a synthesis is possible: faith and reason, revelation and inquiry, can coexist. They once did.

A Call for Reopening the Gates

The question, then, is not whether Islam can modernize, but whether it can reconnect with its original spirit of curiosity. That spirit once produced the polymaths of Baghdad and Córdoba, who saw no contradiction between science and spirituality.

Reopening the gates of ijtihad today would not mean abandoning faith. It would mean allowing faith to breathe—to live again in dialogue with the world. The Qur'an's God, after all, is not afraid of questions.

Civilizations rise and fall not by divine decree but by the vitality of their minds. The Renaissance that began under Islamic skies shows what can happen when reason and imagination walk hand in hand. Its decline shows what happens when they part ways.

Somewhere between the dust of history and the urgency of the present lies the possibility of another renewal. The Islamic world once lit the way for humanity's search for truth. The flame may have dimmed, but it has not gone out.