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Western civilization has achieved an amazing level of scientific development that has affected all aspects of urbanization and life. Historians confirm that the past 200 years have been radically different scientifically from the 4,000 years that preceded them, and in the past 50 years scientific development has exceeded what was achieved in the past 200 years.
In the last 20 years, scientific developments have accelerated in an unlimited way, thanks to the Internet, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence, to the point that people have begun to think about ethical and legal determinants that frame this amazing development so that they do not destroy themselves.
When we look at this amazing development of science and discoveries in various fields, and the huge cultural difference between us and these mythical levels, we become frustrated and imagine that catching up with civilization is impossible, and it is better for us to be satisfied with the products of civilization and integrate into the civilization that created them.
But thank God, this is not the case. There is a difference between nations that buy products that make life easier for them and enjoy them only, as is the case with us, and nations that buy products and enjoy them but also provide them with the human resources that employ them, dismantle them, imitate them, and perhaps make better ones, as was the case with Japan with American and European products, then China, which caught up with Japan after a difference of 40 years.
Today, China and the West are like two betting horses. Then, after China and Japan, many countries, including our Islamic countries, such as Turkey, Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan, have entered the world of technology and modern industries, and have even begun to manufacture their own weapons.
One day I asked Dr. Mahathir, how did you make Malaysia’s renaissance? We were standing and there was no time for a long answer, so he gave me a brief answer saying: “I was determined to make the Malaysian engineer able to work efficiently in a factory according to Japanese standards.” So catching up with Western civilization is not by piling up its products, but by riding its train through a person who is at its scientific level and can board from any of its stations.
The Americans and the Soviets did not defeat the Germans in World War II because they were scientifically superior, as they were never at the technological level that Germany was at that time, but because the German philosophical, human and social system was extremist and racist, despised humanity, and did not put an end to its ambitions and crimes.
What contributed to its catch-up was hosting its scientists in the laboratories of America and the Soviet Union after its loss in the war. When the Soviet Union preceded the United States of America in space sciences and reached the surface of the moon in the sixties, US President John Kennedy attributed this to the decline in the educational level in his country.
When the Cold War ended with the defeat of communism in the early nineties, it was not because of the weakness of its scientific and technological development, but because of its philosophy that clashed with nature and its calcified social and administrative system. Then, despite the continued Western superiority under American leadership in the scientific, economic and military aspects, the data we have in our hands in the last decade indicate that the leadership in these areas will be for China.
This will be in the not-too-distant future, given the country’s superiority in the growth indicators it records in patents, industry, trade, etc. Other countries in the Eastern world have begun to follow suit in this regard, and it is useful to know that nineteen percent of researchers in the laboratories of some Western countries are from the Eastern and Southern hemispheres.
If we look at the reasons for this Western apathy, we find them in the cessation of the passion for civilization among the American and European people due to the collapse of the moral system, to the point where pornography and deviant tendencies became protected and encouraged by law, which led to the end of the family and the destruction of the social spirit. Likewise, the excitement of instinct, the breaking of the controls of individualistic philosophy, and the spread of material life led to the deification of the market and the transformation of consumption into disciplined rituals of the new religion.
All of this has led to the transformation of Western civilization into a deadly machine for injustice and aggression against peoples and the destruction of their cultural foundations so that they do not rise from their slumber or think about rising. These are the harbingers of the fall of civilizations, according to Ibn Khaldun, Toynbee, Spengler, and Malek Bennabi.
Heritage of Civilizations
Civilizations are the legacy of humanity, inherited as every legacy is inherited. Accordingly, Islamic civilization inherited the sciences and philosophy of Greece and adapted them to its Islamic intellectual, cultural, and social system. When Islamic civilization ended, the West inherited its legacy and adapted it to its Christian culture and intellectual and social system.
When the West was transferring the legacy of Islamic civilization since the Carolingian Renaissance in the ninth century AD, then the Italian Renaissance, then the European Renaissance and the religious reformation starting from the middle of the fourteenth century, Europe was not stronger than the Islamic world, but rather the Muslim Turks were destroying their countries and cities. However, something happened at that time in their social awareness and in their human, administrative and educational systems that made them qualified for civilization.
This is the case today. We do not need to be stronger than others materially and scientifically to inherit Western civilization and resume our Islamic civilization. Rather, we need to be superior intellectually, humanely, socially, administratively, and organizationally. Therefore, we must realize that controlling the social sciences is more important than controlling the technological sciences, not because this science or that or that science or that science is better than the other, but rather technological sciences are capable of being transferred when the social and human system is strong, expresses the culture of its country, and has a civilized vision.
The West has understood the roles of technological sciences and the roles of social sciences, so it and its followers, from the colonial era until now, have directed the nation’s noble and intelligent people to cosmic and technological sciences to transform them into technicians in their factories and capitalist facilities, and to steal the minds of many of them by forcing them to immigrate to them due to the absence of a scientific environment in our countries and the absence of a living horizon, especially due to corruption and tyranny.
They also prevented and discouraged the academically superior students in our universities from studying the social and human sciences, so that the nobles would not become thinkers, scientists and researchers in these specializations. And so that we would not be able to establish the structural systems that make our societies free with an abundance of conscious leaders, and capable of organizing themselves and exploiting their resources, no matter how scarce, and that raise educational levels and spread social effectiveness that then enables technological transition with ease.
Whether it is through scientific missions whose members travel to return to the country with knowledge, and not to escape for their livelihood or political reasons, or through the national educational system that produces researchers with patents that develop agriculture and industry, and which also graduates engineers who can build and operate factories according to American, Japanese and Chinese standards.
