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Why are Muslim cultures in paralysis? Where are the ideas, the innovation, the cultural and intellectual productivity? Why has the Muslim mind closed? Commencing Kasurian's Autumn issue, The Closing of the Muslim Mind by @pashadelics traces the collapse of Muslim cultural and intellectual production to three historical events which saw the total evisceration of Islamic culture, institutions, and networks: 1. The Ottoman dissolution 2. The Rise of Russian Communism 3. The Indian Partition Throughout the first half of the 20th century, a reform movement that had grown in response to the needs of industrialising civilisation was swiftly and brutally destroyed. Each of these catastrophes alone may have been survivable — after all, the Mongols came and were swiftly assimilated — but altogether became a compounding catastrophe that left practically no part of the Muslim world untouched. In the aftermath of these catastrophes, in which countless died and many more millions exiled, the entire edifice of Islamic civilisation had been eviscerated. In the ruins, Muslim populations emerged traumatised and driven by existential crisis to focus on survival. This history was lost. In its place came a mythological narrative that both glorified our most distant history and treated our most recent history as a footnote, absolving us of the need to reckon with defeat. The Closing of the Muslim Mind challenges traditional historical narratives on the "long decline" of Islamic civilisation, placing a greater emphasis on catastrophic events in the 20th century as opposed to European imperial pressures in the 18th and 19th centuries. Another consequence of the three catastrophes was the collapse of Islam's "plausibility structure" (in Jacksonian terms), the rise of the "fiqhmaxxing" reductionism of Islam to a set of decontextualised laws, and the general lack of confidence, output, and innovation in all areas of human knowledge that characterises contemporary Muslim societies around the world. These issues are concretely traceable to the collapse, and failure to rebuild (in more suitable forms) new cultural, legal, and social technologies, artefacts, and institutions to restore Islam as a relevant civilisational force in the 21st century. We have not yet reckoned with defeat, and lacking an understanding of what we have lost, we have found ourselves incapable of rebuilding. Until we reckon with defeat and understand its true causes, the Muslim mind will remain paralysed by existential fear and confusion. Read more on Kasurian. Link to the essay below:





















