WHAT WENT WRONG WITH MUSLIMS A Result of Not Changing

WHAT WENT WRONG WITH MUSLIMS A Result of Not Changing I N 1770, the Turkish naval establishment was wiped out in the Battle of Çeşme by a Russian fleet. In 1799, the Fourth Mysore War was fought between Tipu Sultan and the British East India Company at Srirangapatanam. In this war, Tipu Sultan was killed. When the British Governor-General of India, George Harris, heard of the death of Tipu Sultan, he is said to have exclaimed: “Today, India is ours!” These two events symbolise the beginning of the end of Muslim political glory in the modern age. There were a series of such events in most Muslim countries, and the Muslim leadership of that time strongly reacted to this disturbing phenomenon. But history shows that in all their attempts they totally failed to achieve their goal. First, there were complaints, then protests, followed by violence, then the gun culture, and, lastly, suicide bombing. In short, this is the scenario of more than two hundred years of Muslim struggle. What is happening in Egypt today is only the latest manifestation of this unsuccessful Muslim activism. The time has now come to reassess this long failed struggle. There is no justification for continuing this pattern of resistance. It will only lead to more loss. An unbiased study tells us that the Western powers who Muslims considered enemies were, in fact, not enemies, but harbingers of a new civilisation. It was the Western nations who had developed this new civilisation, and it was bound to spread out across the world. But there were two aspects to this. One was the political dominance of Western nations. And the other was that they had brought to the world an age of new science, technology and industry. The traditional world was then transformed into a new world, which resulted in a change in the balance of power. The mistake that Muslim leaders made was that they failed to understand this duality. They took it as simply a political phenomenon, and they waged a political war against these Western nations. In this situation, the best policy for Muslims would have been to differentiate between politics, on the one hand, and civilisation, on the other. The better choice would have been to avoid the political problem and to take into account the non-political aspect of Western expansion, that is, the civilisation ushered in by the West, based on scientific discoveries and modern technology.