الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

Islam and the West… for a better world @

‘The decline in civilisation’, he writes in his Prolegomena (that is, the prologue to his History of the World ) ‘had so degraded the arts and the sciences that the total loss of the high art of writing seemed imminent. But then, recently, there came to us, here in the Maghreb, a book out of Egypt…’ It was in 1372 that Ibn Khaldûn holed up in the fortress of Ibn Salâma in North-Western Algeria to write his immense investigation concerning the history of the world and, in particular, the evolution of systems of thought and means of expression. It’s a sharp, lucid study, without teleology or eschatology, concerning the dynamics of power and the rise of religions, as well as the relative merits of nomadism and sedentarity, desert-living and urbanism. Ibn Khaldûn felt the shock-waves in the Arab-Muslim world from the Turco-Mongol advance, he was witness to the collapse of the old empire of Bagdad that had housed the school of philosophy founded by al-Kindi (where Aristotle’s Organon was translated), and he foresaw worse to come. That made him neither boil with belligerent anger nor shut himself up in brooding fatalism. Having completed his study, he began to teach, working towards a redefinition of society and a re-grounding of culture, opening the minds of students, awakening their enthusiasm – arousing thereby (shall we say ‘of course’ ?) the hostility of the political and religious authorities in power. Towards the end of his life, he wrote an autobiography, bearing the significant and revealing title : Travels in the East and the West . After history (etymologically, from the Greek : ‘finding things out for oneself’), geography – the moving from territory to territory, the discovery of the earth. There I think in the first instance of Ibn Battuta, whose life was a perpetual exile. Between 1330 and 1370, one can follow his tracks in Arabia, Irak, Iran, the Yemen, on the Red Sea and on the African coast, in the Russo-Mongol area, in Afghanistan, in the Maldives archipelago, and in China. When, on his return to Morocco, he dictated an account of his travels, he not only extended the scope of geography, no mean thing in itself, he also provided the mind with unaccustomed latitudes and

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