With our attitudes, we can turn this voyage into a good one or make our doom inevitable. So the human factor lies at the heart of the matter. God has given the universe for our disposal. There is a wisdom and purpose in this. If we act erroneously in perceiving the raison d’etre of existence and using it, then the costs will be beyond our physical existence. As Muslim sages say: “Corruption of man corrupts the universe and vice versa.”Thus, we need to find an answer to three questions:
(1) How can we control this material/economic growth through which we desensitize our consciousness with anesthetics? Unfortunately, Muslims tend to focus on how to “grow more” and turn to the Quran and the Sunnah, as the main sources of their religion, in order to find an answer to this question. This is a misguided quest which tells them to base their political ideologies on “more development.” Muslims should stop asking the wrong questions, which they have been voicing for the last 200 years, and should have the courage to question clichés such as “Islam does not preclude science, progress, development, modernity and growth.”
(2) How can we as all the inhabitants of the Earth live together? A prerequisite to coexistence is to avoid “otherifying” the people who are different from us as Satan did toward human beings when they were first created. This is a purely philosophical issue about our creation, Satan’s refusal to prostrate in front of Adam and man being conscious about his primary choice between God and Satan. The administration of justice is of pivotal importance for social, economic and political coexistence. Yet, the question is fixed: How can we find the true forms of justice? What is the raison d’etre of freedom and morality and the raison d’etre of man’s creation? Without answering these questions, we cannot know the answer to the question of how to live together.
(3) How can we control our carnal self and unrestrained passions? This is an important question. Liberal capitalism is a system that provokes all desires and lusts of the carnal self and keeps alive all of its insatiable desires, and its dynamics and weaknesses are all concentrated on the same point: the ideology of “growth.” The more it grows, the stronger the system becomes, and if growth stops, it fails. The driving force of growth consists of passions and desires of the carnal self, which is continually provoked. If we can find ways to control the carnal self, then we can find a cure for this ideology of growth.
This crisis that we experience on a global scale is, it seems, man’s deep conflict that has resurfaced. Thus, man is in conflict with himself, with the other, with nature and with God. The paradigm that will give us a way out of this crisis is the philosophical and legal framework that will ensure that we can live peacefully with our own selves and with other people. Others may not think or believe like us, or they may practice other faiths, but we can live together with them in a legal framework. We must find a way that will help us come to terms with nature and ultimately with God.
We cannot get out of this crisis by renovating capitalism. We cannot do this by returning to socialism or borrowing from it. We cannot overcome it by seeking reconciliation between Islam and liberalism or leftist ideologies. Islam does not need liberalism or leftist or socialist ideologies.
The West has set off on a dangerous voyage. It plans to overcome this crisis at the expense of losing millions of people as it did in World War I and II. As it did in the past, it plans to dodge this crisis through big wars. What the West envisages is a new and comprehensive war on the territories of the Muslim world that would kill millions of Muslims. War is a way out of the crisis, but there are other ways as well.
