Abstract
After the end of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire (1924) parts of the Muslim world
which constituted the Usmania Empire experienced the Western imperialism directly and
indirectly. Muslims in post-WWII freed countries across the world feel that their country’s
governments have been under the influence of western powers even after gaining official
independence when deciding internal and external policies. Whether it was the Cold War era or
the current single superpower phenomenon Muslims have encountered enormous internal and
external challenges. The incident of 9/11 and then the fallout from the failure of the events of the
Arab Spring in the Middle East the Muslim world has been most affected by these developments.
Political instability, social evils, poverty, unemployment, drug trafficking, human smuggling, and
most importantly, extremism, have badly affected some of the states’ very existence.
Circumstantial evidence evidently strengthened the case of anti-Islam forces that are bent upon
proving Muslims as extremists and thus Islam-phobia is still on the rise in the West. The Muslim
intelligentsia feels coverage that forms the main source for so-called intellectual and enlightened
views of the Western world--or the ‘North’ against the South--at the moment, is chiefly
responsible for existing anti-Muslim feeling in the west. Although Islam has been maligned by
most of the Western media as if it was the root-cause of extremism in the Muslim world yet there
have been a handful of intellectuals who have pondered over to find out the causes of downfall of
the Muslim civilization and propounded prescriptions to regenerate the Muslim society.
Therefore, there is a dire need to understand the causes and effects of degradation of Muslim
civilization in the world from a different perspective and this paper attempts to explore and
analyze the genesis and dynamics of Muslim civilization in the contemporary Muslim world.
While analyzing the evolution and growth of challenges of varied kinds including the social,
political and economic, the underlying hypothesis of this paper is that Muslim intellectuals have
not only pointed out the weaknesses in the society but also proposed solutions to their continued
degradation. The paper shows that the intellectuals from the Muslim world were always in the
forefront in all such political phases and created awareness among the masses. A general study
and comparison of the literary works of Ghulam Ahmad Perwez (1906-1985) and Abdessalam
Yassine (1928-2012) will clearly reflect that throughout the last half of the past century, Muslim
thinkers have spelled out such practices of Islam which could help create an ideal society where
there could not be fear, violence and extremism.
Muhammad Iqbal Chawla. (2016) Comparative study of two progressive contemporary Muslims scholars: Abdessalam Yassine and Parvez., South Asian Studies, Volume 31, Issue 1.
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