Pitiful. The Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) member states fixated on past, often blame external actors for their troubles, have lost self-esteem and look apologetic when dealing with West. The fact is that OIC member states have failed to provide a decent life and future for most their citizens. This is not Islam's fault; the faults lie within themselves.

Ironically, Ibn-Khaldun (1377) was the first critical thinker who articulated a cyclical framework of rise and fall of empire drawn from his observation of demise of North African and Arab dynasties: social solidarity builds empire, indulgence in power and luxury corrupts, leading to decline and collapse. The Ottomans, Safavis and Mughals met same fate. Later, this foundational framework was evolved into creating universal rise-and-fall methodologies to ascertain reasons for failure for over 25 civilisations, such as external causation, internal causation and structural collapse. (O Spengler, A Toynbee, W Durant, P Kennedy, J Tainter, P Turchin – to explore further)

Why then? The orientalist rarely draws the parallel with natural-civilisation decline cycle and laces their analysis by blaming Islamic teachings. Because they blatantly reject their belief and values system, and atheist and materialist world views. Likewise, Muslim intellectuals themselves remain reluctant in applying the universal cyclical framework, fearing orthodoxy backlash and political cost. Few have applied conventional views to analyse the decline of Muslim civilization. (M Bennabi, M Chapra, SH Raja 2024 – to explore further)

Such parallels would undo the conventional outlook, as they would challenge the mainstream narrative: that Islam is uniquely incompatible with modernity and that........

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