![al ghazali political thought al ghazali political thought](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/presentation23-140128144800-phpapp02/95/alghazali-and-politics-13-638.jpg)
![al ghazali political thought al ghazali political thought](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/8JZMj1iEmuc/maxresdefault.jpg)
The following excerpts come from the final chapter in George Saliba’s Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance. In both accounts, one must wonder what kind of a civilization that runs across a vast distance from east to west, with multiple centers for learning and thousands of scholars dispersed across the land can be destroyed by the work of a single man or the intellectual productions in a single city being cast into the river. For Muslims, the decline of Islamic civilization is simply the result of religious belief overcoming “reason”, where Imam Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī and his work against philosophers is blamed, or the result of the sacking of Baghdad and destruction of its manuscript collections by the Mongols. In this narrative, the simplistic causes given for the ascent of Western Europe over the rest of the world are used in reverse to explain the decline of everyone else. It makes the Western European into the peak of human development that everyone else must measure up to and aspire to be like. There is a great proverb worth reflecting on: “ Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” What we read in history books today, at least those popularized through official mainstream education systems and popular culture “intellectuals” is one that tells a story of the great triumph and progress of reason in Europe over the superstition of religion.
![al ghazali political thought al ghazali political thought](https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/a6ebff81-d167-4121-a595-70ab6dcba847_1.efe0f90b9898d132c3d273e570a97259.jpeg)
Part of our inability to engage in a healthy critical self-reflection to understand how and why we are in the position we are today is the general lack of historical literacy. The collective Muslim psyche has yet to properly come to terms with the trauma of the destruction of Baghdad in 1258, the loss of Al-Andalus in 1492, or the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924.