The question is often asked what Muslims need to do to regain their civilizational initiative.

In seeking answers to this question, one must at the outset make a distinction between Islam and Muslims. Islam is alive and well. It is the most dynamic, fastest growing faith in the world.

One cannot make the same statement about Muslims. Countries that are predominantly Muslim play but a minor role in world affairs and subsist as an appendage to one major power or another. They are technologically, economically and educationally backward, unable to exploit their own natural resources except with outside help. What is more alarming is that on a comparative scale, they are falling behind not only the industrially advanced countries but are also outdistanced by the larger non-Western countries such as India and China. Corruption is rampant and pervasive. Political legitimacy of the ruling classes is at best questionable.

With this dismal picture in mind, the question of what Muslims need to do to regain their civilizational initiative becomes pertinent. Indeed, it becomes pressing and acute. The majesty of the historical process, and its comprehensive reach, does not provide a single answer. It only offers possibilities.

Our global survey of Islamic history suggests some such possibilities. We summarize them with the acronym SEEEC, where S stands for spirituality, the first E stands for ethics, the second E represents education, the third E connotes economics and the C represents cooperation.

The spirituality of Islam provided the life raft for Muslims in their darkest hour during the Mongol and Crusader devastations of the thirteenth century. It can do so again in the twenty-first century. To a secular modern world that is governed by a material view of humankind, Islam offers a lofty vision of man as the divine regent, animated by a soul, suffused by divine spirit, endowed with a free will, and tasked with the responsibility to rule all that is between the heavens and earth. Spirituality (Ehsan) is the core essence of Islam and the common domain from which it can build bridges to the other major faiths of humankind.

Ethics is the second dimension of renewal. Faith, kinship and contract are the elements that provide the binding force, the cement for a civilization. Faith provided the glue for Islamic civilization in its earliest centuries. Kinship was the driving force in the Turkish eruption a thousand years ago. The modern world runs on the basis of contract, sometimes consummated by a handshake, at other times documented in the most elaborate manner by a New York lawyer. And contract is a part of ethics. The Muslims lost their initiative to other civilizations because they lost their own innate spirituality and gave up their ethical standards. Man is spirit and civilizations are driven from within. When Mir Ja’afar betrayed Siraj ad Dawlah at the Battle of Plassey (1757), and Mir Saadiq betrayed Tippu Sultan at the Battle of Srirangapatam (1799), they betrayed their trusts. It was manifest proof that Muslim civilization had reached a low point in its ethical standards and produced traitors who would sell their compatriots for pittance. Ethically, the issue is no different today when a civil servant in Pakistan engages in graft, a businessman in Dubai reneges on his contract, or a head of state siphons off state funds into a Swiss bank.

Education is the third dimension of renewal. It is tied synergistically with culture. Backwardness in education is a sign of poverty of culture. In the classical age of Islamic civilization, Muslims led the world in the study of spiritual as well as the empirical and social sciences. Their universities were beacons of light for the world and attracted scholars from far and wide. They led the way in understanding creation through the natural, spiritual and social sciences, and in creating divine patterns in the world of man through the disciplines of fiqh, tasawwuf, geometry, astronomy, medicine and mathematics. Now, it is their turn to relearn. This requires a far-reaching effort to get away from narrow compartmentalization of knowledge between what is deen (religion) and what is duniya (world). This compartmentalization is a product of history and has no basis in faith. A deep understanding of the natural and social sciences increases faith, and does not decrease it. As Mohammed Iqbal wrote in 1930: “…Inner experience is only one source of knowledge. According to the Qur’an, there are two other sources of knowledge -- Nature and History; and it is in tapping these sources of knowledge that the spirit of Islam is seen at its best…”

Economics is the fourth dimension of Islamic reconstruction. It relates in an integral manner to education, ethics and mutual cooperation. Islam encourages trade and forbids usury. In a global village knit together with instant communications, the Muslims must continuously strive to build commercial links with each other and with the rest of the world. Economic cooperation is the antidote to poverty. A world that engages in trade is a better world than a world that engages in war.

Mutual cooperation is a key to survival. Since the dissolution of the Caliphate in 1924, the Islamic world does not have a spiritual or political focus. While avoiding slogans of pan-Islamism or pan-Arabism, the Muslims can help themselves through mutual cooperation in education, trade, commerce and communication. And they must build bridges to other civilizations based on a shared spirituality and a common human destiny. A shared world is a better world for all humankind.

These are times that call for a bold vision. In this vision, we see that in the years to come, the global Muslim community will go through a two-way osmosis, learning from the outside world that which is good, and sharing with the world that which is noble. Islam has the historic opportunity to impart a spiritual dimension to the rich spectrum of human ideas, and round out the jagged edges of a global materialist civilization. Muslims, in their collective endeavor, as architects of their own destiny, must shape the processes that will make this happen. In this endeavor, Islamic history can be a most valuable guide, and a worthy companion. (Dr. Ahmed is Executive Director of the American Institute of Islamic History and Culture. This article is extracted from his two-volume book, ‘Islam in Global History’).