Tom Facchine – Do Muslims Believe In The Doctrine of Progress

			One of the myths of modernity, part of the doctrine of progress is that globalization is a new
thing. Globalization is not a new thing, okay. In fact, there were types of globalization that
existed before the modern era before industrialization. And those forms of globalization were
probably a lot more humane and enjoyable than the ones that we're experiencing. Now, there's lots of
information online, there's many historians that write books about, you know, there's Abbulu vote
and her and the book, I think, before European hegemony, if I'm remembering correctly, and all these
years, the Indian Ocean trade, and all these are the Silk Road, all these sorts of networks that
		

			existed were Cultures and Ideas and faiths, you know, cross pollinated, and kind of we're in
conversation with each other, however, on a parodic Matic level, because as Muslims, we don't
necessarily believe I don't think that there's merit to the doctrine of progress within Islam. I
think that goes against the sense of time that is inherent in the Quran that Allah subhanaw taala
tells us, we don't necessarily look to those sorts of cross cultural exchanges, as always a good
thing. It's not an inherent good, like, for example, I'll give an example. Today's culture, a lot of
modernists, they believe that we live in the best possible time. I mean, we have the philosophy of
		

			the Greeks, and we have the morals of Christianity. And then we have the Enlightened religion of
secularism. And we have the technological fruits of the Industrial Revolution, the scientific
revolution, we live in the best possible times, of course, not realizing that we're killing the
earth and about seven, maybe herland to nuclear war at the same time. That's another point. But this
is kind of their idea that, okay, we take the best from all these sorts of places, and we kind of
cobble it together and that produces something great. Well, that does that is true, that does hold
water when it comes to things like food, or when it comes to things like medicine and things that
		

			have to do with the dunya. But we as Muslims reject that sort of frame when it comes to things like
religion and thought, not all thought for talking again about medical thought thought that has to do
with the dunya technology and things like that, sure, but when it comes to theology, when it comes
to who is Allah, okay, we don't believe in this materialism, that these are people generating these
ideas, and as they interact with other other people, then they're going to refine their ideas. And
this is an old Orientalist trope that Orientalist scholars use to talk about Islam as well. It's
really just Christianity, you know, or it's really just Judaism, or it's really just this pre
		

			Islamic cult that just formed, you know, that's not what we're talking about. We believe that
theological truth is something that is given by Allah subhana wa, tada. And then why is that
significant? Because then if ideas get added to it, or interpretations get imposed upon it from
outside, that's actually a deviation. That's actually something that is a heresy, that's actually
something that needs to be corrected. So we have to sort of this bifurcated, you know, trajectories,
we have this one trajectory of like everything that has to do with the dunya. And yes, if people
interact, and add and change and adopt, and whatever, then this is a good thing. Again, medical
		

			technology and knowledge and information and food and trade and all these sorts of things. But if we
talk about what's the truth from the Divine, what's the truth that was sent to us from the Creator,
then we got to keep that as pure and pristine as possible. But we've got to keep it as the original
message that it was revealed as and if it's affected, or the interpretation of it is affected by
outside forces, then this is actually something that's a travesty. And this is something that's
happened to many religions, Christianity, and in addition to Judaism, with Neo Platonism, Greek
philosophy, the Neoplatonic sort of strain more prominent than others when it came to interpreting
		

			Okay, the texts and forming the theology, right, you had an an external, completely foreign sort of
paradigm, or way of looking at the world being imposed upon a religious text. And now we have all
these sorts of, you know, points of dissonance that we have to square we have to reconcile, and it
comes to something that's very, very contrived, like the Trinity and the divinity of Christ and all
these sorts of things. So when it comes to Islam, we would reject those outside influences. We say
that no, we don't need Greek philosophy to interpret the Quran. We don't need Neo Platonism to tell
us, you know, that the soul our individual souls emanated from the collective universal soul know or
		

			that or that God is ineffable. He both exists and doesn't exist at the same time. This is nonsense.
This is not how Allah spoke about himself. This is not what Allah subhanaw taala revealed to us in
his text and Alhamdulillah as Muslims, we are the only tradition that has actually kept pristine and
kept preserved the texts themselves, right. So we implore people to interpret those texts as they
were intended to be interpreted and not viewed, not via any sort of external outside lens.