There is no consensus about what was the primary reason for the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire, but remarkably there is a near global consensus that the Islamic World has been in decline for centuries. Some intellectuals have argued that the reason why Muslims have lost their mojo is because they have abandoned the path of the Shariah, Islam’s revealed divine law. They hypothesize that if Muslims implemented the true Shariah, they would once again be glorious like their Muslim forbearers. They believe that the best way to order society is according to the divine Shariah and because Muslims have departed from this divinely ordained path to success, they declined. This is the basic premise behind movements that are broadly defined under the rubric of political Islam, such as Jamaat-e-Islami in South Asia, and the Muslim Brotherhoods (Al-Ikhwaan al-Muslimeen) in the Arab World. They believe that a systematic implementation of the Shariah will once again restore global leadership and moral sovereignty to Muslims. They envisage an Islamic state as the vehicle that will re-implement Shariah in the lives of Muslims and re-establish Islam as a global force.
Political Islam Part 33
