Why, while Europe was undergoing the scientific, technological, economic and institutional transformations that would give rise to modernity, did the world governed by Islamic powers — despite vast empires, wealth and considerable military strength — fail to develop a comparable process in intensity, continuity and transformative capacity?
The easiest answer is to keep looking for the culprit outside: the Crusades, the Mongols, colonialism, Western imperialism. Wars, invasions and foreign domination had real and sometimes devastating consequences. But they do not explain the central phenomenon: the divergence becomes visible before the height of European colonialism and while major Islamic empires still possessed territory, wealth and formidable armies. To understand its roots, we have to look inside Islam itself: at the sacralisation of norms, the primacy of revelation over autonomous reason, the imitation of Muhammad as a normative model, and an orthopractic conception that extends religious command from conscience to social, legal and political life.
The question is not whether great thinkers, physicians, mathematicians, astronomers or philosophers lived in societies ruled by Muslim dynasties. They did, and their very existence makes the problem more interesting. Figures such as al-Fārābī, Avicenna, al-Bīrūnī, Ibn al-Haytham, Averroes and Ibn Khaldūn show that the problem was not the absence of individual talent. The problem is why those experiences did not produce a cumulative institutional process comparable to the one that, in Europe, would progressively transform science, law, economics and society. External aggression can destroy cities, economies and empires. It does not by itself explain why Europe developed corporate universities, printing presses, scientific societies, new financial systems and eventually industries without a transformation of comparable scale occurring in the Islamic world.
Decline before oil
Today, simply comparing the GDP of Muslim countries with that of Western economies can be misleading. Oil and gas can make a state enormously wealthy without telling us much about its ability to produce autonomously the technology, institutions and knowledge on which that very wealth depends. Oil can finance universities, airports, laboratories, satellites, hospitals, skyscrapers and weapons systems. It does not prove that the scientific and institutional system that conceived them was produced by the society that buys them.
To understand the relative decline of the Islamic world, we therefore have to look further back: before petrodollars, before contemporary industrialisation and before the height of European colonialism. Historical reconstructions of real wages and the so-called Great Divergence show a growing differentiation between north-western Europe and other European and Mediterranean regions in the early modern period. Series constructed for the Ottoman Empire from 1489 to 1914 also allow direct comparisons with European cities. The divergence therefore appears while the Islamic empires are still militarily formidable. It does not begin with the Western oilman in the Gulf, nor with the European colonial official: when both appear on the scene, deep scientific, technological and institutional differences are already clearly visible.
The fifteenth century: while Islam conquered, Europe changed the world
In 1453 Constantinople fell to the cannons of Mehmed II. It was one of the most spectacular victories in Ottoman history and confirmed the capacity for expansion of an Islamic empire into the heart of Europe. In the following centuries the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals would rule immense territories, while Islam continued to spread in Africa and in South and Southeast Asia. Yet while Islamic armies continued to conquer lands, institutions and technologies were maturing in Europe that would determine the power of the centuries to come.
In 1492 the Reconquista ended and Columbus crossed the Atlantic. In 1498 Vasco da Gama reached India by sailing around Africa. The Portuguese and Spanish, followed by the Dutch, English and French, progressively transformed the oceans into great commercial routes. Behind those ships stood cartography, shipbuilding, navigational instruments, astronomical knowledge, finance, organisational capacity and growing competition among European powers. The Islamic empires still possessed territories, armies and wealth, but in Europe a scientific, technical, economic and institutional system was taking shape that was increasingly capable of producing cumulative innovation.
External explanations do not reach the root
Baghdad was devastated by the Mongols in 1258. The Crusades brought wars and destruction. European colonialism exploited territories, imposed foreign interests and redrew borders. These events explain destruction, trauma and accelerations of decline. They do not explain the root of the divergence. A catastrophe can explain destruction; by itself it does not explain centuries of institutional differentiation. Europe experienced invasions, endless wars, famines, epidemics, religious conflicts and the Black Death. The Thirty Years’ War devastated vast regions of the continent. Yet it was in Europe that the Scientific Revolution, new financial institutions, mass printing and later industrialisation took shape.
Colonialism also leaves a decisive question unanswered: why were European powers the ones that developed the naval, financial, industrial and military capacity necessary to impose their rule over vast parts of the world? When Europeans penetrated or conquered many Muslim regions in the nineteenth century, they already possessed oceanic fleets, industries, publishing networks, scientific institutions, financial systems and military technologies that Islamic states were by then trying to acquire. Colonialism used a material and institutional superiority that it had not created: that superiority came first.
The problem is religious: orthopraxy as a structure
The root this article aims to bring into focus is religious and normative. Islam is not merely a profession of faith. It is a profoundly orthopractic religion: the Qur’an, Sunna and jurisprudence classify an enormous range of human behaviour into categories such as obligatory, recommended, permissible, reprehensible and forbidden. Religion does not regulate prayer alone. It reaches marriage, divorce, inheritance, trade, food, clothing, sexuality, war, relations with non-Muslims, punishments and the organisation of the community. It does not merely indicate what to believe: it claims to establish correct conduct.
This is where orthopraxy becomes a key to understanding Islamic institutional history. A vast part of intellectual work is devoted to determining what Allah has prescribed and how Muhammad’s model is to be applied. The problem is not the mere existence of rules: every civilisation produces norms. The problem is their sacralisation through a revelation regarded as final and a prophetic model regarded as normative. The greater the territory occupied by sacred norm, the greater the space in which the new must justify itself before what has already been revealed. The jurist interprets, the theologian draws boundaries, the traditionist verifies, the believer imitates. Over the question “what should we do?” there is a higher question: “what have Allah and His Messenger established?”
The limit appears when reason reaches a conclusion incompatible with a source recognised as authentically divine. It may interpret it, discuss its application, distinguish cases and compare competing readings. But it cannot calmly declare: “Allah established this, but Allah was wrong.” The moment it does so, reason has placed itself above revelation. This mechanism reappears in philosophy, fiqh, education, political thought, suspicion of bidʿa and reform movements that seek regeneration through a return to origins. Orthopraxy is not a side issue: it is the mechanism by which the sacralised past continues to demand obedience from the present.
Al-Ghazālī: when philosophy meets the limit of revelation
One of the great clashes in the intellectual history developed within Islamic civilisation concerns precisely the relationship between philosophy and revelation. In the Tahāfut al-falāsifa, “The Incoherence of the Philosophers,” al-Ghazālī attacked some fundamental theses of philosophers influenced by Avicenna and, on certain issues, went so far as to accuse them of unbelief. At stake was a fundamental question: who has the final word when the conclusion of philosophy conflicts with revelation?
The famous example of fire and cotton shows the depth of the clash. We see fire touch cotton and the cotton burn. A naturalistic conception looks for the causal relationship that produces combustion in the properties of the phenomena. In the seventeenth discussion of the Tahāfut, al-Ghazālī challenges the necessary character of the causal connection: contact between fire and cotton does not make it necessary, independently of God, that the cotton burn. The decisive point is primacy. Nature cannot become a necessary order capable of binding God; philosophy cannot become a tribunal superior to revelation. Al-Ghazālī did not need to destroy all philosophy. It was enough that philosophy should not become sovereign.
Averroes answers al-Ghazālī
Averroes replied with the Tahāfut al-tahāfut, “The Incoherence of the Incoherence,” defending philosophy and challenging al-Ghazālī’s attack. Philosophy in Islamic territories did not end with Averroes: important philosophers, schools and speculative traditions continued to exist. But philosophy did not conquer the normative centre of Sunni culture. That centre remained tied above all to the religious disciplines: Qur’an, hadith, fiqh, theology and the transmission of tradition.
Averroes, by contrast, had considerable success in Latin Europe. His commentaries were read, used, challenged and condemned in European universities. This fact, however, should not be turned into the legend that Europe recovered Aristotle and Greek philosophy thanks to Islam. As we examined in Aristotle against Averroes, the transmission of classical knowledge followed multiple routes. Part of Aristotle’s work was already available in Latin through Boethius; between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there were translators directly from Greek such as James of Venice, Henry Aristippus and, later, William of Moerbeke, alongside translations made from Arabic. Modern scholarship on textual transmission confirms that the Aristotelian corpus reached Latin through both Greek and Arabic channels and that many works were later translated or retranslated directly from Greek.
Averroes’ influence on the Latin West was real. But it is another matter to claim that Europe owed to Islam the preservation of its Greek heritage. One thing is the influence of philosophers who wrote in Arabic; another is to turn Islam into the source or the only bridge of classical culture. Averroes was debated in Europe precisely because the European university could receive a foreign author, use him, fight him and continue beyond him.
Aristotle: the knowledge of the Ancients did not originate in Islam
The same distinction applies to what is often generically called “Islamic science.” The fact that medicine, astronomy, mathematics, logic and philosophy were cultivated in territories ruled by Muslim dynasties does not mean that those disciplines arose from Islamic doctrine. As we showed in Foreign Science in Islam: the myth of Islamic science, much of the scientific heritage used in the Abbasid period came from earlier traditions: Greek, Hellenistic, Syriac, Persian and Indian.
The translation movement into Arabic was important, but translating Aristotle does not mean producing Aristotle; using Galen does not mean generating Galenic medicine; using Euclid does not mean Euclidean geometry derives from the Qur’an. Classical Islamic culture itself distinguished religious disciplines from rational sciences or the “sciences of the Ancients.” The rational heritage could be received, translated, commented on and developed; it did not arise from Islamic revelation.
Moreover, the translation process was not simply “Muslim.” Syriac Christians played a fundamental role in transmission from Greek to Syriac and from Syriac to Arabic. The case of Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, a Nestorian Christian and a central figure in the translation of Galen and other Greek authors, is emblematic. Knowledge circulating in Arabic belonged to a multireligious and multiethnic environment that the term “Islamic,” if used without qualification, risks concealing.
Likewise, Europe did not remain waiting for the Muslim world to return Greece to it. There were Latin continuities, relations with Byzantium, direct translations from Greek, centres in southern Italy and Sicily and, in parallel, translations from Arabic. The real history is one of many routes of transmission, not of an intellectually empty European civilisation saved by Islam.
For a specific discussion of the problem, we have also devoted the article Islamic science: the myth of the West’s debt to Islam.
Philosophy survived, but it did not conquer the centre
Al-Ṭūsī, the astronomy of Maragha, the Persian philosophical tradition and later Mullā Ṣadrā prevent us from telling this story through the false shortcut that after Averroes people in Islamic territories simply stopped thinking. The problem is more serious. The question is not how many intelligent men continued to be born, but what form of knowledge occupied the centre of the institutions that determined what was normative, transmissible and authoritative. Philosophy continued to exist. It did not conquer the right to judge revelation sovereignly. There was no need to burn every philosophical book: it was enough that the sacred book continued to occupy a position that no philosophical book could overturn.
Suhrawardī and the other paths
The crisis of falsafa did not mean the disappearance of speculation. Suhrawardī developed the philosophy of Illumination; Ibn ʿArabī constructed one of the most influential metaphysical visions of Sufism. Suhrawardī was executed in Aleppo at the end of the twelfth century, in a context in which religious accusations and political considerations intertwined. Ibn ʿArabī, by contrast, exerted enormous influence on Islamic mysticism and metaphysics. Speculation continued. What did not occur was its transformation into a general principle according to which reason could claim the right to judge the religious source itself.
Ibn Khaldūn: genius that does not become a system
Ibn Khaldūn makes the problem even clearer. In the fourteenth century the Muqaddima developed an extraordinarily original analysis of societies, dynasties, economics, power, group solidarity and processes of political rise and decline. The decisive question is: why did insights of this magnitude not then produce an institutionalised and cumulative discipline capable of developing, correcting and systematically surpassing them? This is the difference between a genius and a system. An exceptional man can write a masterpiece. A scientifically dynamic system builds institutions, controversies and successions of scholars that turn that masterpiece into a starting point.
The problem is not the intelligence of individuals. It is the religious enclosure within which that intelligence is required to move. Islam can contain men of enormous intellectual ability and at the same time subordinate that ability to a revelation that cannot be judged with the same freedom reserved for any other source. The wall is not in the human mind: it is built around the mind.
Madrasa and university: two institutions, two trajectories
The madrasa was an important institution of Islamic societies. It educated generations of scholars and guaranteed the transmission of an enormous religious and legal heritage. Its centre remained strongly tied to the religious sciences, the transmission of hadith and above all jurisprudence. This orientation is perfectly consistent with a civilisation of orthopraxy: if correct conduct has religious value, determining the correct law becomes one of the most prestigious intellectual activities.
The medieval European university developed a different trajectory. As a universitas, a corporation of masters or students, it acquired statutes, privileges, legal continuity and the capacity to negotiate with civil and ecclesiastical authorities. The decisive difference therefore does not lie in the existence of education on one side and its absence on the other. It lies in structure and trajectory. The European university progressively became an institutional subject capable of outliving individual masters, defending prerogatives and incorporating different fields of knowledge. Knowledge acquired organised memory and dissent could become method.
Disputation as a method
In the medieval Christian university, the disputatio transformed intellectual conflict into procedure. A question was formulated, objections were set out, an answer was presented and the objections were addressed one by one. Dissent entered the very mechanism of education. Censorship, condemnations and persecutions continued to exist, but something fundamental had been formed: an institution capable of producing knowledge also through argued conflict.
Printing: knowledge stops travelling at the speed of the copyist
With Gutenberg the change became even more radical. A manuscript has to be copied; a printed book can be multiplied hundreds or thousands of times. More copies mean more readers, greater standardisation of texts, faster controversies, wider diffusion of discoveries and the possibility of building on the work of others.
In the Ottoman Empire, İbrahim Müteferrika obtained authorisation for his printing press in 1727 and began publishing in 1729. According to the reconstruction reported in The Arabic Print Revolution, Müteferrika produced sixteen books for about 10,000 copies in total; another eight titles appeared later. Between 1727 and 1800, therefore, 24 books totalling roughly 13,000 copies were produced in Istanbul through this first Muslim printing experience, over more than seventy years also marked by long periods of inactivity.
Printing was not unknown in the Empire: Jewish, Armenian and Greek communities were already using it. This makes the phenomenon particularly significant. The technology existed; what came late was its transformation into a general machine for multiplying Muslim knowledge. While in Europe printing was fuelling the Reformation, theological controversies, science, cartography, manuals and the international circulation of ideas, Muslim typographic production in the heart of the Ottoman Empire remained extremely limited.
From the university to the scientific society
Europe continued to multiply institutions of knowledge. In the seventeenth century organisations such as the English Royal Society and the French Académie des sciences appeared. Experiments, observations and results could be communicated, verified, challenged and incorporated into the work of others. Knowledge depended less and less solely on the personal relationship between master and pupil. It became a network. The decisive revolution was not the sudden birth of more intelligent Europeans. It was the construction of institutional machines capable of accumulating intelligence.
Europe had another weapon: nobody controlled all of Europe
European political fragmentation also produced an enormous advantage. Monarchies, principalities, republics, autonomous cities, ecclesiastical territories and empires competed constantly. No ruler stably controlled the entire continent. A book banned in one territory could be printed in another. A persecuted thinker could find protection across a border. An expelled merchant could transfer capital and skills to a rival city. Censorship could close one door; it was far harder to close them all at the same time. Political competition became competition among institutions, ideas and models.
From conflict among powers comes space for the individual
Papacy and Empire fought over authority. Monarchies and nobilities negotiated privileges. Cities won autonomy. Universities defended prerogatives. Guilds, parliaments and ecclesiastical institutions created a plurality of allegiances. From this conflict there progressively emerged space between one authority and another. And it is in the space that no power manages to occupy completely that the individual can become something more than a merely obedient member of the community.
Renaissance and Humanism: the human being returns to the centre
The new circulation of ancient texts, philology, art, humanist philosophy and a growing attention to human experience progressively changed the relationship between the individual and received authority. Europe had not needed to wait for Islam in order to possess a classical tradition: Latin texts continued to circulate, Greek texts were recovered through multiple channels and relations with Byzantium further contributed to the process. The Renaissance enormously strengthened this direct appropriation of antiquity.
Europe remained deeply Christian and experienced harsh religious repression. Yet through centuries of conflict among faith, philosophy, science and power, spaces widened in which authority, tradition and sacred text could no longer occupy the entire field of knowledge by themselves. The contrast with Islamic orthopraxy emerges here with particular force: on one side the space of the individual as judge progressively grows; on the other, the religious model continues to classify the individual and his behaviour through a norm claiming divine origin.
Al-Māwardī: the crisis of power does not free it from religion
Al-Māwardī developed his political theory while the Abbasid caliphate was passing through profound political and military weakness. The historical crisis of the caliphate did not produce a theory in which religion and politics became independent spheres. In his al-Aḥkām al-Sulṭāniyya, the responsibilities attributed to the imam include protection of religion, administration of law, maintenance of order, punishments, defence, war, taxation and government. The historical weakness of the caliph did not produce separation between religion and politics. It produced the attempt to reconstruct their unity normatively. Orthopraxy thus reaches power: correct conduct no longer concerns the believer alone. It concerns the society that authority must govern.
Sharia: when the norm becomes sacred
Sharia represents the path established by Allah, while fiqh is the human work by which jurists seek to determine its concrete prescriptions. This distinction does not eliminate the fundamental problem. A law openly declared to be human can be criticised by saying: it was wrong, let us abolish it. A norm regarded as correctly derived from the Qur’an or Sunna presents a completely different resistance. Declaring it unjust inevitably leads to the question of the source from which it claims to derive. Sacralisation radically increases the cost of revision. The question is no longer merely “is this rule just?” but “can we declare it unjust if Allah or Muhammad really established it?” When the past speaks with divine authority, the present no longer debates the past on equal terms.
Ibn Taymiyya: reform means returning to the origins
Between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Ibn Taymiyya powerfully represented a response to crisis founded on a return to the Qur’an, Sunna and the first Muslim generations. He fought philosophers, certain forms of speculative theology, Sufi practices, the cult of saints and religious innovations he considered foreign to the original purity of Islam. Here a fundamental difference emerges in the very meaning of the word “reform.” Reform can mean correcting the past in the light of new knowledge. Or it can mean correcting the present so that it once again conforms to the past. In Islamic traditionalism, the second direction has an intrinsic force: the normative model has not yet to be discovered, because it has already been revealed.
In the Siyāsa al-Sharʿiyya, Ibn Taymiyya assigns public authorities an explicitly religious task. Politics, justice, war, administration and public order are to contribute to reforming society according to revealed law. Political power is not freed from religion: it is placed at its service. The response to crisis does not consist in emancipating the present from the authority of the origins. It consists in bringing the present back to the origins.
Bidʿa: when perfection is already behind us
The concept of bidʿa, blameworthy religious innovation, makes this structure visible. The perfect normative model has already existed: Muhammad, the Companions, the first generations, the Qur’an and the Sunna. Legitimacy is therefore sought by looking backwards. The point is not the invention of a machine or a new instrument. It concerns religion, morality and norm: the new must justify itself before the sacralised past. A culture of radical revision requires the opposite possibility: being able to conclude that a rule of the past was wrong and should no longer govern the present. But if that rule authentically derives from Allah or the prophetic model, this possibility directly conflicts with the structure of faith.
Revivalism: the future must return to the past
This pattern reappears in modern Islamic history. Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb in the eighteenth century built his movement around purifying Islam of practices regarded as deviations and innovations. ʿUthmān dan Fodio in West Africa launched a reform and jihad movement aimed at bringing societies and rulers back to what he regarded as authentic Islam. Shāh Walī Allāh in India sought Islamic regeneration through a return to the sources and religious renewal. Different contexts, but a recurring structure: the solution to decline is sought in restoring the origins. The sacralised past is not merely memory: it is the yardstick by which the present is corrected.
Waqf and institutions: when the past binds the future
Institutional rigidity does not concern theology alone. The waqf was one of the great institutions of Islamic civilisation and financed mosques, schools, fountains, hospitals and charitable works for centuries. The economist Timur Kuran has shown how some of the characteristics that gave the waqf continuity could also produce rigidity: the administrator was bound by the founder’s stipulations and the institution possessed possibilities for transformation different from those later developed by European corporations.
Kuran connects this issue to a broader explanation of the institutional roots of economic underdevelopment in the Middle East, pointing among other things to the effects of inheritance law and forms of partnership on the size and longevity of firms. Once again the same question returns: how easily can what the past has made binding be changed?
European competition rewarded those who changed
European fragmentation also had a brutal effect: those who did not innovate risked defeat by those who did. A ruler might distrust a new weapon, a new financial technique or a new method of navigation, but if a neighbour adopted it successfully, ignoring it became dangerous. Military, commercial and political competition turned innovation into a matter of survival. The same instability that periodically devastated Europe forced its institutions to change.
War, taxation and power
European wars became progressively more expensive. Ocean-going fleets, artillery, fortifications, standing armies and logistics required enormous amounts of money. States developed tax systems, public credit, more sophisticated administrations and increasingly close relationships with merchants and finance. The Ottoman Empire remained a major power for centuries and also developed complex fiscal and military instruments. But European competition progressively produced systems capable of mobilising financial and technological resources on a growing scale.
When Ottoman armies faced increasingly efficient European military apparatuses, behind the cannon there was not merely a cannon. There were metallurgy, mathematics, finance, taxation, shipyards, cartography, universities and industry. Copying the weapon was not enough. The system that had produced it had to be rebuilt.
Three great empires concealed the problem
The Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals show why structural divergence could remain relatively hidden for so long. A civilisation can continue conquering territory while elsewhere institutions are being born that will determine future forms of power. It can build monumental mosques, palaces and fortresses while others develop printing presses, scientific societies, modern finance and later industries. It can possess huge armies without producing with the same intensity the mechanisms that will determine the power of later centuries. Imperial splendour can coexist for a long time with a structural weakness that is not yet fully visible.
In the nineteenth century: importing European models
In the nineteenth century the gap becomes evident. With the Tanzimat, the Ottoman Empire reformed administration, the military, law and education by increasingly adopting European institutions and models. It is important not to describe this process as the simple reversal of an earlier teacher–pupil relationship in which Islam had supposedly educated a backward Europe. Europe had always possessed intellectual traditions of its own and had received the ancient heritage through multiple channels: Latin, Greek, Byzantine and, in part, Arabic.
The genuinely new fact in the nineteenth century is another: Islamic states were now explicitly looking to Europe to reform armies, administrations, schools, legislation and technology. They were not merely importing cannons and machines. They were importing military schools, legal codes, bureaucratic apparatuses, financial techniques and educational models. The question became unavoidable: why had it become necessary, in order to compete with European powers, to adopt institutions developed in Europe?
Why colonialism comes too late to explain everything
When European powers imposed their rule over large parts of the Muslim world, they already possessed the naval, industrial, scientific, financial and military capacities that made that expansion possible. Beginning the explanation with colonialism means beginning the story when the problem we want to explain is already evident. Colonialism exploited resources, created dependencies, redrew borders and left deep political consequences. But it did not retroactively build Gutenberg, medieval universities, the Royal Society, oceanic fleets, European credit systems or the Scientific Revolution. The structures that made colonial expansion possible had been built earlier.
Modern numbers: petrodollars do not bring down the wall
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Arab Human Development Reports of 2002 identified three major deficits in Arab societies: freedom, women’s empowerment and knowledge. The 2003 report, Building a Knowledge Society, directly analysed the production, acquisition and diffusion of knowledge. These data photograph contemporary problems; the historical explanation developed in this article instead leads to the structures that for centuries regulated the relationship among authority, knowledge, individual and norm.
GDP, especially in hydrocarbon-exporting states, does not resolve the question. A state can sell oil for billions and buy extremely advanced technology. It can build spectacular universities and import researchers. The decisive question remains: who autonomously produces the scientific system from which that technology comes? Who generates theories, instruments, industries, research universities and companies capable of continuously turning knowledge into innovation? Material modernisation can be purchased. Intellectual freedom and the institutional capacity to produce modernity have to be built.
The central problem: who can judge Allah?
Philosophy, law, politics and education ultimately converge on the same question: how far can reason go when it encounters something considered revealed by God? Science advances because a scientific theory can be declared false. Philosophy advances because Aristotle can be wrong. Civil law can be changed because a legislator can be wrong. A constitution can be amended. A theory can be abandoned. A code can be rewritten. But a system founded on a Qur’an regarded as Allah’s definitive word and Muhammad regarded as a normative model encounters a structural limit.
The believer may discuss what a verse means. He may debate the authenticity of a hadith. He may compare legal interpretations. He may seek new applications. But if he concludes that a prescription authentically coming from Allah or Muhammad is morally wrong and must be rejected precisely because it is wrong, he is no longer merely interpreting. He is placing his own judgment above the source. Interpretation means debating what God commanded. Radical criticism, by contrast, claims the right to answer that, even if God had commanded it, the rule would still be unjust. It is this second step that brings down the wall. And it is precisely this step that a revelation declared perfect and final cannot accept without calling itself into question.
Orthopraxy: the heart of the problem
At this point the thread connecting the different phenomena becomes visible. If normative perfection is already contained in revelation and embodied in the prophetic model, the fundamental task does not consist in inventing a better norm, but in identifying, interpreting and applying the correct one. Fiqh determines it. The madrasa transmits it. The jurist interprets it. Political power is called to protect it. Revivalism promises to restore it when society moves away from it. This is the conservative force of orthopraxy: the past does not merely offer examples to know; it contains models to which the present must conform.
A religion that claims to establish how human beings should pray, wash, eat, dress, marry, divorce, inherit, trade, judge and govern restricts the space in which the individual can declare himself sovereign over his own choices. When that normativity remains personal, it binds the believer who submits to it. When it becomes public law, it reaches those who do not believe as well. When it becomes an intellectual criterion, it places reason before a boundary already drawn. When it becomes political theory, it subordinates human sovereignty to divine sovereignty. The wall does not arise from an absence of intelligence. It arises from the subordination of intelligence to a source it is not authorised to judge with the same freedom with which it judges any other source.
Conclusion: the wall built around the human being
The relative decline of the Islamic world does not originate in a single battle or a single invasion. Its duration requires us to look at the structure that for centuries governed the relationship among the individual, reason, law and authority. The divergence becomes visible before petrodollars and before the height of colonialism, while Islamic empires are still powerful enough to hide behind conquest and splendour problems that would become evident in later centuries.
Al-Ghazālī did not need to erase every philosopher: it was enough that philosophy should not conquer intellectual sovereignty. Averroes did not need to be forgotten: it was enough that his attempt to reconcile philosophy and revelation should not turn reason into an authority superior to revelation. Ibn Khaldūn did not need to be the last great Muslim thinker: it was enough that extraordinary insights should not become the beginning of an institutionalised discipline capable of developing them systematically. Printing did not need to be unknown: it was enough that, while in Europe it multiplied books and controversies on an enormous scale, the first Muslim printing experience in Istanbul produced, over more than seventy years, only 24 titles and about 13,000 copies.
Nor is it necessary to build the opposite legend according to which all ancient knowledge passed from Islam to Europe. Europe was not an empty container waiting for Islamic civilisation to return Aristotle to it. Latin preservation, Byzantium, direct translations from Greek, southern Italy, Sicily and translations from Arabic were different channels in a far more complex history. Likewise, much of what is today celebrated as “Islamic science” came from Greek, Syriac, Persian and Indian heritages absorbed in conquered territories and often transmitted by non-Muslim scholars. Having used, commented on and developed that knowledge is a historical fact; attributing its origin to Islam is something else.
And Islam did not need to prevent every Muslim from thinking. It was enough to establish what thought could not call into question. This is the meaning of the wall. It is not a supposed inferiority of the people who live within it. The greatness of Avicenna, Averroes, Ibn Khaldūn and many others shows precisely how much talent can exist within a sacralised normative system. The wall is what that talent encounters when it claims to become sovereign. It can interpret revelation, debate where the boundary lies and construct extremely sophisticated theories within the boundary. But it cannot freely declare that an authentically divine prescription is false, unjust or obsolete without striking at the principle on which the entire system rests.
Oil can finance modernisation. Wars can devastate a civilisation. Colonialism can exploit its weakness. None of these elements, however, answers the fundamental question: why did societies governed for centuries by Islamic powers, despite hosting important philosophical, medical, mathematical and astronomical traditions, fail to develop the cumulative process of scientific, institutional and technological transformation that took shape in Europe? The answer proposed in this article leads to the religious core of the system: the relationship between revelation and reason, between sharia and human law, between orthopraxy and individual autonomy, between imitation of the prophetic model and the freedom to move beyond the past.
Laboratories can be bought. Professors can be imported. Universities can be built; satellites, patents, weapons and artificial intelligence can be purchased. Freedom of thought cannot be imported. The problem is not human intelligence. It is the sacred wall built around human intelligence.
