We can spend another century arguing over which scholar, sect, empire or foreign power caused Muslim decline. Meanwhile, a capable young Pakistani can still discover that the quickest route to influence is proximity to power, while the slower route—learning, testing an idea, building something useful and admitting an error—receives less protection. If I must name one most important cause, it is this: our institutions became less able to hold power accountable and less willing to reward independent, useful knowledge.
That is my judgment, not a historical formula that explains every Muslim society. “Muslim civilisation” describes an enormous and varied intellectual world, not one state that rose on a single date and fell on another. Baghdad’s destruction, Ottoman difficulties, Mughal decline and European industrial expansion happened in different places and centuries. Historians of science warn against the tidy story in which Muslim inquiry simply stopped and Europe took over. Wiley Online Library Yet the broad question matters because it asks what happens when societies that once supported remarkable scholarship struggle to turn talent into durable public strength.
The problem beneath the familiar answers
Dr Taimur Rahman’s question drew answers ranging from colonial conquest and poor education to clerical authority, dynastic rule and departure from faith. Each points to a real debate. None, by itself, explains why a school fails to teach inquiry, why a researcher depends on a patron, why a ruler can evade consequences, or why an engineer with a working design struggles to bring it into use. Accountability connects those failures: when powerful people cannot be questioned or removed on fair terms, they can distribute opportunity through loyalty instead of competence.
This is why I resist treating “lack of education” as the complete answer. A society can produce graduates and still waste their education. It can celebrate scientists in speeches while making serious research dependent on connections, short funding cycles or an official’s favour. Knowledge grows through institutions that let people challenge a claim, replicate a result, correct a mistake and apply what works. A country that prizes credentials but frustrates those habits has misunderstood what education is for.
| Common explanation | What it captures | What it cannot explain alone |
|---|---|---|
| Loss of faith | The gap between professed values and conduct | Why different Muslim societies changed at different times |
| Suppression of inquiry | The cost of punishing questions and dissent | Why scholarship continued in some later Muslim settings |
| Invasion and colonialism | Destruction, extraction and unequal power | Why institutions were vulnerable, and why recovery varied |
| Failure to industrialise | A consequential economic and technical gap | Who made investment decisions and how they were held accountable |
These are competing or overlapping interpretations, not measured shares of a single historical cause. Research on the social organisation of premodern science and on Ottoman encounters with modern science supports a more complex account than a universal, centuries-long halt to inquiry. Journal of World Philosophies
Stop putting the entire decline on al-Ghazali
The claim that al-Ghazali ended Muslim science offers the convenience of a named culprit. It is also too neat. Scholarly work on his thought challenges the idea that he banished philosophy or science; scientific work continued after his lifetime. Criticism of particular philosophical arguments is not evidence that one man closed every laboratory, observatory and school across a diverse world. cambridge.org
The same care is needed with the argument that religious learning itself caused decline. A division that treats study of the natural world as beneath serious religious life can impoverish both fields, but its effects must be demonstrated in particular places and periods. So must the effects of conquest, changing trade, state finance and European military power. Blaming one thinker lets generations of rulers and institutions escape scrutiny for decisions they actually made.
Pakistan should ask the harder question
The most revealing test is in front of us. In Pakistan, we can agree loudly that education matters and still fail to ask whether a student is allowed to question a teacher, whether a laboratory can challenge an imported product’s claims, whether public procurement rewards a better design, and whether a failed project produces an honest report. These are questions about power as much as science.
