4. Islamic Civilization and
Culture
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Islamic Civilization and Culture
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Meanings and the Vital Elements
Role of Civilization in Development of Human Personality and Communities
Distinctions of Islamic Civilization
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Tauheed
Spiritualism
Dignity of Man
Equality
Social Justice
Moral Values
Tolerance
Rule of Law
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Civilization
• The Philosophy of Civilization (1923),Albert Schweitzer outlines two
opinions:
• One purely material and the other material and ethical
"the sum total of all progress made by man in every sphere of action
and from every point of view in so far as the progress helps towards
the spiritual perfecting of individuals as the progress of all progress.“
• The world crisis was from humanity losing the ethical idea of
civilization
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What characterize civilization
1. Tool making, /Industry-Food making and Non food Making
2. This permits a division of labor
3. The gathering of these non-food producers into permanent settlements-cities
4. Some form of ruling system or government
5. A social hierarchy consisting of different social classes
6. A form of writing will have developed-communication
7. The establishment of complex, formal social institutions -religion and education
8. Development of complex forms of economic exchange. Trade/money and markets.
9. A concept of a Higher being- sovereignty
10.A concept of time, by which the society links itself to the past and looks forward to the future
11.A concept of leisure, permitting advanced development of the arts
12.Development of a faculty for criticism. To enable society to contemplate change from within
rather than suffering attack and destruction from outside
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• Every society, civilization or not, has a specific set of ideas and
customs, and a certain set of items and arts, that make it unique
• Civilizations have more intricate cultures, including literature,
professional art, architecture, organized religion, and complex
customs associated with the elite
• Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, defined
"the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest
level of cultural identity people have short of that which
distinguishes humans from other species”
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Civilization and Culture
• “Civilization" has been used almost synonymously with culture
• This is because civilization and culture are different aspects of a single
entity
• Civilization can be viewed as the external manifestation, and culture
as the internal character of a society
• Civilization is expressed in physical attributes, such as tool making,
agriculture, buildings, technology, urban planning, social structure, social
institutions
• Culture, on the other hand, refers to the social standards and norms of
behavior, the traditions, values, ethics, morality, and religious beliefs and
practices that are held in common by members of the society
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Vital elements
• Cultural Identity
• Complexity of System
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Cultural Identity
 Consists of the beliefs, behaviors, objects and other characteristics
common to the members of a particular group or society
 Through culture, people define themselves, conform to society's
shared values, and contribute to society
 Culture includes many societal aspects:
 language, customs, values, norms, mores, rules, tools, technologies,
products, organizations, and institutions
 Institution refers to clusters of rules and cultural meanings associated with specific social
activities.
 Common institutions are the family, education, religion, work,
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Complexity of system
• Social scientists such as V. Gordon Childe have named a number of traits that distinguish
a civilization from other kinds of society.[23] Civilizations have been distinguished by
their means of subsistence, types of livelihood, settlement patterns, forms of
government, social stratification, economic systems, literacy, and other cultural traits.
• Culture
• Laws
• Government
• Institutions
• Religion
• Economy
• Art and Architecture
• Identity/Ideology
• Collective Consciousness
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Role of Civilization in Development of Human Personality and
Communities
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Distinctions of Islamic Civilization
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Fall of a civilization
• Ibn Khaldūn's Muqaddimah
• He suggested repeated invasions from nomadic peoples limited development
led to social collapse
• Edward Gibbon's work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
• Final act of the collapse of Rome was the fall of Constantinople to the
Ottoman Turks in 1453 CE
• The decline was natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness
• Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction
multiplied with the extent of conquest;
• Time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric
yielded to the pressure of its own weight
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• Joseph Tainter in "The Collapse of Complex Societies"
• There were diminishing returns to complexity, due to which, as states achieved a
maximum permissible complexity
• They would decline when further increases actually produced a negative return
• Jared Diamond in his 2005 book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or
Succeed"
• suggests five major reasons for the collapse of 41 studied cultures:
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Environmental damage, such as deforestation and soil erosion;
Climate change;
Dependence upon long-distance trade for needed resources;
Increasing levels of internal and external violence, such as war or invasion;
Societal responses to internal and environmental problems
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• Oswald Spengler, in his "Decline of the West"
• There had been only eight "mature civilizations."
• Growing cultures,tend to develop into imperialistic civilizations which expand
and ultimately collapse
• with democratic forms of government ushering in plutocracy and ultimately
imperialism
• Arnold J. Toynbee in his "A Study of History"
• The cause of the fall of a civilization occurred when a cultural elite became a
parasitic elite, leading to the rise of internal and external proletariats
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• Peter Turchin in his Historical Dynamics
• fiscal-demographic" model can be outlined as follows: during the initial phase of a sociodemographic cycle we observe
relatively high levels of per capita production and consumption, which leads not only to relatively high population growth
rates, but also to relatively high rates of surplus production. As a result, during this phase the population can afford to pay
taxes without great problems, the taxes are quite easily collectible, and the population growth is accompanied by the
growth of state revenues. During the intermediate phase, the increasing overpopulation leads to the decrease of per
capita production and consumption levels, it becomes more and more difficult to collect taxes, and state revenues stop
growing, whereas the state expenditures grow due to the growth of the population controlled by the state. As a result,
during this phase the state starts experiencing considerable fiscal problems. During the final pre-collapse phases the
overpopulation leads to further decrease of per capita production, the surplus production further decreases, state
revenues shrink, but the state needs more and more resources to control the growing (though with lower and lower rates)
population. Eventually this leads to famines, epidemics, state breakdown, and demographic and civilization collapse
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• Peter Heather argues in his book The Fall of the Roman Empire: a
New History of Rome and the Barbarians
• that this civilization did not end for moral or economic reasons, but because
centuries of contact with barbarians across the frontier generated its own
nemesis by making them a much more sophisticated and dangerous
adversary
• The fact that Rome needed to generate ever greater revenues to equip and
re-equip armies that were for the first time repeatedly defeated in the field,
led to the dismemberment of the Empire
• Although this argument is specific to Rome, it can also be applied to the
Asiatic Empire of the Egyptians, to the Han and Tang dynasties of China, to
the Muslim Abbasid Caliphate, and others
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• Bryan Ward-Perkins, in his book The Fall of Rome and the End of
Civilization
• The collapse of complex society meant that even basic plumbing disappeared
from the continent for 1,000 years. Similar Dark Age collapses are seen with
the Late Bronze Age collapse in the Eastern Mediterranean, the collapse of
the Maya, on Easter Island and elsewhere
• Arthur Demarest argues in Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a
Rainforest Civilization
• No one explanation is sufficient but that a series of erratic, complex events,
including loss of soil fertility, drought and rising levels of internal and external
violence led to the disintegration of the courts of Mayan kingdoms which
began a spiral of decline and decay
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• Jeffrey A. McNeely
• That past civilizations have tended to over-exploit their forests, and that such abuse of important resources has been a significant
factor in the decline of the over-exploiting society
• Thomas Homer-Dixon in "The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization",
• The fall in the energy return on investments; the energy expended to energy yield ratio, is central to limiting the survival of
civilizations. The degree of social complexity is associated strongly, with the amount of disposable energy environmental,
economic and technological systems allow. When this amount decreases civilizations either have to access new energy
sources or they will collapse
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• Feliks Koneczny in his work "On the Plurality of Civilizations" calls his
study the science on civilizations
• Civilizations fall not because they must or there exist some cyclical or a
"biological" life span. There still exist two ancient civilizations Brahmin-Hindu
and Chinese which by no means are ready to fall any time soon
• that "a person cannot be civilized in two or more ways" without falling into
what he calls an "abcivilized state" (as in abnormal). He also stated that when
two or more civilizations exist next to one another and as long as they are
vital, they will be in an existential combat imposing its own "method of
organizing social life" upon the other.
• Absorbing alien "method of organizing social life" that is civilization and giving
it equal rights yields a process of decay and decomposition.
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