The assassination of the mind "Burhan Ghalioun"

The rise of European and Western dominance in the entire world announced the end of classical civilizations, and the beginning of the breakdown of their fundamental structures, leading them into a long historical crisis both material and spiritual. The Arab civilization was not immune to this historical upheaval; rather, it was at its core. The confirmed new military and civilizational dominance since the eighteenth century gradually led to the disintegration of a major Islamic empire, with its remnants scattering at the beginning of the twentieth century in all directions. This dominance eroded the firm and traditional foundations of internal hegemony and social authority, and diminished the effectiveness and influence of its existing economic and intellectual systems. Therefore, within the framework of seeking new mental, political, and economic balances since the collapse of the Ottoman Sultanate, and motivated by resistance to complete disintegration and fading under the pressure of the traditional colonial phase, the Arab community attempted multiple efforts at the end of the last century and into the middle of this century to reconstruct its elements, unify, and shape itself as an active civilization within the new civilization, meaning as an independent and working entity. However, there is a healthy conviction today that the harvest of the past thirty years has been very weak in key sectors of the civilizational experience. No significant and serious accumulation has occurred in the fields of industrial and technological expertise, nor in applied and fundamental scientific research—natural and human—nor in building the nation-state that expresses and embodies the will of the community, nor in organizing social and legal authority and structuring civil society. All of this suggests that the required response today from the Arab nation is not merely reforming the Arab national system known from past decades, or restoring it to its former state as some suggest, but rather, based on the major issue, to review the shortcomings of Arab responses since the Renaissance to this problem, with the aim of reconsidering the nature of this struggle, identifying the active forces, their goals, objectives, and stakes, and reaching a clear and acceptable vision of what the future Arab system could be. This also includes responding to the movement of disintegration and decomposition triggered by the rise of Western hegemony at the heart of the Arab city. To achieve this, a review of Arab concepts—intellectual, political, economic, and social—is necessary, re-studied in light of new circumstances. Within this framework comes this review of the Arab cultural crisis between Salafism and dependency, where the researcher did not exclude any period of modern Arab history from this review. The goal is to uncover the factors of movement, development, unity, and intellectual and material cohesion, to highlight, deepen, and expand them. In a sense, this means creating the community—forming it in the mind as it should be. This required the researcher to uncover the sources and spiritual and material origins—cultural, social, and economic—that feed the renaissance and to highlight them. It also required discussing the foundations on which previous experiences were built and demonstrating their success or failure in exploiting and mobilizing these sources without neglect to achieve the desired goal. To facilitate the research, a distinction was made between three main issues that form the basis of thinking about the Arab renaissance: the cultural issue, then the political, and finally the social. The book is then dedicated to the first issue, "the cultural issue," for two reasons: first, because the issue of culture and the struggle to evaluate the place of Arab culture in the renaissance has been and still is the main field of discussion among Arab intellectuals regarding the problems of the renaissance; and second, because the mind can look from culture as a set of general values that inspire the community’s behavior and its intellectual, political, and economic practices across the social fabric.