فصلنامه نقد و نظر
سال نوزدهم شماره 2 (پیاپی 74، تابستان 1393)

The Islamic Civilization is a distinguished period in the history of human civilization. Studying this civilization requires a periodization of it, since historical periodization aims at developments occurring in the essence of human society, and this helps historians to organize historical information, as it makes it possible to examine the processes and developments of historical events in different periods. This paper, aiming at a conceptual explanation, is an introduction to the requirements of periodization of the Islamic Civilization with respect to its significance, concept, necessity, criteria, and patterns.

The relation between the level of analysis and ijtihad (that is, theorization) is a significant issue in social sciences. In this paper I seek to show that there is a particular relation between the level of analysis and ijtihad, and the employment of any level of analysis will affect the outputs of ijtihad or theorization. Indeed, it is the level of analysis that specifies the importance and priority of certain issues for the thinker and mujtahid. In this paper, the explanation of the relation between the two does not count as a theoretical, foundational matter; rather it is a matter of actions and behaviors or practical outputs emerging from the relevant views. As a case study, I focus on views of Said Nursi—known as Badiʾ al-Zaman, a well-known Turkish scholar—regarding the relation between Islam and the West, and the ways out of the problems caused from their civilizational encounter. One thesis of the paper is that since Said Nursi considers the problem of the Islam-West encounter with a civilizational approach, he gives a center-stage to the project of "Islamic modernity" or "Quranic civilization".

Studies of the Islamic thoughts with a civilizational approach should count as the highest level of introducing Islam with a rational, pragmatic and objectifying attitude. According to Mālik b. Nabī, major crises in the Islamic world, and even in humanity in general, are of civilizational sorts, and the way out of such crises and retrogressions in theory and practice is to reconstruct the civilizational ideas and objectivities in the Islamic world. An analysis of b. Nabī's ideas reveals that the civilizational model not only expresses the objective form of Islam, but also the way thinkers and scholars understand it. Much of this paper is concerned with capacities of b. Nabī's thoughts for, and its relations with, the civilizational infrastructures and structures of the Islamic Revolution of Iran. In this paper, with an appeal to Mālik b. Nabī's thoughts, I explicate the most important basic concepts of the Islamic civilization studies in Mālik's view and show that his civilizational views are effective to help Islamist currents out of their intellectual and practical challenges with respect to civilization.

A genuine, perfect civilization is a result of all-encompassing progress in a society, the rule of discipline and power, the establishment of sustainable security, the development of sciences and technologies, appropriate distribution of environmental facilities, the development of moral and spiritual traditions and the prevalence of rationality and justice in different aspects of the society in order to secure the human prosperity. According to Javadi Amoli, civilization, so understood, can only be obtained in light of the harmony between "divine and innate religion" and "different levels of reasoning", and it is only the "pious person" who can organize and determine civilization-making elements on the axis of "religious science" and in terms of "divine project", by understanding the four relations governing him, harmonizing the reason and the religion, subjecting his thoughts, words and acts to reason, religion, and the prevalence of his innate essence over the nature. In this paper, I will provide the details of this view.

This paper reviews the civilizational ideas of Sayyed Hossein Nasr in its most general form, without considering any particular civilization. However, the paper is concerned with evaluating the possibility of referring these ideas to a central idea I call "cooriginality of religion and civilization". Determining the place of civilization in human life from Nasr's viewpoint, I introduce his general civilizational theory, that is, cooriginality of religion and civilization, and then I deal with some outcomes of this theory with respect to the meaning of presence in, and belonging to, a civilization, the force leading a civilization forwards, the way civilizations are founded and revived, the definition of civilization and its compatibility of the theory of cooriginality, the division of civilizations, and inter-civilizational relations. Moreover, some other significant aspects such as plural manifestations within a civilization are also considered. Finally, I show that while we can refer Nasr's civilizational ideas to the cooriginality claim, there are ambiguities in this claim making troubles for some outcomes and generalizations.

In the civilizational thoughts of Sayyed Monir al-Din al-Hossayni al-Hashemi, civilizations provide the grounds for the relation between a human person and the society as well as nature, and this relation requires the presence of the civilization both in the way humans and socities affect the nature and the way the latter affects the former. Of course, relations and dimensions of a social life can only count as civilizational when they are institutionalized. For a civilization to be Islamic is for the religion to systematically be present in all areas of the civilizational-social life. A system of concepts (fundamental, strategic and practical concepts), social structures, and civilizational products (according to which the need-satisfaction process is manipulated) are the essential infrastructures of a civilization according to which social ethics and the style of life are formed. Though the Western materialist civilization has managed to form its civilizational requirements on the basis of its foundations and purposes, it is doomed to fail because of its materialist tendencies. According to Sayyed Monir al-Din's civilizational thoughts, in order to realize the Islamic civilization we have to acquire a network of sciences as well as civilizational structures and products on the basis of foundations, doctrines and goals of Islam. Accordingly, in the network of Islamic sciences—which is the core of the Islamic civilization—we need to acquire three layers of strategic and practical sciences, and they have to exhaust the theoretical infrastructure of the Islamic civilization with perfect theoretical harmony. The three theoretical layers are the jurisprudence (fiqh) of guardianship or patronage, applied Islamic sciences, and Islamic models of managing the society.

Many world thinkers maintain that Ayatollah Khamenei is an intellectual character in the Islamic world and the international community much more than he is a political leader in an Islamic country. Among intellectual issues and problems of the Islamic Republic of Iran and of the Islamic world, his views about the new Islamic civilization takes a center-stage. In this paper, I seek to extract his "universal geometry of the civilizational thought" with an appeal to his speeches from 1989 through 2015 with the method of fundamental conceptualization. Though there is no doubt that any of the concepts and conceptual categories referred to in this paper can be examined independently, the paper is focused on the general structure and the outlines of Ayatollah Khamenei's civilizational thoughts. Thus three sections of the paper are as follows: an examination of the possibility or impossibility of the new Islamic civilization, the concept (or nature) of the new Islamic civilization, and the creation of the new Islamic civilization. In the third section, concerning how to realize the new Islamic civilization from Ayatollah Khamenei's view, I have considered the following categories: (a) prerequisites of the formation of the Islamic civilization, (b) stages of the formation of the Islamic civilization, (c) requirements of achieving the Islamic civilization. It is noteworthy that because of the objectivist feature of Ayatollah Khamenei's civilizational thoughts, the issues in this paper have a concrete nature regarding the civilizational movement of the Islamic Republic of Iran.