Investigate the causes of the decline of Islamic civilization from the perspective of Shakib Arslan

Several articles and books have been written about the decline of Islamic civilization and authors have tried to examine the causes of this decline on the basis of their intellectual basics and mental images. One of the most prominent thinkers was Shakib Arslan (1286-1366) who had Islamic modernism tendency unlike the fundamentalist and pro-Western currents. He tried to answer to this important historical question in his works, especially " Why Muslims delayed and why others progress" that why Muslims fell behind at non-Muslim in civilization arena. After numerous trips to different countries like America, the former Soviet and Spain, he looked for the retardation secret in both internal and external factors that the most important internal factors from his viewpoint were ignorance, imperfect science, moral corruption, fear, disappointment and despotism. Arsalan has mentioned the influence and effects of Western countries in political, economic and evangelical frameworks as well as neighboring of Islamic countries with colonialist countries as the external factor in the decadence of Islamic civilization. In this paper, we seek to answer to the causes of the decline of Islamic civilization from the viewpoint of Shakib Arsalan by the method of description along with analysis and relying on the works of this scientist.