Dynamics of human-divine civilization with an overview of Bernard Lewis' standpoints

Abstract

An unbiased scientific research evaluating our until recently leading civilization, the Islamic civilization, based on the research of a famous researcher in the area of Islamic world, Bernard Lewis, shows its collapse both in the field of military and economic power and in the fields of culture and science. It seems that the Islamic civilization, with its inherent discrimination between the three categories of humans: Muslim - non-Muslim, slave - master, woman - man, has been by far superseded with contemporary theories about free and civil society, human rights, tolerance and the like. Philosophically discussing human being as such, this work comes up with the definition of human being which is naturally acceptable, both from the purely rational and intuitive point of view, as well as from the viewpoint of traditional theses about human being. Both of these cognitive resources show that it is natural for the human, as a divine being - which can be under influence of Satan or even be a satanic being - to reside in a kind of mythological world. Since contemporary scientific standards reject the mythological as non-scientific, howsoever precise and objective analyses it offers, it is not possible to apply these standards, as such, on humanistic, particularly religious sciences. According to the mythological description of the world, though God himself gave Satan the ability to act against the humans, but before that He gave to the humans the ability to show and prove their own superiority. In this sense, Islamic civilization emerges as the civilization of the Human-centric divinity and the Theo-centric humanity; if there is any discrimination, it is only to improve that divine humanity and to protect it from satanic anti-human plots and pretensions. Hence, the Islamic human-loving civilization, with more or less intensity, has existed and exists in each corner of the history and the world where there is care, theories and actions to preserve and advance divinity in human being. This work provides evidence that the divinity of human being is measurable by standards of empirical science and that it is possible to protect it and to work on its intensification, through all-human zeal.