Many people trying to explain the reasons of Muslim civilisation’s decline take an approach that effectively sidelines how colonialism, and the neoliberal order that emerged in its wake, fundamentally reshaped its very foundations: its epistemic horizons, institutional architectures, modalities of intellectual production, the relation of the self to knowledge, and the subjugation of Muslim societies to global capitalist logics. By neglecting to foreground how colonial and post-colonial structures redefined the very conditions of intellectual and civilisational possibility, the argument risks reducing the crisis of the Muslim mind to surface-level symptoms rather than tracing it to its structural and historical causes.
What is framed as an internal intellectual failure is, in truth, the outcome of centuries of epistemic domination, where the categories through which Muslims think, govern, and even critique themselves have been mediated by Western modernity. The “closing” of the Muslim mind, then, cannot be separated from the forced opening of Muslim lands to colonial power, where education, law, and governance were systematically re-engineered to reflect Western notions of reason, progress, and order. These transformations reconstituted what it meant to think, to know, and to exist as a Muslim within a world now structured by imperial hierarchies of knowledge.
Moreover, any serious engagement with this question must resist collapsing into the same tired nationalist polemics that have long fractured the Ummah and obscured deeper civilisational diagnoses.
To reframe the discussion properly, one must understand that the colonial project did not end with formal independence, it merely evolved into new forms of control under neoliberalism. The neoliberal order perpetuates the same civilisational asymmetry by converting Muslim societies into nodes of the global capitalist machine, where intellectual worth is measured by productivity, marketability, and alignment with Western epistemic norms.
Thus, the real “closure” of the Muslim mind is not a retreat from progress but a coerced conformity to a Western model of progress itself, an intellectual captivity masked as enlightenment. Re-centring the conversation around colonialism and neoliberal encroachment restores clarity to the task ahead: not reopening minds within the same imposed frameworks, but reclaiming the conditions of autonomous, God-oriented thought that once animated the Muslim intellectual tradition.
Adapted with some modifications from https://x.com/islamicize/status/1986149909951619368?t=xrbG9Dgp0isdEuCYiURRJA&s=35
