"The result is the poverty of contemporary Islamic intellectual life. We rely on ideas formulated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, not because these ideas are adequate to our moment, but because we have lost the capacity to generate new ones. The institutions that might critique, refine, and build upon these earlier efforts do not exist, for the most part. Venerated institutions such as Al-Azhar are husks of their former selves. The class of people who might staff such institutions was destroyed. We are left with degraded copies, slogans repeated without understanding, and an amnesia so profound we do not even recognise what we have lost." Read the full Kasurian essay here:

The Closing of the Muslim Mind

How three events in the 20th century destroyed the Muslim capacity to produce new ideas.