Believing that Western technological development is a net gain for humanity is incompatible with sound Islamic creed. Have we been so indoctrinated with materialism that we can’t see that this “advancement” is trading what is better for what is worse?

The purpose of life is to worship Allah, subhanahu wa t’ala. A calamity which brings us closer to Allah is better than a blessing which causes us to forget Him.

Even in a purely materialistic sense, Western technology is a massive fail. Why?

  1. Humanity and the earth are interconnected and interdependent.
  2. Development of Western technology did not lead to an overall improvement in the human condition, rather it elevated the condition of some humans at the expense of other humans and natural systems.
  3. Social actions yield social reactions. Interactions with nature yield natural reactions.
  4. Achieving Western technological progress required a level of cruelty so high that Westerners had to suppress their natural mercy (fitra).
  5. The loss of this fitra contributed to a disintegration of their social interactions with each other, leading to a disintegration of social relations and widespread sense of isolation and depression.
  6. The excesses generated by the “progress” led to a sense of purposelessness and a cycle of intensifying, mindless consumption, compounding the cycle.
  7. The material consequences of the “progress” are causing increasingly severe destructive climatic events.
  8. Most of the resource surplus attained through extreme cruelty and destruction goes toward attempting to fix the problems that cruelty and destruction caused, whether through entertainment, seeking pleasure through status symbols, or attempting to remediate various crises.
  9. The measures used to address the numerous crises do not solve the crises, but only defer their proliferation into more crises of increasing intensity.
  10. Eventually this game of “kick the can down the road” will fall apart, and a huge entropic debt will have to be paid.
  11. The inevitability of the failure of this system can be easily ascertained with logical certainty.
  12. Western civilization is a humiliating failure of epic proportions, and only the willfully blind (kuffar) can fail to see this.
  13. To bring about this massive failure, the kuffar have sacrificed the true purpose of their life, which is to worship our Creator and Sustainer sincerely and exclusively.
  14. Kufr is ingratitude and arrogance.
  15. To reject the purpose for which we were created is ingratitude. To believe that we can achieve some other aim (such as immortality) through our own power and ingenuity is arrogance.
  16. Muslims are winning the “war on terror” by any metric you care to use.
  17. This struggle does not need us. We need it.
  18. Who moves away from the struggle and toward the luxury and illusion of safety of the civilization of failure does so to the detriment of their own soul.