One of the first talks was given by an elderly man from the Sudan, and it was based on a well known saying of the Prophet which, so the speaker claimed, had never been properly understood: “Islam began as a stranger and it will end as a stranger.” The opening words are clearly a reference to the problems experienced by the Prophet in seeking to impose on the then polytheistic inhabitants of Arabia the alien idea of monotheism. But the speaker maintained that the second part of the saying had been misunderstood until this very day, and that he had come to give us its true meaning, which was that Islam would end by spreading over all those parts of the world which had hitherto remained alien to the Quranic message. In other words, that Islam would end as an alien by being adopted by aliens; and there were some implications that most of those present in the lecture hall were not doing enough to help this to come true.

When it was time for question and answer, I ventured to question the legitimacy of interpreting one saying of the Prophet without taking into consideration other sayings of his which were related to a similar theme, in this case the spiritual future of the world. I pointed out that the Prophet had not believed in what the modern world calls “progress”, and I quoted several well known sayings of his, for example “No time will come upon you but will be followed by a worse” and “The best of my people are my generation, then they that come after them, then they that come after those.” When I had finished I heard expressions of agreement with me from all sides, and then one or two came up to me and thanked me warmly for having said what I had said.

Later in the week an afternoon had been set aside for those who might wish to be taken outside Cairo to see certain examples of modern “developments” in some of the neighbouring districts. It did not sound at all interesting, and more than half the members of the congress declined to go. No lectures had been listed for that afternoon, and one of the officials came up to me, greatly to my surprise, and said that he had been told to ask me if I would give a talk. I said I would think it over, and let him know the next morning. I had not prepared anything, but I felt that the words “Welcome to Development” demanded some comment, and that was how I came to give the following talk which is here translated from the Arabic in which it was spoken.

We have heard many times during this conference the words “development” (tatawwur) and “progress” (taqaddum) and “renewal” (tajdıd) and “renaissance” (nahdah) , and perhaps it will not be a waste of time to pause and consider what they mean. “Development” means moving away from the principles, and although it is necessary to move a certain distance from the principles in order to make applications of them, it is of vital importance to remain near enough for contact with them to be fully effective. Development must therefore never go beyond a certain point. Our ancestors were acutely conscious that this danger point had been reached in Islam hundreds of years ago; and for us, who are so much further removed in time than they were from the ideal community of the Prophet and his companions, the danger is all the greater. How then shall we presume not to be on our guard? How shall we presume not to live in fear of increasing our distance from the principles to the point where development becomes degeneration? And indeed it may well be asked as regards most of what is proudly spoken of today as development: Is it not in fact degeneration?

As for “progress,” every individual should hope to progress, and that is the meaning of our prayer Guide us upon the way of transcendence . The word “development” could also be used of individuals in the same positive sense. But communities do not progress; if they did, what community was better qualified to progress than the first Islamic community in all the impetus of its youth? Yet the Prophet said, “The best of my people are my generation, then they that come after them, then they that come after those.” And we must conclude from the Qur’an that with the passage of the centuries a general hardening of hearts is inevitable, for it says of one community, a long length of time passed over them so that their hearts were hardened ( LVII , 16 ); and this same truth is to be understood also from what the Qur’an says of the elect, that they are many in the earlier generations and few in the later generations ( LVI , 13 -4 ). The hope of communities must lie, not in “progress” or “development,” but in “renewal,” that is, restoration. The word “renewal” has been used so far throughout this conference mainly as a rather vague synonym of “development,” but in its traditional, apostolic sense, renewal is the opposite of development, for it means a restoration of something of the primordial vigour of Islam. Renewal is thus, for Muslims, a movement of return, that is, a movement in a backward rather than a forward direction.

As to “renaissance,” it might in itself be used in the same sense as “renewal,” but this word “renaissance” has very inauspicious associations, because the movement that is called the European Renaissance was nothing other, if we examine it carefully, than a renewal of the paganism of ancient Greece and Rome; and that same “renaissance” marked the end of the traditional Christian civilization and the beginning of this modern materialistic civilization. Is the “renaissance” that we now hear of as taking place in the Arab states different from that one, or is it of the same kind?

There is not one of us, whether he be Arab or non-Arab, who does not rejoice in the independence of the Arab states and of Islamic countries in general, and it was to be hoped that this independence would bring about a return to the noble civilization of Islam. But what do we see? We see the doors flung wide open to everything that comes from Europe and America without the slightest discrimination. It is not irrelevant to recall here that for us—and the same must be implicitly if not explicitly true of all religions— every earthly possibility falls into one of five categories, being either obligatory ( fard ), strongly recommended ( mandub ), allowed ( mubah ), strongly discouraged ( makruh ), or forbidden ( haram ). It is against the second and fourth of these that a subversive movement will direct its efforts, at any rate to begin with, for since they are less absolute than the first and the fifth, it is easier to break through their defences. And it is to be noticed that the terms mandub (strongly recommended) and makruh (strongly discouraged) have changed their significance. Thus, in the eyes of the champions of this “renaissance” that we are now supposed to be enjoying, what is to be “strongly discouraged” is everything that is left of the Islamic civilization in the way of sunnah such as wearing the turban and not shaving off the beard, whereas what is “strongly recommended” is everything that comes from the West. It may well be that only a very few actually go so far as to say that this or that is to be discouraged because it belongs to the civilization of our pious ancestors or that a thing is to be recommended because it comes from the West. But to judge by the facts, one might imagine that such words were on every tongue, such thoughts in every head. And what is the result of this? The result is that the rising generation is more ignorant of the practices of the Messenger of God, and more cut off from those practices, than any generation that has come into existence since the dawn of Islam. How then shall we augur well of the present situation? And how shall we not shrink from the word “renaissance” as from an evil omen?

All this was foreseen by the Prophet. He said, “You will follow the ways of those who were before you span for span and cubit for cubit until if they went down into the hole of a poisonous reptile you would follow them down.” That descent is now taking place; and it is called development and progress.

More than one delegate has mentioned, during this conference, that Islam embraces the whole of life, and no one doubts this. But what is actually happening today in many if not most Islamic countries is that life is embracing Islam—embracing, no, for it is a stranglehold rather than an embrace! Life is crowding religion out, pushing it into a little corner, and stifling it more and more so that it can scarcely breathe.