Few two persons can be as different as General Pervez Musharraf and Usama bin Laden, but both agree that Muslims are living in the darkest period of their history. This diagnostic paradigm about the state of the Muslim world is shared by intellectuals of all hues and colors, the proverbial common man on the streets, politicians, and religious leaders of all kinds. This is a rather unique dimension of the current dilemmas faced by Muslims; there is perhaps no aspect of their situation upon which there is such a broad agreement.

This agreement has evolved over a period of time. The nineteenth-century Muslim reformers were the first to articulate it; their twentieth-century heirs confirmed it with increasing insistence until it became a fixed notion shared by friends and foes alike. That Muslims are in a very bad state is written on the wall; one only has to read the daily headlines to confirm this, but whether this is the darkest period of their fourteen hundred and twenty-eighth year of existence remains debatable. Those who lived through the horrors of the Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century would have felt the same way. Those who witnessed the two fitnas, which pitched the Companions of the Prophet (SAW) against each other, would have felt the same way with much more justification than we have today.

But regardless of the intensity of darkness, one cannot deny the fact that our times are not the best Muslims have witnessed in their long history. Staring into this darkness in an attempt to discover the most devastating aspects of the current state, one finds centuries-old conflicts harking back: shias and sunnis slaughtering each other, military generals sending armies against their own citizens, religious leaders issuing fatwas of takfir against those who do not agree with their way of thinking and living, a stinking moral perversion and intellectual stagnation of the first order. All of these are apparent realities of our times. What is not apparent, however, is the reason for this malaise. And there is no consensus about the cures.

For the fervent but simple-minded devotee, the cause of present crises is the abandonment of Islam; for the secular Muslim, it is attachment to Islam. For the generals it is the failure of the politicians; for the politicians, it is the intervention of the military in civic affairs. And to make matters worse, all of these groups have their say, their platforms and outlets, and their fields of operation wherein they exert their influence, often violently.

Staring into this darkness, one also discovers that it is not new; it has now existed for over two centuries. During the nineteenth century it was felt less acutely by the masses, who still lived in a relatively secluded and less global world with a pre-modern mindset. Today, the power of media has spread the awareness of this state of Muslims to the four corners of the world.

Though the darkness is not new, there have been significant changes in the state of the Muslim world over the course of these centuries. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, all that was needed to control and colonize vast regions of the Muslim world was a small European army and even smaller administrative manpower; today, no amount of military power can subdue any part of the Muslim world. Then it was possible for a Lord Curzon to rule over an area as large as the Indian subcontinent without fearing for his life; today, even an ordinary soldier heavily laden with the latest weapons is insecure.

This change has not occurred by itself; it has come through the contributions of a few individuals who dared to look into the dark abyss, analyzed it, and formulated solutions. These pioneers of the resurgence of Islamic consciousness have not always been successful in producing positive quantitative change in the overall situation of the Muslim world, but their contributions have given birth to a process which continues today and which is attracting an ever-increasing number of Muslims. What Muhammad Iqbal, Sayyid Qutb, Abul Ala Mawdudi,  Imam Khomeini, Ali Shariati, and Hasan al-Turabi did in the course of the twentieth century is not a mean accomplishment, given the state of the Muslim world at the dawn of that defining century.  What the twenty-first century holds for them remains in the unseen world, but those who have the courage and the moral and intellectual resources to look into the darkness can surely see the first rays of light.

The violence that characterizes our times is neither condonable nor acceptable; it is, however, understandable, as it has deep historical roots and reasons. Beyond the immediate and apparently destructive aspects of the current state of the Muslim world, there is a different future emerging through the rebirth of a consciousness of Islam in an ever greater number of Muslims. It is this deeply transformative consciousness of Islam that promises a bright future within the limits imposed by the overall structure of historical time which keeps on ticking, bringing the entire universe to the close of its present cycle.