 The movement of decolonization of knowledge has emerged in the former colonized areas from Africa, Latin Americas and elsewhere to reject the Eurocentric worldviews and to replace it with alternatives. From the Islamic perspective, it's definitely correct to reject the Eurocentric foundations of knowledge that we currently imbibe all over the world. But the next step, which is to rebuild knowledge on new foundations is problematic because we have our own foundations. So from an Islamic perspective, rebuilding knowledge cannot be done on just any foundations. It must be rebuilt on the foundations of the Quran. And this makes our decolonization project different from the others. You can start by noting that everybody agrees both among the Muslim Ummah and also outsiders that currently the Ummah is in very bad shape on all fronts, massive disagreement on the root cause of our current decline. So Western analysts say that we are the greatest civilization and the solution is for you to imitate us. So Western influenced Muslims want to be like the West. They want to have democracy, secularism, rule of law, etc. All of the things that the West admires. Another group of Muslims is more cautious and says that we don't need to borrow Western culture and institutions, but we do need their science and technology and that is the critical area in which we need to make progress. But all three of these positions ignore the Quran as a source of guidance. So among the Muslims, there are a lot of factions who which take the Quran as the relevant today. And so one of the groups, largest groups called for renewal of the faith and that that is the Tabligh. Tabligh, there are others who have called for purification of the Deen in various ways. And those are the Salafis. There are a large number of different varieties of political Islam which ask for the Muslims to acquire power in this world as a means to implementing the Islamic positions. And then there are the people of the heart who emphasize service or zikr or other aspects, humanitarian aspects of Islam. Among these large categories, there are many different groups and they even have disagreements among themselves on the right approach. In contention of this talk is that it's a huge tragedy that we do not even know the central background, the central battleground and we are wasting energies in fighting peripheral battles without battles, without paying attention to the core and center. And when we pay attention to the central battle, we realize that we don't currently have the weapons required to fight this battle. And in the meanwhile, the enemies have made enormous progress in manufactured powerful weapons, which influence the minds and hearts of our youth. And these are being used against us and we have no counters. This is an uncontested battleground. So I will offer the Ghazali project for decolonization of education as an effective counter. This includes an analysis, a diagnosis, a treatment and plan of action. By noting that knowledge is the heart of the message of Islam, which begins with the verses which say that we will reveal to mankind knowledge which they don't have. This knowledge which Allah Ta'ala revealed to the Muslims led ignorant and backward Bedouin to leadership of the world. Today we Muslims are again backwards and ignorant. And the question is, does this knowledge, does this final revelation have the same power today that it did 14 centuries ago? And the huge tragedy is that Muslims do not think so. Muslims are convinced today that the path out of our current darkness is guidance from the West and not from the Quran. From the Islamic perspective, decolonization is easily defined. Colonized mind looks to the West for guidance and a decolonized mind looks to the Quran for guidance. So while the problem is easy to state, acting upon it leads to deep difficulties. If we assert that Quran is revolutionary today, then we immediately face the question of why the Muslims who have the knowledge of the Quran are able to use this to knowledge to launch a revolution. Why can't the ulama who are experts on the Quran and these design a path to uplift the Ummah? Why are current massive, multi-efforts which engage millions of people launched on the basis of understanding of the Quran, failing to produce significant results? And on the one side, we have these problems and the other side we have. It's absolutely clear as the sun that the power of the West is impacting every moment of our lives. So how can this knowledge which shapes our lives today possibly be inferior to the knowledge of the Quran, especially when Quran doesn't seem to provide any guidance for our modern lives? In summary, in a recap before we go on, we have discussed colonization and decolonization in terms of Western knowledge versus Quranic knowledge. There are some practical issues that colonization ended 70 years ago. So why are minds still colonized? What is the process by which minds are colonized? And how we can interrupt and disrupt and counteract this process? And I will try to explain the Ghazali project which provides comprehensive solutions to these problems. Since the Quran is the final message of God to mankind and provides complete and perfect guidance for all times to come, why does it appear irrelevant or obsolete today? This is due to Jahl-e-Murakkab, compound ignorance. We think we know the Quran and because we think we know it, we have been unable to use this knowledge that we have of the Quran to find solutions to modern problems and therefore we are mistakenly thinking that the Quran doesn't have the power to solve modern problems and therefore we think that we must turn to the West to find the solutions for our problems. So to break out of this trap, we need to first abandon the idea that we understand the Quran. And in this connection, Ahadis are helpful. They say that Islam came as a stranger and will become a stranger. So truly we can recognize that Islam is a stranger to us because none of the dimensions of our lives, whether it's education or justice or governance or the markets or society itself, none of our social institutions are shaped on Islamic patterns and instead they are. So Islam has become a stranger. And similarly, the reason for this is pointed out in another hadith which says that you will follow the ways of the other nations inch by inch and that's what we are doing today. We are imitating the Jews and the Christians. Instead of trying to discover the revolutionary elements of the message of the Quran, let us take an indirect approach and see what this message did. How did this message change history? So it's the effect of the knowledge rather than the knowledge itself which we will look at. Small example from my personal experience will provide an illustration of the main message of this talk. Islamic studies teacher came to me recently that he has been announced, he has been chosen to provide a short discussion of the Quran in the assembly for the university. And so he prepared a traditional lecture which goes over the Quran and he picked out the hadith of the Fazail of the Quran and so on. So I asked him that, is it true that the students that you are going to be talking to have heard all of these hadiths a thousand times before? He said, yes. So the question is, I said, when the Quran came, one ayat, the Sahaba would listen and it would change their lives and they were so much concerned that they said that our prophet is a magician and you must not listen to this Qalaam. So where is this excitement? How can we reach the Quran and teach the students that this Quran is just exciting and wonderful today as it was 14 centuries ago. I said that go and look at videos on YouTube of converts who listen to the Quran and they have stories today where they say that I read the Quran and it opened life to me, it opened wonders to me, it changed my life, I converted to Islam. So the excitement of the Quran, we need to recreate this, we have become blind to it because of familiarity. We think that we know where is the message of the Quran is so powerful that we can really understand it because of our preconceptions about it. The colonization is a huge project spanning all fields of knowledge but the core is the rejection of Eurocentric history. Eurocentric history says that the world was in darkness and ignorance until the son of reason first arose in Europe. And so according to Eurocentric history, there's only one player and that is the Europeans, everybody else has been just not present or not effectively relevant to history. So a very strong and powerful antidote has been given by this book by Sayyed Abu-Lahas-Salam-e-Nagvi and among the many messages, the critical one is that the Islamic civilization had the ability to balance between the spiritual and material and this is what makes it unique and distinguishes it from others who have gone overboard on one side or the other side with Western civilization being completely destroying spirituality and completely materialistic impact of the revelation on world history. We can only give a few hints. More extensive discussions are available in many books, but basically Islam took the most ignorant and backward people on the planet and made them leaders of the world and created a civilization which enlightened the world with knowledge for a thousand years. Re-conquest of Alandulus, which was a declining civilization with seven centuries to its credit. They got wrapped up in luxuries and forgot fighting. So Europeans were able to reconquer and that gave them access to millions of books in Islamic libraries. And this time, instead of burning them, they translated the books which gave and this flood of knowledge ended the dark ages of Europe. This new knowledge was in conflict with teachings of Christianity and led to a battle known as the battle between science and religion and it's ended up splitting the church in two and violent battles between Protestants and Catholics, which led to the population to become allergic to religion as the source of wars. So once it was decided that religion is not a good way to build society, then the need to build society on a secular basis became clear and that eventually led to the need to build knowledge on secular foundations, ignoring and discarding religious teaching. That was the Enlightenment project in Europe where the intellectuals undertook to reject all traditional inherited knowledge, all of religion, all of revealed knowledge. And they decided to rebuild the entire stock of human knowledge from scratch, starting from zero. In particular, they firmly rejected the unseen. So in contrast to Al-Azina minunabil-ghaib, they became the yun-kirunabil-ghaib and they also rejected the testimony of the heart. Allah says, they said, but we won't accept the heart because the heart testifies to the existence of God and they want to reject God. So this statement, simple statement, I think, therefore I am has deep meaning because if you think about your own existence, you will realize that what gives evidence to me of my presence is the beating of my heart and the sensation of the wind against my skin and my breathing in and out, the lungs expanding and so on. So all of my bodily sensations, but it is not my thought. It's not logic which proves my existence. It's my, I'm directly aware of my own existence. So, but they rejected this sensations, this subjective experiences and they wanted to build knowledge purely on thought. And this is a fundamental break with not only Islamic epistemology, but with all traditional epistemologies known to mankind. And this break in the conception of what knowledge means is at the root of our problems today. Sorry of how Western intellectuals told from Muslims without acknowledgement has often been told, but my purpose in telling the story is very different from what the usual purpose is. Usually people say this in order to participate, get a share in the glory of Western knowledge and say that we also had something to do with it. But my purpose is to say that the most, the essence of the knowledge that was produced by the Islamic civilization was inaccessible to the West. What they took from us was inferior and second rate copies. And the original is still highly superior to the imitation that they have. And so, you don't need to borrow from the West. We need to go to our own intellectual heritage to rediscover the treasures which the West could not borrow or copy. So, the West rejected the heart and the soul as sources of knowledge. And they only relied on objective observations of external reality. This led them to acquire a deep insight into the external world around us so that they could split the atom and achieve amazing technologies. But in the process they also became blind to the internal world of human beings and our own subjective experience and our souls and our hearts and how we can make spiritual progress. So, one particular area with this impacts heavily is the study of society. Society is a collection of human beings. And you can't understand society unless you understand human beings. So, if the West is blind to the nature of human beings, then they are also impossible to create valid social science. Because Western theories of knowledge make them blind to the internal of human experience. Western theories of human behavior are really absurd. On the one hand, you have the absurdities of Freudian psychology. On the other hand, you have the economic theory of homo economicus, which is completely remote from actual human behavior. At the same time, these days, Islamic psychologists have made great strides in the field based on Islamic models of human behavior. Based on the akal, the kalb, the nafs and the roof. Build theories of society on the basis of Islamic ideas about how human beings are structured. And there are multiple strands of our intellectual heritage, which allow us to rebuild the social sciences on bases which are radically different from those that exist currently in the West. But there are a number of ongoing projects in this direction. One of the most advanced thinkers is Recep Shantur. And he has a lecture sequence of lectures on decolonization of knowledge. And also on Ibn Khaldun's approach to the social sciences, which we may name Ullumul Umran and which is radically distinct from contemporary Western social science. The Ghazali project is the name of these collective efforts to reject Western knowledge, Western corpus of knowledge, and to replace it by a new set of knowledge built on the Islamic intellectual heritage. This is the process by which respect and admiration for the West is produced in the minds and hearts of our young. That is colonial education, which was designed for this purpose. It was designed to create respect, admiration and love for the colonizers. And at the same time, contempt and hatred for our own culture, heritage and religion. That is actually the colonization of minds, which was the same all over the world in Islamic and non Islamic colonies. How did this process continue after liberty was achieved? Well, it has to be understood that colonization is primarily a conquest of the minds. And it proceeds by the process of education and by the creation of a trader class, which is designed to have their loyalties to the colonizer. And to hate and despise their own people. And this class was the one that slid into power after the independence. So they continue to use exactly the same methods and using exactly the same colonial education processes that continued, that were there in the colonial times. War of independence of 1857, the British assumed that this was caused by the Muslims, led by the Muslims, even though this was not actually true. And they took enormous amount of revenge, suppressing and having enormous amount for atrocities to the Muslims. As a result, the Muslim leadership withdrew into their own forts and abandoned the pursuit of equality and they abandoned the field of Western knowledge. This is very similar to what happened earlier with the Moazzala, where the Greek philosophy led, had a lot of admiration from some intellectuals. And the Muslims leaders, the orthodoxy said that we should not engage with Greek philosophy, just a set of things which has nothing to do with religion. And this failure to engage led to the rise of the Moazzala to state religion. And at that point, it became clear that the Ulama had to engage. In the same way, the abandonment of the field of Western knowledge has led to a situation where Western knowledge has come to dominate the culture. And we are not equipped with the tools to counter it because we have failed to engage with it. Going over this history is quite instructive because when the Moazzala argued that reason is superior to the Quran because we use reason to understand the Quran. Today, the modern Moazzala argued that science and technology is superior to the Quran because of their shock and awe of the West. And the way that the Moazzala were overcome was by engaging with Greek philosophy and defeating it on its home ground. And this is exactly the same thing that we need to do. And that is what basically the Azali project is about. We need a new Ilmil Kalam to counter the arguments against religion which has been created by Western philosophy. We cannot afford to detach ourselves and ignore this because this poisonous philosophy is causing enormous damage to our young who go through an education which puts these false ideas into their minds and hearts. After detaching ourselves from and ignoring Western education, we have to analyze it and understand what effects it produces and learn how to counter them. So one of the direct effects of Western education is to teach the students that the purpose of life is to make money. And then it follows that useful knowledge is that which teaches us how to make money. And with this mindset, it becomes clear that Islam is not designed to teach us how to make money. And so Islamic teachings are useless because they don't fit this concept of knowledge. And then it follows that the knowledge which currently dominates the world, Western knowledge is the one which is useful for getting jobs and making money. And so it appears as if Western knowledge is the only type of knowledge which is useful for this world even though this is a false illusion. When we counter this message what we need to do is decolonize the educational system but this is quite difficult because we cannot abandon it. So we have to enter the field and we have to pick out the useful elements of Western education and we have to reset them into an Islamic foundation. One of the critical tasks is to replace Eurocentric history according to which Europeans are the only ones who are rational and creative and intelligent and brave and they have all the good qualities and everybody else is just a zero. So we have to rediscover, we have to rewrite the history of the past four centuries from an Islamic perspective. And also we have to relearn the Islamic styles of pedagogy. How do you teach? How do you learn? These are unique to Islam and they are radically different from the current approach in use in the West. First step in re-ramping the education is to start with the discussion of purpose of life. This is primary because all knowledge must be judged relative to our purpose. If knowledge helps us fulfill the purpose of life then it is useful. If knowledge distracts us and prevents us from fulfilling the goal of life then it is harmful. So the first step of the Wazali project is deliverance from error which means that we rebuild our faith in the message of the Quran by understanding the nature of knowledge as a Noor which is cast into our hearts and not as knowledge of the external world but as knowledge of our internal world. Instead of shying away from it we must squarely confront the challenge facing the youth of our time. The perspective that there is no God leads to the idea that world was created by chance, man emerged by evolution and therefore our lives are purposeless and meaningless and society is just a jungle of competition governed by the survival of the fittest and these ideas which are at the bedrock and foundation of western education are dramatically opposed to the Islamic ideas that universe was created for a purpose and the man is the best of the creations with infinite potential to rise above the angels but also with the potential to be the worst of the beasts and so how do we fulfill this purpose we have to achieve the potential for excellence which is within our souls. This requires training and education in a completely different way from that which is the standard western method. I'll counter the arguments of the atheists. In fact there is a lot of material from Ilmul Qalam which is useful and there are many new arguments which have been developed but unfortunately we have failed to engage with this field so there are large class of arguments which can be used to convince the youth of the validity of religion but ultimately intellectual arguments can lead us to the door but they do not allow us to enter the building of faith which is a feeling in the hearts and so also on this we have a lot of tradition and a lot of approaches on how we affect the hearts and how the faith enters the hearts and what are the steps we can do to facilitate this. In the Ghazali project is to rebuild faith in our religion and to build the understanding that the final message of God to mankind is superior to any knowledge that man could possibly invent. The next thing is to support this faith by logic by showing that the knowledge developed by the West is a very superficial kind and it's full of errors and is built on false foundations. There's a lot of work ongoing which can be used in this direction. It's not our goal here to provide the examples themselves but to point out the direction in which work needs to be done. Building faith and rejecting Western knowledge then we have to rebuild the structure of human knowledge on the basis of foundations provided by our own intellectual heritage. Include and summarize the failure the decline of Muslims today is caused by failure to trust in the completeness and perfection of the final message of God. Instead of looking to God for guidance we are looking to the West for guidance. So the challenge facing us is to rebuild the entire structure of human knowledge developed by the West over the past few centuries on secular foundations based on rejection of God and rebuild this knowledge on the basis of Islamic foundations. Typically we can say that the ball was dropped in 1857 when the decision was made to disengage with Western structures of knowledge instead of countering it then and attacking it on home grounds. And this is a repeat of the mistake that was made by in the challenge of the Mozzarella where we the field of Greek philosophy is abandoned until Imam Ghazali entered and and showed that this Greek philosophy is full of defects. If I the Enlightenment project rejected all tradition and sought to rebuild knowledge from zero and the results of this effort have become clear and these are the foundations of Western education today and these results are very toxic they sought to build morality on rational grounds and this has not been successful and so we see the climate crisis and human crisis and all sorts of economic crisis political crisis wars everything results from a failure to understand the nature of the human being. So today we have to reject this knowledge which was built over the past three centuries and basically reverse the Enlightenment project we are through the Ghazali project is the counter to the Enlightenment project in the sense that we seek to rebuild all of knowledge starting not from zero but from the intellectual heritage of Islam or as somebody has put it it's a rooted revival of the Islamic intellectual heritage. The tradition is very powerful and is fully capable of dealing with all the challenges and we need to rise to the challenge of modernity may Allah give us the Tawfiq to create the structure of knowledge required to protect our youth from the toxic effects of modern Western education