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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values For Humanity EPILOGUE: THE ETHICAL AND SPIRITUAL NATURE OF HUMAN LIFE, EAST AND WEST The Quran asserts that God is the Lord of both the East and the West and also that the Blessed Olive Tree, which symbolizes the spiritual axis of the world, is of neither the East nor the West.

It is more necessary today than at any other time in history to realize the universal nature of the truth, which belongs to both the East and the West and yet is confined to neither. And yet there are those in the West who see Islam as the “totally other” and then vilify and identify it with all that they disdain, while there are also those in the Islamic world who look upon the West as the innate enemy of Islam.

Those who realize that God is the Lord of both the East and the West must raise their voices against such ignorant and sometimes malefic attitudes. There is not, however, a simple symmetry between East and West today.

Before modern times the “Abode of Islam” was the only “other” the West knew, and the selfconsciousness of Western civilization during its period of maturation and its crystallization was to a large extent defined by that “other.” For Islam, however, there were several other civilizations, such as those in India and China, with which it had contact and which it saw as the “other.” This factor itself contributed, through Islam’s image of itself as the central world civilization, to the neglect for several centuries by Muslims of the rise of European power during the Renaissance and the major intellectual and religious transformations that were taking place at that time in the West, including the rise of modern science followed by the new technology.

Some have tried to fault Islamic civilization for not following the same trajectory of development that took place in Europe and have asked, “What went wrong?” in reference to the Islamic world. If we look at world history, however, the question should not be “What went wrong in the Islamic world?” but “What went wrong in Europe?” The very question “What went wrong?” implies a norm or a right against which something is judged to be wrong.

Now, the global norm was once traditional civilizations based on religious and spiritual principles and rooted in a theocentric or anthropocosmic worldview, as we see in Japanese, Chinese, Hindu, Islamic, Byzantine, and medieval European civilizations.