Internal Factors of Decline of Islamic Civilization from Muhammad Iqbal's Perspective Emphasizing on Urdu Poems

While colonizers were dominating over different territories, Muslim communities were lagging behind. Because European countries were developing massively, Islamic scholars began to discover the roots of the decline of Islamic civilizations in order to prepare the situation to make changes and reforms. Initially Seyyid Jamal al-Din commenced the reformation and it continued by other scholars including: Abd al-Rahman Kawakibi, Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida and Muhammad Iqbal. However, Iqbal's thoughts on the internal factors behind the decline of Islamic civilization, which were expressed in his Urdu poems, have not been explained clearly; it is an important subject that scholars have not assessed it precisely. The raised question of the present paper is: What are the main internal factors behind the decline of Islamic civilizations in Urdu poems of Iqbal? The main internal factors which weakened Islamic civilizations are: intellectual and religious deviations, traditionalism and conservatism, cultural deterioration and internal disputes.
The purpose of the present paper is to introduce internal factors behind the deterioration of Islamic civilization in Mohammad Iqbal's poems, so that by refraining them we would be able to prepare the situations for improvement of Islamic countries. By means of a descriptive – analytical approach, the internal factors behind the decline of Islamic civilization will be assessed in the present paper. Unity of Islamic nations, making serious rational efforts, and opposing dogmatic thoughts and intellectual recession are strongly emphasized in this article.