A Study of Ayatollah Motahari’s Approach to the Modern West and the Interaction with It

The questions of the nature of the Western civilization and the way to confront it have been among important questions for Muslim politicians and thinkers, in the last two centu-ries. In this research, Ayatollah Motahari’s views on the West and the way to deal with it are studied. The main questions in this paper are: can Islamic and Western civilizations bor-row from each other intellectually and is there any limitation in such a borrowing, from Motahari’s view? While he argues that the West’s borrowings from the Islamic civilisation played an important role in the formation of the modern Western civilisation, he believes that the latter suffers from many weaknesses, which are related to its philosophical founda-tions and can also be seen in its political thought and practice. Motahari sees colonialism as the darkest point in the process of exchange between the West and Muslim societies. In principle, he is pessimist about the Western civilisation, though acknowledges its achieve-ments in some aspects such as science and technology and even in the promotion of justice. He does not refute Muslims’ adoption from the West, but renounces any attempt at dissolv-ing Islamic identity within the Western civilisation or following the latter’s deficiencies. He does not see the civilisation as a package that must be adopted or rejected as a whole, nor does he see it an integrated civilization with no differentiation between its constituent soci-eties.