To the Youth in the West: Preserving Authenticity in an Age of Fascination

My words are addressed to the youth who may aspire to immerse themselves in the Western world, as though it were the promised paradise that fulfills their finest dreams. You must reflect upon your intellectual and practical authenticity—your human authenticity—which is expressed in remaining steadfast upon the Islamic path in your movement through life.

By authenticity, I do not mean that you should take the past in its entirety and in every detail. Rather, I mean that you should affirm your Islam in any openness to all that is new in thought and behavior. For the new is not simply the new of the age, such that someone might say to you that a person must live their era in all its intellectual developments, lest they be backward relative to the contemporary reality and thus become a stranger among people. For ideas—old or new—are the product of human beings, not of time. People may submit to a particular thought due to the forces that hold dominance over reality and impose it upon life, without life having any role in producing it through development.

In light of this, it is necessary that you enter into a process of comparison—if you are in a position of intellectual objectivity—between the Islamic thought to which you belong in your commitment to Islam, and the thought prevalent among people due to the factors of power that have imposed it upon reality. You may find in Islam a progressive thought, open to genuine human interests, and you may discover in contemporary thought a backward thought, far removed from realism in addressing the multidimensional problems of the human being, encompassing both matter and spirit.

Contemporaneity in its vital human meaning is not something in the movement of time in terms of content, but rather something in the movement of the human being in producing their humanity in their issues, problems, and circumstances. So let your intellectual will be exercised in choosing the thought to which you commit, with awareness and openness, far removed from all societal emotions that pressure the human being through the emotional atmosphere that plunders their thought through the method of the "collective mind," with which the human being loses their intellectual independence and free choice in practical direction.

Authenticity represents the deep roots in the humanity of the human being in authentic thought, emanating from God and His Messenger, which opens to all time and all life, and does not submit to the past, present, and future within their temporal limits.

As for contemporaneity, it is openness to the age in the human being's needs and real issues in their diverse dimensions, such that the human being embodies their life in a balanced manner—in terms of their commitment to their Islam, and their openness to the issues of their age—through their awareness of both, in their intellectual endeavors, and their spiritual awareness of the elements of endeavor and awareness that qualify them to enter into dialogue with the thought of the other and with the human other.

If the West represents great practical power and extensive technological progress, then we must distinguish between the elements of science in the movement of civilization and the elements of intellectual and behavioral lines in the human being's way of relating to God, to themselves, and to life. We should not see cognitive and scientific growth as evidence of the correctness of the intellectual approach in matters of creed, ethics, and behavior, and in the meanings of spirit and conscience. Rather, every issue must be studied according to its own elements and its vital effects on reality along the line of truth.

Then it is necessary to study the question of human freedoms from more than one angle. It is not permissible to open to it from the single dimension that represents the individual state of the human being. Rather, there must be conscious reflection on the individual and societal aspects, the material and spiritual elements, in addition to attention to one creedal truth: that the human being is from God's creation, and must move from the position of God's will in their movement through life, and in managing the affairs of themselves and the affairs of the earth. This makes the issue connected to the human being's relationship with their Lord, with themselves, with the people around them, and with the earth upon which they move in its environmental and developmental reality, and with the living or growing creatures upon it. Freedom is responsible for all of this, because the human being is not the only creature that experiences the tragedy of restricted freedom. The tragedy has more than one location in the elements of the cosmic order. This imposes upon the human being not to live the meaning of tragedy as an emotion within themselves that weeps from self-deprivation, but rather to live with it as awareness of all the needs of what is around them and around others, in addition to their own needs. For the universe is not the human being alone; it is animal, plant, sea, land, plain, mountain, and diverse elements here and there. Each one of these requires the other to integrate with it in the reality of existence, and not to transgress against it, lest all its particular and general conditions collapse.

There are other aspects that space does not permit me to discuss, but I will summarize the discussion in one word: youth is not pleasure, desire, emotion, and happy dreams. Rather, it is an existential responsibility connected to all existence, a humanity connected to all humanity, and a spirituality that opens to God, to the world, and to the Hereafter—so that you may think about all of this, and attain soundness of destiny in all its worldly and otherworldly dimensions.