Our Culture – Part 3 – End of Religion

The argument thus far has tracked how imported curricula, global market logics, and minuscule cultural drips re-engineer the very drawers through which a Muslim perceives reality. Yet cognition does not stop at street etiquette or economic choice; it also governs how we read the Qurʾān, weigh ḥadīth, and adjudicate fiqh. If culture is the loom that pre-sets what counts as evidence, coherence, or beauty, then any shift in that loom necessarily recasts the enterprise of Islamic hermeneutics itself. Part III therefore turns the lens inward: we will examine how the same cognitive realignments that trivialise traditional practices also reshape the methodologies by which revelation is approached, interpreted, and sometimes unwittingly subordinated to alien epistemic horizons.

The pre-modern Muslim republic of letters rested on a lattice in which disciplines like uṣūl al-tafsīr, uṣūl al-fiqh and ʿilm al-balāgha, functioned as interlocking gears. Uṣūl al-tafsīr, for example, supplied the principles for encountering the Qurʾān: mastery of the language’s morphology and syntax; awareness of multiple qirāʾāt; knowledge of asbāb al-nuzūl that tether each passage to a concrete moment; and a theory of textual cohesion that assumed the Divine speech to be internally harmonious, no verse cancelling another save by explicit warrant. Uṣūl al-fiqh, for example, articulated how that Divine address migrates into actionable norm: first by fixing a hierarchy of proofs, Qurʾān, Prophetic Sunnah, consensus (ijmāʿ), analogical extension (qiyās), and then by laying down canons for linguistic implication, general versus particular, command versus counsel, explicit versus implicit. ʿIlm al-balāgha crowned the system by exposing the aesthetic and rhetorical force of the revelation: how metaphor, ellipsis, hyperbole, and rhythmic cadence are themselves vehicles of meaning that cannot be paraphrased without loss. Together the three sciences formed an epistemic ecosystem, the Qurʾān was not a text to be mined piecemeal, nor a codebook to be applied woodenly, but a multilayered discourse whose legal yield, moral aroma, and spiritual gravitas were indissoluble.

Hidden within these disciplines were cognitive drawers alien to the modern mind. Language was not a human construct to be deconstructed at will; it was a divinely chosen medium whose semantic fields (ḥaqīqa, majāz, kināya) mirrored ontological truths. The cosmos, likewise, was perceived as āyāt, signs, guiding intellect from sensible particulars to metaphysical certainties. When a jurist moved from revealed injunction to analogical ruling he did so convinced that reality itself is coherent, because its Author is one. The very hierarchy of sources, Qurʾān → Sunnah → ijmāʿ → qiyas, rehearsed that ontological descent: the closer a statement stood to the font of Revelation, the higher its epistemic authority; reason’s task was to be midwife, not monarch.

Governing the entire enterprise was adab al-baḥth wa’l-munāẓara, the ethics of inquiry and disputation. Scholars approached a verse or ḥadīth first with tazkiyat al-nafs, purifying intention, lest desire warp perception. Debate partners began with salutations and prayer, acknowledged each other’s premises, and cited chains of transmission before launching critique. Underlying that etiquette was a metaphysical pledge: truth is singular, gifted by God, discoverable by disciplined minds acting in humility. Disagreement (ikhtilāf) was mercy not because every view is equally true, but because dialectic, practiced with adab, refines collective vision toward that singular reality. In such a scaffold, the categories of “good,” “beautiful,” “true,” and “lawful” were concentric. A juristic ruling divorced from the Qurʾān’s rhetorical texture risked ugliness; a theological gloss that jarred with Arabic usage signalled error; a personal piety out of tune with communal consensus hinted at imbalance. Education therefore trained not only the intellect but the ḏawq, the taste, with which one sensed harmony across legal, moral, and aesthetic registers.

This is the baseline that later centuries would bend: a hermeneutic architecture grounded in tawḥīd, guarded by linguistic precision, and policed by an ethics of humility before the text. Once that lattice is remembered, the magnitude of the modern displacement, its new drawers, new ends, and new styles of “critical” reading, comes into sharper relief. Culture, as we argued in Part I, installs drawers that pre-decide what counts as evidence, coherence, or outrage. When the classical Muslim mind opened the Qurʾān, its drawers were already labelled by a culture formed in the Prophet’s presence: authority is mercy, duty precedes entitlement, language is morally transparent, reality is stratified but harmonious. Hence a verse such as al-rijālu qawwāmūna ʿalā l-nisāʾ (4:34) was read almost without controversy as guardianship in the register of care. Qawwām evoked the shepherd hadith, the Prophet (saw) staying awake to mend Ṣafiyyah’s (ra) saddle-rope, ʿUmar (ra) patrolling Medina at night. Because the drawer “authority = burden” sat ready, commentators from al-Ṭabarī to Ibn ʿĀshūr expounded the verse as a mandate of provision, protection, and disciplined stewardship, not domination. Transpose the same verse into a mind whose drawers have been relabelled by global feminism, authority is power asymmetry, power is oppression, autonomy is moral baseline, and the semantic field flips. Now qawwām appears self-evidently unjust; the exegete rushes either to apologise (“contextual, no longer valid”) or to invert (“shared guardianship”). The text has not moved; the cultural loom beneath the reader has turned the verse through a different light.

Classical jurists approached textual tension with a default harmony drawer. When two hadiths seemed at odds, the instinct was al-jamʿ wa l-taʾwīl, reconciliation through context or layered meaning, because tawḥīd implied that divine speech cannot clash in ultimate intent. Modern historicist readers, trained in a culture that treats contradiction as data (“discontinuity reveals redaction layers”), isolate the tension to prove development: “This earlier verse was patriarchal, later verses soften it,” or “The Prophet (saw) evolved ethical maturity over time.” (nauzbillah) What for the pre-modern mind was a signal to search for synthesis becomes, for the modern mind, a licence to select one layer as authoritative and discard the rest.

Because the classical scaffold rested on drawers shared by jurist and layman alike, many interpretive choices that later generations debate were once virtually axiomatic. Take the concept of wilāyah. In a society whose daily practices treated guardianship as a form of solicitude, fathers lowering themselves to lace a child’s shoe, sultans donating half their estates to soup kitchens, it was self-evident that Qurʾān 4:34 (“ar-rijāl qawwāmūna ʿalā n-nisāʾ”) established a structure of care, not domination. When Ibn ʿAṭiyyah (d. 546/1151) glossed qawwāmūn as “those charged with maintenance, protection, and teaching,” no one heard paternalism in its modern pejorative sense; the drawer labelled riʿāyah (custodianship) was already primed by lived experience. Only after colonial civil codes recast male authority as legal privilege, stripped of economic and spiritual obligation, did wilāyah acquire, in many Muslim minds, the modern resonance of “patriarchal control.”

Consider wilāyah beyond gender. In classical Ottoman guilds the shaikh of dyers held wilāyah over apprentices: he set prices below market in Ramadan, forgave debts in drought, policed cheating. Because guardianship drawer meant custodial care, the apprentice saw oversight as security, not surveillance. Re-situate guild hierarchy in a post-industrial culture where supervision equals control, and the same wilāyah is re-branded “exploitative labour monopsony.” Islamic economists then feel compelled to defend market deregulation as more “just,” inadvertently privileging a neoliberal drawer over the prophetic one.

The drawer swap also alters linguistic sensitivity. Classical mufassirūn treated ellipsis (ḥadhf) and ambiguity (īhām) as deliberate divine artistry, so a verse with open texture invited awe and layered commentary. Modern textualists, habituated by positivist prose to distrust ambiguity as imprecision, press for definitional closure: “Does this verse permit X, yes or no?” When the Qurʾān resists binary coding, scepticism creeps in, “the text is unclear,” which quickly mutates into “the law is obsolete.”

Even the ethics of inquiry is recast. Adab al-munāẓara instructed students to phrase objections in the opponent’s terms before refuting, an acknowledgment that truth, while singular, might be clarified by the humbling exercise of repetition. Contemporary social-media disputation, schooled in algorithmic attention, rewards punchlines and demolitions. A fiqh difference becomes an identity marker: Ḥanafī vs. Salafī threads devolve into meme warfare because the drawer “debate as collective search” has been overwritten by “debate as personal brand defence.” Authority itself is re-coded. Shared drawers once governed reverence toward authority as much as toward text. Adab al-baḥth discouraged students from naming a teacher without prayer; disagreement began with “may Allah have mercy on him, but I see….” The premise was filial: knowledge descends through a chain of living bodies anchored to the Prophet ﷺ; to scorn the carrier is to dent the vessel. Modern critical culture, conversely, elevates suspicion as virtue. A seminarian schooled on Foucault feels empowered, morally obliged, to unmask every hierarchy as a will-to-power. The nafs interprets humility as servility, critique as emancipation, because the drawer marked authority has been relabelled oppression-until-proven-otherwise.

The pre-modern Muslim assumed chain of transmission to be an epistemic virtue; more intermediaries meant broader communal ratification. Western academic culture, after the Reformation, treated intermediaries as sites of corruption; immediacy to the source is purity. Hence students of Arabic in Western universities may privilege a lone papyrus reading over fourteen canonical qirāʾāt because the papyrus is older, closer to the imagined “original,” not filtered through centuries of communal recitation. The classical drawer “collective memory secures integrity” is replaced by “collective memory breeds distortion.” Likewise, working within tradition was the default hermeneutic posture. When al-Qarāfī (d. 684/1285) believed a Mālikī rule out of step with stronger evidence, he authored al-Furūq not to abandon the madhhab but to recalibrate its principles from the inside. The preservation of continuity was itself a virtue, paralleling the cosmological belief that creation is an ordered weave. By contrast, a graduate imbued with Enlightenment narratives of rupture sees originality as intellectual currency: to claim scholarly space he must challenge tradition, publish a “new reading,” declare a break with “medieval patriarchy.” The drawer labelled tajdīd (renewal) once meant reviving a dulled edge; now it signals discarding the old sword for a 3-D-printed prototype.

The shift shows in renderings of spiritual vocabulary. Taqwā translated in early English tafsīrs as “God-fearing piety” gradually becomes “mindfulness,” aligning with therapeutic culture. Mindfulness is inward, non-judgmental, divorced from legal consequence; taqwā in classical usage was outward-inward synergy, ever conscious of reckoning. The lexical substitution appears innocuous yet relocates the concept into a drawer no longer tethered to eschatology. Intertextual echoes fade likewise. Classical commentaries read Qurʾān through hadith, hadith through Qurʾān, both through Arabic poetics. Global Muslim universities now offer Qurʾān majors where hadith is an elective, balāgha optional, because the drawer “text sufficient unto itself” arrived via biblical higher criticism – Javed Ahmad Ghamidi sb doesn’t become a discovery but an invention of his era. A student may parse conditional clauses flawlessly yet miss that Sūrah al-Ikhlāṣ answers pre-Islamic debates on divine offspring echoed in tribal poetry.

Modern, often Western-trained, Muslim academics also invert burden of proof. Where classical scholars assumed the Sharia’s moral claims true until decisively disproven, today’s academic begins with secular moral intuitions and asks the text to justify variance. Polygyny must defend itself before a jury of liberal norms; laws of inheritance stand charged of inequality unless statistical repartees acquit them. The pattern matches uṣūl al-fiqh in form (identify operative cause, weigh evidence) but imports alien major premises unseen. Temporal framing compounds the issue. The Gregorian calendar denotes historical epochs by secular milestones, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, Post-Modernity, while the Qurʾān uses epochs of revelation, prophetic missions, and eschatological stages. Historians trained in a Eurocentric timeline naturally periodise Islamic law as “pre-modern, medieval, early modern,” implying obsolescence. The drawer “history as ascent toward secular rationality” nudges even believing scholars to bracket verses as “7th-century context.”

Visual literacy has altered hermeneutic presuppositions too. The omnipresent photograph teaches the brain that seeing is believing. When Āyah al-Kursī describes God’s Throne, classical exegetes cautioned against imagining form; modern readers, saturated with CGI, demand either a literal image or a metaphor dismissible as mythology. If no image satisfies, the mind shelves the verse under “poetic ornament,” downgrading its theological import. Finally, the drawer overhaul influences prioritisation of maqāṣid (objectives). Classical jurists listed preservation of religion first; modern Muslim reformists, echoing human-rights discourse, often relocate “preservation of life” or “reason” to the apex, leaving “religion” negotiable. The list is the same, but the order discloses whose culture framed the hermeneutic judgement.

Urf, custom, offers a final lens. Classical jurists held that local usage (ʿāda) carries legal weight unless it directly violates an explicit text. Marital dowry norms, commercial partnership forms, even oath formulae were validated by communal practice; the law assumed that Providence shapes cultures toward tacit wisdom. When Ibn ʿĀbidīn resolved a Damascene dispute over wedding expenses, he invoked the maxim, al-maʿrūf ʿurfan ka-l-mashrūṭ shartan (“what custom determines is as binding as a written condition”). Today’s secularised mind, trained to esteem Universal Declaration of Human Rights and distrust parochial difference, considers custom a suspect relic. The positivist drawer ranks codified statute above lived practice, so it is the local cultural text that is assumed archaic and the local song that must be silenced for international “best practice.”

A concrete illustration: inheritance rules. Classical culture, steeped in joint-family economics and male duty of provision, could not imagine the Qurʾānic shares (2:11–12) as unfair; they ratified existing patterns of security. Division of property, the way it is done, seems appropriate in its cultural milieu, the female gets gold, the male gets the house. Modern readers, socialised into dual-income nuclear households, open the same verses and same customs under a drawer titled gender equity as identical shares and see inequality. Historicists propose temporal supersession; activists demand legislative override. The dissonance is not in the Scripture or in the custom; it is in the shifted cognitive filing cabinet.

Or consider the ḥudūd. Pre-modern Muslims, accustomed to public sacredness and slow judicial procedure, saw in these penalties a sombre guardrail seldom applied. Cultural drawers associated crime with moral injury to the divine order, not mere offence against social contract. Post-colonial minds, formed by utilitarian penology and news-cycle imagery, perceive disproportionate violence. The instinct is to moralise against the text, then mine for contextual escape clauses, finally to advocate total repeal, steps driven less by juridical evidence than by drawers relabelled through centuries of secular humanitarian discourse.

Even environmental verses illustrate the clash. Classical exegetes read “We did not create the heavens and the earth in vain” (38:27) as an ontological anchor: purposiveness pervades all layers of being, calling for contemplative awe. Corporate sustainability managers now cite the same ayah in ESG brochures, framed as “faith-based case for green investment.” The text is domesticated into a KPI (Key Performance Indicator); the rhetorical power to summon worship is swapped for a marketing utility.

These examples illustrate a single dynamic: shared cultural drawers make certain readings self-evident, others implausible. When the drawers change, hermeneutic instincts change. What al-Shāṭibī called “inborn linguistic taste” (ḏawq) is now fed by Netflix subtitles; what al-Juwaynī framed as “rational necessity” (ḍarūrīyāt ʿaqliyya) is recalculated by behavioural economics. Unless the reader is conscious of the loom beneath his exegesis, he may mistake imported reflexes for textual inevitabilities, imagining himself rigorous when he is merely repeating the catechism of a culture not his own.

What binds these examples is the cultural loom’s silent script: change the assumptions of language, authority, purpose, and norm, and the exegesis will follow suit. When care turns to control, harmony to contradiction, lineage to hegemony, local custom to backwardness, the hermeneutical edifice bends accordingly. Classical scholars differed, but inside a shared cosmology; modern interpreters resemble one another across confessions because they share the same imported drawers. This is why contemporary debates often misfire. Traditionalists cite texts presuming pooled drawers; progressives read with drawers furnished by globalised education. Each side sounds unintelligible to the other, not from malice but from cognitive non-overlap. The conversation can be rescued only by making the drawers visible, recovering the metaphysical scaffolding that once braided uṣūl al-tafsīr, uṣūl al-fiqh, and ʿilm al-balāgha into a single, God-oriented hermeneutic. Until such a reclamation occurs the modern instinct will continue to isolate verses, historicise norms, and centralise autonomy, while classical texts will continue to baffle or embarrass. Recognition of this cultural-hermeneutic link is therefore the first step toward any meaningful renewal: we must rebuild the drawers before we rearrange their contents.

Yet for the sake of analytic clarity it helps to isolate, one last time, the three engines that do the daily work of relabelling drawers inside the exegetical mind: formal curriculum, global normative regimes, and the sub-sensory drip of minuscule injections. Each attacks a different layer of the hermeneutic scaffold, method, moral horizon, and affect, and together they tilt the entire interpretive edifice.

First, the modern curriculum. In most Muslim universities the core of Qurʾānic and ḥadīth study is now filtered through the methodological canons of Western philology and Semitic linguistics. Survey courses present the Qurʾān as a “Near-Eastern discourse” shaped by late-antique sectarian debate; doctoral seminars teach source-criticism modelled on the Documentary Hypothesis; students are drilled to hunt for redaction seams, variant codices, sociological motives. The operative question shifts from What does God will here and now? to What did early believers think they were doing then? Legal theory follows suit: uṣūl al-fiqh is recast as a case study in pre-modern jurisprudential pluralism, useful for mapping intellectual history but no longer self-authorising. Normative authority migrates to the footnotes, important to “stakeholders” but methodologically bracketed, while historiography and linguistics occupy the throne once held by revelation and ijmā. A generation trained in this pedagogy approaches 4:34 or the ḥudūd not as living imperatives to be integrated, but as artefacts to be periodised, critiqued, and selectively curated for contemporary “values alignment.”

Second, globalisation’s rights culture supplies the supra-textual horizon against which all scriptural claims are now silently measured. From Indonesian gender-equity bills funded by UN agencies to Moroccan family-law reforms steered by EU partnership criteria, policy elites learn that legitimacy, and foreign investment, depend on compliance with CEDAW articles, ESG dashboards, and DEI metrics. These frameworks encode a moral ontology in which the autonomous individual precedes community and positive law outranks sacred mandate. When jurists revisit inheritance shares or male guardianship, they do so with an eye on constitutional courts that cite the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; when a Qurʾānic verse appears out of step, the hermeneutical instinct is to relativise or postpone it rather than contest the global charter. Thus the hierarchy of proofs that once placed Qurʾān and Sunnah above all is quietly inverted: an asterisk from Geneva can overrule an explicit ayah in Cairo or Kuala Lumpur because the drawer labelled “universal human rights” has been installed higher than “divine ordinance.”

Third, minuscule injections prime the emotional palette long before formal study begins. BuzzFeed listicles on “Five most problematic Qurʾān verses,” Marvel-cinematic takes on female empowerment, TikTok rants that conflate ḥijāb with patriarchy, all drip micro-doses of suspicion that accumulate into default affect. Subtitling choices in Turkish dramas translate qawwām as “controller,” ḥayāʾ as “shyness,” coding classical virtues as psychological defects. Instagram carousel infographics reduce complex jurisprudence to colour-coded scales of “toxic” versus “liberating,” teaching the limbic system to flinch before the mind has parsed the argument. Because these cues ride the pleasure circuits of humour, music, and visual thrill, they install their value assumptions pre-critically: by the time a student enrols in Qurʾān 101, his inner ear already twitches at verses on hierarchy, his aesthetic sense already equates beauty with cinematic symmetry, not rhetorical elision. The exegete who feels “unease” with a hadith often mistakes that visceral conditioning for moral insight.

Curriculum establishes the new method, globalisation the new yardstick, minuscule media the new gut reaction. Together they form a hermeneutical feedback loop that treats divine speech as historical data, ranks it beneath international norms, and bathes every engagement in a prior mood of scepticism. Recognising these mechanisms does not settle every interpretive dispute, but it restores honesty to the conversation: many of today’s “rational” objections to revelation are less discoveries of reason than rehearsals of schooling, market incentives, and meme culture. Reconstructing a God-centred hermeneutic will therefore require more than quoting classical commentaries; it demands re-cultivating the drawers, methodological, moral, and affective, through which those commentaries once felt self-evident.

Having said what we had to, one much also understand that culture and hermeneutics do not occupy parallel tracks; they are concentric spirals that write and rewrite one another in real time. When a community’s shared grammar of honour, hierarchy, and sacrament pervades its streets and homes, the exegete who opens a tafsīr absorbs those same categories through his skin: he reads wilāyah as paternal solicitude because the neighbourhood patriarch still spends himself for widows; he reads ṣabr as active perseverance because the marketplace still pauses for the noon prayer. Conversely, once curricula, global norms, and meme loops have relabelled the drawers, authority as coercion, patience as passivity, ritual as optics, the “scholar” returns to the text with a new instinct: authority must be minimised, patience problem-satisficed, ritual re-branded. At that moment hermeneutics ceases to stabilise culture and begins to license its erosion. Practice trails exegesis, and exegesis is now downstream of an imported culture.

This dialectic is why cultural attrition constitutes a spiritual danger, not merely an anthropological shift. Traditional Muslim societies enveloped religious law inside a thick weave of courtesy, poetry, craft, and kinship that taught the soul to want what the Sharīʿa commands before the intellect argued for it. Fitrah recognised itself in every utensil: clay cups that cooled water by slow evaporation reminded the drinker of restraint; wedding songs praising Fāṭimah (ra) and ʿAlī (as) tuned the heart toward conjugal reverence before any sermon on marital rights. Take away this scaffolding and the same legal duties feel abrasive, abstract, imposed from without. Islam survives in the law books, but it is practised as compliance shorn of flavour, soon to be negotiated down or abandoned because the affective soil has been stripped.

Salafism, in its late-modern iterations, is both symptom and accelerant of this condition. Its rallying cry, “back to the pristine text, uncontaminated by culture”, sounds pious but presupposes the very Enlightenment drawers we have critiqued: suspicion of historical mediation, privileging of de-contextualised proof-texts, binary logic that equates complexity with corruption. By flattening fourteen centuries of devotional artistry into “bidʿah,” it performs a cultural auto-immune attack: the protective tissue that once channelled revelation into daily delights is declared cancerous and excised. The result is a brittle literalism that must borrow global pop idioms, slick YouTube cuts, logo merchandise, conference arenas, to fill the cultural void it just created. That such movements thrive is evidence that the curricular/global/injection triad has already prepared the ground: a generation taught to distrust tradition can be rallied to any ideology that promises a shortcut to purity.

Once religion is prised loose from its cultural body the next reduction is inevitable: from communal law to private spirituality. Stripped of the rituals and spaces that make transcendence tangible, courtyards of dhikr, guild waqfs, saintly lineages, Islam is re-imagined as halal mindfulness or ethical minimalism. Prayer becomes “meditative benefit,” zakāh a tax write-off, fasting an intermittent-fasting hack. Western therapeutic categories step in to organise the soul: self-esteem over tawāḍuʿ, self-care over zuhd, boundaries over brotherhood. What remains is a psychological wellness kit circumscribed by personal choice, incapable of commanding sacrifice or forging solidarity. At that point nihilism lies only one disappointment away: if religion is a mood-regulator and the mood fails to lift, why persist?

Family is the first institutional casualty of this cognitive realignment. The joint household once served as madrasa, welfare office, and retirement plan, a concrete demonstration that God’s mercy descends through ordered dependence. Western individualism, smuggled via curriculum and media, relabels dependence as humiliation and hierarchy as abuse. Children learn that adulthood equals residential independence; ageing parents become a “care burden” for state agencies; marriage is negotiated as two sovereign individuals with prenup clauses. Break the family and you break the primary transmitter of religious memory; Qurʾānic tales heard at a grandmother’s knee are replaced by Disney origin myths, and the epistemic chain snaps without a sound.

The reconfigured drawers also corrode Islamic certainty (yaqīn). Scepticism, once a methodological tool for scientific inquiry, is universalised into an existential stance: every claim to truth must pass laboratory verification or be parked in the bin of “personal belief.” Revelation thus competes with conspiracy podcasts, all “narratives” awaiting fact-checks that never arrive. Submission (islām) is recast as blind obedience, freedom as perpetual doubt. Yet a psychology habituated to doubt cannot muster the existential stakes that make worship transformative; salah becomes physical therapy, duʿā wishful thinking. Under the humanitarian drawer, even Hellfire is re-interpreted as metaphor, Paradise as self-actualisation, until eschatology dissolves into moral platitude.

Economic practice follows suit. With family safety-nets gone and metaphysical horizons flattened, homo islamicus joins homo economicus: value equals price, barakah an archaic superstition. Sūrat al-Baqarah’s warning against riba reads like a primitive aversion to “healthy credit markets”; inheritance shares look inefficient against venture funding; the waqf model of frozen capital is castigated as unproductive in GDP spreadsheets. The Sharīʿa’s economic distinctiveness fades, replaced by Islamic-labelled index funds that track the same speculative benchmarks, so long as the compliance officer certifies “no sin stocks.”

What, then, is ultimately at stake is not just loss of poetry or dress codes but the semantic core of Islam itself. When language drawers change, shirk becomes “pluralism,” takdhīb (denial) becomes “alternative perspective,” and dīn shrinks to “faith tradition.” Without conscious resistance, Muslims wake to find their creed translated back to them in terms that cancel its claims. The trajectory ends where Western late-modernity is already headed: religion as boutique spirituality, selectable at will, comforting in sorrow, irrelevant to law, politics, or economics – a scented candle for the soul.

Salafism’s rise, paradoxically, prefigures this endpoint even as it rails against Westernisation: by isolating text from living culture it prepares younger minds to accept a culture-less religion, which the secular order can easily re-package as private eccentricity. When the literalist movement collapses under its own rigidity, its adherents seldom return to the thick Sunni heritage; they migrate to agnosticism or self-curated Sufism, confirming that a tree severed from soil cannot long bear fruit.

Re-stitching hermeneutics to culture, therefore, is not a nostalgic indulgence but a wager on the survival of meaning itself. It requires resurrecting family as covenant, marketplace as moral theatre, mosque as community vortex; teaching Arabic not merely for tafsīr exams but as the bloodstream of revelation; reviving aesthetic forms, nasheed, calligraphy, regional dress, that incarnate doctrine in fabric and sound. Only in such re-textured environments can the drawers of mercy, hierarchy, and awe click back into place so that divine speech is once again heard as commandment and consolation rather than historical artifact.

If Muslims fail in this labour, the road ahead is clear. Religion will fracture into therapeutic shards, morality into lifestyle brands, the ummah into consumer demographics, and the Qurʾān into a citation index for TED talks. At that horizon even disbelief loses its drama; the heart no longer rebels against God, it merely scrolls past Him. The final victory of the imported drawers is not apostasy but indifference, a civilisation too distracted to ask why it ever needed revelation at all.

A further casualty of drawer-shift is sacred time. In the classical rhythm, sunrise summoned Fajr’s quiet awe, mid-afternoon bent to ʿAṣr’s sobriety, and the lunar month planted societal expectation of communal rupture (Ramadan) and collective jubilation (ʿĪd). Global productivity metrics, however, slice time into billable fifteen-minute blocks; success is velocity, not cadence. The tahajjud hour is invaded by trans-Pacific Zoom calls, Tarāwīḥ compressed between Netflix episodes, and the Friday khuṭbah timed to the minute so commuters can reclaim “lost efficiency.” Exegetes attuned to this tempo now read “wa’dhkur isma rabbika bukratan wa aṣīlā” (remember your Lord morning and evening) as aspirational metaphor, not calendrical obligation – another example of practice trailing a re-calibrated hermeneutic clock.

Digital mediation re-writes ritual presence. Livestreamed funerals, QR-code charity kiosks, and metaverse ḥajj demos promise access without inconvenience. Yet embodiment was not an incidental detail; it was the crucible in which patience, humility, and mutual care were forged. When a funeral becomes a Facebook reaction, the Surah Y/9-30 recitation that once wrestled grief into communal submission devolves into an emoji. Scholarship follows culture: a rising chorus of fiqh essays now explores “virtual congregation validity,” treating physical proximity as negotiable. The fiqh question is legitimate, but the speed and appetite for relaxation signal a drawer already labeled “efficiency supersedes corporeal solidarity.”

Language, too, is undergoing erosion beyond mere translation. Arabic’s trilateral roots link form to meaning; breaking that homo-logical bond severs concept from cosmology. Children taught Islam exclusively in English adopt a lexical field where God is a generic deity, prayer a meditative pose, prophet an inspired activist. The Qurʾān, stripped of its sonic lattice, becomes one book among many “scriptures,” its polemical edge dulled by interfaith marketing. As Arabic retreats to the margins of global Muslim schooling, exegetes increasingly rely on English concordances compiled by Orientalists whose philological notes embed Protestant assumptions about scripture – a second-order drawer swap invisible to readers who cannot double-check the Arabic.

The drawer realignment also distorts the notion of social reform. Classical jurists spoke of iṣlāḥ – mending a fabric whose basic weave is sound. Contemporary Muslim activism, re-educated in the binaries of Marx or Rawls, talks of “deconstruction” and “re-imagining.” Hence campaigns for mahr reform or abolition of kafāla rarely begin with maqāṣid analysis but with UN white-paper benchmarks. Legal methodology is retrofitted ex post facto to the desired policy, turning uṣūl al-fiqh from compass into rubber stamp. Apprentices who see this pattern repeated internalise that scriptural adjudication equals legal validation of prior secular ideals – another loop where culture dictates hermeneutic workflow.

Academia institutionalises the shift. Grant proposals from Muslim scholars often ape Western critical theory jargon – “intersectional gender reading of hadith” – because funding bodies flag “confessional scholarship” as suspect. Over time the peer-review filter ensures that only historicist or neo-Marxist readings secure tenure. A graduate student who longs to study bayān or sarf as gateways to spiritual insight learns that such pursuits are “non-rigorous,” steering him instead toward discourse analysis of ḥadīth power structures. The outcome is a learned clergy of doubt: impeccably trained in critique, ill-equipped for conviction, mimicking secular disciplines even while quoting Qurʾān in epigraphs.

The implications for collective identity are stark. Islam has survived previous political collapses, the fall of Baghdad, the loss of Andalusia, because domestic culture absorbed the shock, re-knitting law and lore in new geographies. A cognitive collapse is different: once drawers relabel West as aspirational norm and Revelation as negotiable heritage, the prophetic claim that “this dīn will reach every place” flips into a fear that no place will sustain the dīn. Communal arguments then devolve into brand wars, Sufism versus Salafism, Progressives versus Traditionals, each packaging fragments for niche audiences but none regaining the unified grammar that once made disagreement merciful.

Even nihilism, the endpoint, emerges first as hermeneutic fatigue. A teenager taught that every verse is “contextual,” every hadith “probable,” every moral claim “situated,” soon wonders whether any statement can command commitment. If law is politics in disguise and spirituality a dopamine hack, then why not construct a private meaning? Salafism’s literalism offers temporary relief, clarity without culture, but its austerity often drives adherents towards the opposite pole: disillusioned quietism or agnostic drift. Thus the polarity of hyper-textualism and post-textual relativism is not a contradiction but a pendulum within the same flattened cosmos.

What, then, is required to arrest the slide? Not merely quoting Ibn Jarīr or al-Zamakhsharī, though their voices must be revived, but rebuilding the infratextual habitat where their insights resonate. That means re-culturing public space: restoring courtyard architecture where generations mix, funding waqf theatres for devotional poetry, incentivising family businesses that anchor kin networks, teaching Arabic prosody alongside coding so the next engineer can hear surah al-Raḥmān as music, not cryptic prose. It means a pedagogy where grammar drills are preceded by ablution etiquette, logical fallacies cross-referenced with Qurʾānic polemics, and science labs framed by Surat al-ʿAlaq, recitation as the primal technology.

Simultaneously, hermeneutics must re-inhale spirituality. That entails re-legitimising disciplined Sufism, the very dimension Salafism and Modernism, sisters borne of the same mother, disparaged, as the heart-school that tunes desire to divine purpose before the intellect parses syntax. A jurist steeped in dhikr feels wilāyah as a mercy long before he explains it. Without this heart-prep, even the best technical commentary reads like property law, producing compliance without devotion.

Finally, we need epistemic triage: interrogate every drawer installed by colonial syllabi and global media. Which analytic tools illuminate the Qurʾān’s intent and which smuggle secular premises? Which human-rights concepts align with maqāṣid and which invert them? Such triage cannot be performed by solitary scholars; it demands an ummatic conversation rooted in the twin securities of classical method and living culture.

If we fail to undertake that reclamation, we inherit a civilisation fluent in sacred terminology yet deaf to its call, a community whose mosques still echo Allāhu akbar but whose young see infinity only in Netflix scrollbars. In that landscape, the eventual extinction of meaning will not arrive with a bang of apostasy but the hush of boredom. And boredom, history teaches, is fertile ground for any new creed, materialist, nationalist, or messianic, that promises thrill. Thus the contest for drawers is ultimately a contest for the soul’s horizon: whether it will once again gaze past the skyline toward the One, or remain forever entranced by flickering images on a handheld screen. With this recognition, Part III closes: culture crafts hermeneutics, hermeneutics manufactures culture, and both together sculpt the possibilities of faith. To recover Islam’s integrality we must restore the grammar of meaning, methodological, moral, and aesthetic, before the last threads of the old tapestry fray beyond repair.

Link to Our Culture – Part 1 – What is Culture?

Link to Our Culture – Part 2 – Forces of Displacement

Link to Our Culture – Part 3 – End of Religion

Link to Our Culture – Part 4 – Towards a Reform Movement

Link to Our Culture – Part 5 – A Reform that Works

Link to Our Culture – Part 6 – The Road to Medina