The Crisis of the Modern World

News:

In Türkiye’s Siverek district, a 19-year-old former school student opened random fire at a school with a pump-action shotgun. Sixteen people were injured, and the attacker committed suicide at the scene. One day after this incident, in the city of Kahramanmaraş, a school attack carried out by a 14-year-old eighth-grade student resulted in 10 deaths and 12 injuries. The attacker was captured dead.

Comment:

The recent acts of violence that have spread even to educational institutions in Şanlıurfa’s Siverek district and in Kahramanmaraş have opened deep wounds in the conscience of society. These attacks, in which students and teachers were targeted, are not merely isolated public-order incidents; rather, they are concrete manifestations of a social corruption and social decay that have long been growing from within. This grave picture forces us to face a fundamental question: Why is humanity being dragged into such a degree of social collapse?

At the root of this social decay and moral erosion, observed not only in Türkiye but on a global scale, lies the removal of Islamic values and fear of Allah from the center of life and their replacement with a completely materialistic understanding. When the secular-based capitalist system imprisons human beings within a spiral of money, interest, power, and pleasure, we encounter what we call social decay: the exhaustion of values. For a person whose values have been exhausted, right and wrong, good and evil, no longer have any importance.

A secular education and legal system stripped of Islamic values falls into the misconception that crime can be prevented only through penal sanctions and that criminals can be fought through a security-based approach, while the real issue—fighting crime itself—is overlooked.

Fighting crime is achieved through faith, correct ideas and perspectives, good morals, replacing laws that damage social relations with the rulings of Allah that reform these relations, eliminating the causes that push people toward committing crimes, and implementing preventive mechanisms before crimes are committed.

What will prevent a person from doing evil in a place where no one sees him is the fear of Allah and sense of responsibility in his heart. As stated in the Noble Qur’an:

[وَمَنْ أَعْرَضَ عَن ذِكْرِي فَإِنَّ لَهُ مَعِيشَةً ضَنكًا] “And whoever turns away from My remembrance, surely he will have a life of hardship...” [Surah Taha: 124].

As society moves away from the limits set by Allah and from His remembrance, it is faced with a life at the lowest of the low, without being bound to any value or rule, as a result of the concept of freedom offered by the modern world. It must not be forgotten that human beings progress through the idea of being bound by rules. Lawlessness leads to primitiveness. Allah, the Lord of the worlds, sent His religion—a system of Islamic rules—in order to elevate mankind, who becomes backward and primitive because of lawlessness, to a noble life.

[أَرَأَيْتَ مَنِ اتَّخَذَ إِلَهَهُ هَوَاهُ أَفَأَنتَ تَكُونُ عَلَيْهِ وَكِيلًا * أَمْ تَحْسَبُ أَنَّ أَكْثَرَهُمْ يَسْمَعُونَ أَوْ يَعْقِلُونَ إِنْ هُمْ إِلَّا كَالْأَنْعَامِ بَلْ هُمْ أَضَلُّ سَبِيلًا]

“Have you seen the one who takes his own desire as his god? Will you then be a guardian over him? Or do you think that most of them hear or understand? They are only like cattle; rather, they are even further astray from the path.” [Surah Al-Furqan 43–44].

The strongest bond that holds the social fabric together is mutual love, respect, and the principle of “commanding what is right and forbidding what is wrong” (al-amr bi’l-ma‘ruf wa’n-nahy ‘ani’l-munkar). However, today, under the influence of the secular way of life, these values have eroded, and individualism has reached its peak.

In the education system, placing morality and proper conduct after technical knowledge, and in law, seeing justice merely as “compliance with laws” while treating “truthfulness and justice” as unimportant, accelerates social decay. The isolation of Islamic values from life prepares the ground for social collapse and crises.

These painful events serve as a warning. We can protect our schools not with metal detectors or police measures, but by filling children’s hearts with love of Allah and the awareness that they will be held accountable before Allah. The antidote to violence and corruption is not the pleasure-centered life imposed by modernism, but a life upon the straight path offered by Islam.

In conclusion, this period of crisis through which Türkiye and the world are passing can only be overcome through a societal structure reconciled with revelation and an Islamic order centered on the fear of Allah. Salvation lies in living a life in accordance with the purpose of our creation.

Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Remzi Özer