How the West actually rose, and why the Muslim decline is a myth

A 20-year-old from Waziristan who reads four hours a day

Muzamil opens by admitting he usually avoids this kind of conversation. He is, by his own description, an academic, data-backed person who steers clear of religion and culture because those threads rile people up. Then he found someone writing what he calls “interesting academic threads” on Twitter and invited him on. What he did not know was that the writer was 20 years old. The episode that follows is, he says, one of the most insightful he has done in a long time — not for the knowledge alone, but for how the young man connects information across many streams.

The guest is Shershah Khan, known on Twitter as @sirsea. He was born in North Waziristan, in Miranshah, into a family that had lived there for generations — his great-grandfather was a congressman in the all-India Congress. The family moved to Peshawar in 2009, after the civil conflict made schooling impossible. Suicide bombings were hitting schools; his father, a local teacher, decided his son’s education could not wait. Shershah arrived speaking neither the Peshawari dialect of Pashto nor Urdu, failed his entrance test, and then scored 89 on his first mid-term because his mother told him he had no choice but to pass.

He reads three to four hours a day. The habit started during the pandemic, in a gap year after twelfth grade, when he was at home with nothing to do but read and think.

The tribal order that ran without police

Before the books, there is the place. Most Pakistanis, Muzamil notes with an apology for the stereotype, know Waziristan only as the capital of drone strikes — a land that was never humanised. Shershah pushes back with memory. Before the Soviet-Afghan war pushed refugees and instability across the border, it was, in his father’s telling, a peaceful place like any other.

What it had instead of a state was a tribal system. Shershah describes it as a “bottom-up social order”: because everyone in a tribe is related, cooperation and trust come from kinship rather than from courts. Markets stayed orderly, trade happened, disputes were debated in a system he calls genuinely democratic — all without police, judges, or imposed law from above. It is the same observation Muzamil has heard from people in Bajaur, and it sets up a thread the conversation keeps returning to: institutions, not ideas, are usually what hold a society together or let it fall apart.

Pseudo-knowledge and the Dunning-Kruger trap

At Edwards College, Shershah encountered intellectual discourse for the first time — and was struck by how uniform it was. In the literary society’s book clubs, he found people rarely discussing the actual book; most had not read it. They gathered to perform the same handful of positions: religion is oppression, morality does not exist, life cracked open by a single Camus novel. He started arguing the opposite side, half out of contrarian instinct, until the search for ammunition turned into a genuine search for knowledge.

His frame for the problem comes from Tom Nichols’s The Death of Expertise and Steven Smith’s The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse. The trouble, he argues, is pseudo-knowledge: you read one popular science book on evolution, even one written by an academic, and you feel you have cracked the code. People defend ideas passionately without knowing their intricate details. Muzamil maps this onto the Dunning-Kruger curve — a little competence produces enormous confidence — and predicts the current hyper-polarised climate is a ten-to-fifteen-year cycle that ends in despair, when people realise how little they actually knew. Shershah adds a wider point: it is not only the internet. Universities that hand out degrees, he argues, have themselves helped democratise knowledge in a way that quietly damaged expertise.

Four stories about decline, all wrong

Then the substance arrives. The dominant story about the Islamic intellectual tradition, Shershah says, is a story of decline — and it comes in four versions, each of which the academic record rejects.

The first is the classical one: Al-Ghazali wrote The Incoherence of the Philosophers, declared maths “the work of the devil,” and ended rationality in the Muslim world. Shershah is blunt. That line does not exist in Al-Ghazali’s work. He points to Frank Griffel, an authority on the subject, and calls the claim a flat-earth theory — not a competing view among historians, but one no serious academic entertains. Its real source is popular YouTubers, bloggers, and non-expert authors, including, he says, figures in Pakistan’s own liberal commentary who have propagated it for years.

The second is that the Mongols destroyed everything when they sacked Baghdad — the House of Wisdom burned, the rivers running black with ink. Also a fairy tale, Shershah says. Baghdad was hit in December 1258 but was not even as badly damaged as the Central Asian and Persian cities, like Nishapur, levelled thirty years earlier. Within a month its libraries were functioning again. The third is Ottoman orthodoxy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the destruction of astronomical observatories, he notes, was about astrology, a pseudoscience, not science — and the largest observatory in the world was built at Maragha after Baghdad fell.

What he is building toward is that the classical period ended with Al-Ghazali only to give way to a flourishing post-classical tradition — four philosophical projects, by his account, including those of Suhrawardi and the genius Fakhr al-Din al-Razi — running into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He keeps naming books because he is careful to insist he is not the authority: Griffel’s The Formation of Post-Classical Philosophy in Islam, Peter Adamson’s recent work on Avicenna, Khaled El-Rouayheb on Arabic logic. The recurring message is that scholars are only now scratching the surface, because for so long everyone assumed there was nothing there to study.

The rupture was institutional

The fourth narrative is the one Shershah actually believes — and it is not about ideas at all. By the nineteenth century the Ottomans had suffered a series of humiliating defeats to Russia and entered an age of crisis, realising they could no longer match the western European states on the battlefield. They reformed.

To understand what those reforms broke, you have to understand the waqf — the endowment that funded the tradition. Education in the Muslim world was free; a teacher taking money from a student was, in Al-Ghazali’s telling, close to shameful. Madrasas, their libraries, their copyists, their lodgings for scholars were all sustained by endowments, which accounted for roughly 60% of real estate in the Ottoman Empire. Facing European encroachment, the reformers redirected that wealth toward centralising the state — rail lines to move reinforcements, governmental projects. By 1850 the money flowing to the waqf had fallen to zero. The natural habitat that had sustained twelve hundred years of scholarship collapsed.

Shershah calls the result an “epistemic rupture” — a break that severed the present from the tradition. It is why, after roughly 1900, Muslim scholars suddenly began writing about socialism and Islam, capitalism and Islam, nationalism and Islam, human rights and Islam. The tradition had become homeless, and homeless ideas attach themselves to whatever stronger narrative is nearby. He quotes Maududi: the prevailing philosophies of the world are always those written by the hands holding the sword. For the references he points to Wael Hallaq and to Asad Ahmed’s Palimpsest of Themselves.

The cleric and the scientist were the same man

This reframes the madrasa, the institution Pakistan’s urban class most loves to dismiss. Muzamil lays out the familiar charge — that madrasas produce only ignorance and extremism — and then refuses the easy reading, arguing that correlation is not causation. Other countries teach Islam intensively and do not get Pakistan’s outcomes; the problem is thirty years of geopolitics that leveraged religion, not religion itself.

Shershah goes further. The image of clerics chasing scientists, he argues, is a Christian reading of Islamic history, projected onto it by the French thinker Ernest Renan out of his own quarrel with the Catholic Church. In fact the greatest theologians were often the greatest scientists. Ibn Sina considered himself a conservative Muslim. Al-Shatir, one of the sharpest mathematicians in the Muslim world, worked as a mosque timekeeper, and his models — along with Tusi’s — were read by Copernicus on the way to heliocentrism. The Nizamiyya madrasa curriculum, he notes, was full of astronomy and mathematics: the curriculum, as one scholar puts it, “not of an extremist but of a mathematician.”

On extremism he reaches for data rather than impression. On Gallup’s “waves on violence” study, when people were asked whether civilians could be killed to achieve national goals, majorities in several first-world countries answered yes — by his account around 60% of Americans, against roughly 12% in Pakistan. He cites liberal scholars like Barry Buzan, and a tradition running through John Locke and John Stuart Mill, who justified slavery and the elimination of Native Americans on the logic that land belongs only to those who cultivate it. The point is not to score against the West but to puncture the assumption that the willingness to kill innocents is a uniquely Muslim, uniquely madrasa pathology.

How the West actually rose

This is the question Muzamil has been driving toward: what gave rise to the Western world order, and will it last? Shershah starts by defining terms. The “West” that dominated the world is narrow — northwestern Europe plus North America, the England, France, Germany, and Netherlands that did the colonising. Europe as a single category is only about 200 years old, popularised in the eighteenth century once the Catholic Church’s Christendom faded and needed replacing.

The three pillars Eurocentric history claims — Greek thought, Roman law, Christianity — were all oriented toward or born in the East. Alexander marched east to the Indus, never to Germany; the Greek archaeological remains sit in Central and South Asia. Rome’s centre of gravity was the Persian frontier. Christianity was born in the Middle East. So how did the periphery come to rule? Drawing on Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads — a book he taught a five-lecture course on, with Frankopan himself joining over a call — Shershah gives three reasons. First, northwestern Europe sat at the periphery of the ancient trade routes and wanted in. Second, it mastered the seas: travelling overland meant paying a tax at every jurisdiction, so resource-poor states built ships instead, sailing around the Cape to undercut every middleman. Third, war. European conflict ran at a frequency without parallel — hundred years’ war, thirty years’ war, one bleeding into the next. As Frankopan puts it, only a European author would call the natural state of man a constant state of violence, and only a European author would have been right.

Muzamil and Shershah are careful to read this as a feature of civilisation and environment, not the people — extreme climates and finite resources breeding a survival instinct, against the prosperity of tropical, rice-growing societies that felt less need to fight. War then funded the science: Newton, Euler, and Galileo working on projectile trajectories to improve artillery; vaccines developed because British soldiers in West Africa kept dying. Colonial plunder produced the surplus wealth that built the universities — Maslow’s hierarchy at the scale of a civilisation. And the Enlightenment, Shershah insists, was an age of debates, not a European invention: tolerance borrowed from the Ottoman model, Leibniz urging Europe to adopt Chinese statecraft, and individualism traced by Joseph Henrich’s The Weirdest People in the World to the medieval church’s ban on cousin marriage, which dissolved kinship ties centuries before Protestantism told every individual to read the Bible alone. The West, in Frankopan’s phrase, was “late to the drama.” Its dominance is barely 300 years old, and it was largely unexpected — a matter of luck and chance as much as design.

Climate, not current affairs

Will it last? On day-to-day politics Shershah cheerfully admits he is clueless, and Muzamil agrees that immediate prediction is a kind of drama best left alone. History, though, lets you extrapolate the long arc, and the arc points back east. When Shershah asked Frankopan what the next fifteen to twenty years hold for Asia and Africa, the answer was climate. The decisions made in the next fifteen years, Frankopan told him, will determine the next thousand. Water crises — Africa’s total consumption is less than New York City’s — will drive resource conflict, civil unrest, and the fascist leaders who rise by promising the hopeless a way out. He hates saying it, but Shershah expects things to get worse before they turn.

The conversation closes at the hour-forty-five mark on Pakistan in 2050, when Shershah will be 47. He is hopeful on one axis above all: education. His entire presence on Twitter, he says, exists to reform it. He is in his fifth semester of computer science, self-studying machine learning, working toward what he calls hybrid intelligence — combining the best of human and machine. He wants to stay in Pakistan, on the logic that maximum value is created where you are most needed. For a 20-year-old who arrived in Peshawar unable to read the school diary, it is a striking place to land: not crying that no one understands the tradition, but proposing to rebuild the institution that once carried it.