Civilization is not established by politicians, sultans, rulers or kings; the civilization cause rises and develops on the shoulders of scientists and cultural men. People who have authority in their country, the world and all mankind should be surrounded by this responsibility.
Two Basic Questions in the Experienced Civilization Crisis
With the disappearance of the importance of geographic distance, even distant civilizations have entered into intense relations with each other and even homogeneous societies have been replaced by heterogeneous societies. In the past, while generally a limited scientific, political, cultural interaction was taking place between two neighbor civilizations; there have been a significant structural transformation and developments experienced along with a multi-civilized society resulted in many big problems. Today, humanity is still engaged in these crises and the search for permanent solution is basically related with two questions: (1) How will civilizations conduct relations with each other, in other words, how to establish a multi-civilized world order? (2) How will the multi-civilized society be managed? What will be the basic principles of this new order?
Vision of “Open Civilization”
As can be clearly seen from the Seljuk to the Ottomans, from India to Andalusia, the Islamic society and civilization have been familiar with the multi-civilized society, conceptualized as the “Open Civilization,” and put the intellectual, social, legal and political infrastructures of this phenomena, which the world has just met, along before.
Open Civilizations acknowledge the right of existence of other civilizations and advocates the universal human rights. The vision of Open Civilization offers a modest and balanced civilization approach among the extremist ones, which are discriminator, dependent and completely reject the others. At the same time, Open Civilization is an understanding of civilization which has constants but these constants are open to change. The concept of Open Science, which was simultaneously developed with the establishment of a healthy relationship with the scientific accumulations of other civilizations, is the theoretical basis of Open Civilization.
Open Science
Open Science is a culture of science designed to promote open political culture and society in the best way; It is a strategy to prevent the transformation of intellectual disagreements into political conflicts and a tool for achieving intellectual diversity. Contrary to the nowadays prevailing positivist reductionist popular closed science conception, “Open Science” has (1) multiplex existence (2) multiplex knowledge and (3) multiplex approach.
The resurrection of our civilization as “Open Civilization”
Open Civilization will enable the members of Islamic civilization to play a global role again and to pave the way for solutions to the problems of all humanity.
Since Ibn Haldun University moves in light of the belief that historical experience and scientific accumulation of Islamic civilization can inspire us, it continues its academic activities with the vision of “Open Civilization,” and presents, in front of youth, the ideal resurrection of our civilization as “red apple” or a vision of the future. To introduce the open civilization concept and its historical practices to the world; the first thing to do on this path is to create a civilization consciousness by re-recognizing our own civilization concept and theory, and then to give insight of world literacy taking into consideration the world’s accumulation of leading civilizations.