Ibrahim Negm
There are moments in a scholar’s life when the weight of history becomes palpable – when you stand in a place and feel, with something beyond intellectual recognition, that the ground beneath your feet has been consecrated by centuries of human striving for truth. I experienced such a moment last week in Uzbekistan, as a participant in the First International Forum on Islamic Civilisation, convened across Tashkent, Samarkand, and Termez from 7 to 11 July 2026.
I came as a scholar and I left as a witness. The Forum brought together ministers, muftis, university leaders, and researchers from across the Islamic world and beyond, under the theme “The Path of Peace, Tolerance, and Knowledge.” But the encounter that will remain with me longest was my first sight of the Islamic Civilisation Centre in Tashkent: a complex of extraordinary ambition, rising from the same soil that once nourished Ibn Síná and al-Bukhárí, al-Máturídí and al-Bírúní. To stand before it is to understand, viscerally, what it means to take civilisation seriously.
As someone who has spent his career at the intersection of Islamic scholarship and institutional service – working alongside the Grand Mufti of Egypt at Dar al-Ifta to articulate Islam’s message of moderation – I am not easily impressed by institutions. Grand buildings are plentiful. Genuine intellectual vision is rare. What distinguishes this Centre is that it is not a monument to the past. It is an instrument for the future.
Under the personal patronage of President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, Uzbekistan has built not one institution but a constellation: the International Research Centre of Imám al-Bukhárí in Samarkand, the International Research Centre of Imám al-Máturídí in Tashkent, the International Research Centre of Imám al-Tirmidhí in Termez – each dedicated to recovering and transmitting the legacy of one of Islam’s supreme intellectual figures. Together with the Islamic Civilisation Centre itself, these constitute a deliberate act of civilisational statecraft: the recognition that a nation’s deepest strength lies in its custody of human knowledge. This is a vision I commend without reservation, and a model I believe the wider Islamic world would do well to study.
In our work at Dar al-Ifta, we have long maintained that the antidote to extremism is not suppression but enlightenment – that the young Muslim connected to the authentic Islamic scholarly tradition is immunised against ideological distortion. What Uzbekistan is building is, in institutional form, precisely that antidote. President Mirziyoyev has understood something that many leaders have not: investing in the heritage of Islamic learning is a civilisational necessity, not a cultural luxury.
I was moved, during our sessions, by the breadth of what this land has given humanity. Al-Khwárizmí’s algebra undergirds every digital device on earth. Ibn Síná’s medicine shaped the trajectory of human health for six centuries. Al-Bukhárí’s critical methodology for evaluating prophetic testimony remains, in its essentials, a gold standard for historical source criticism. These were not achievements for Muslims alone – they were gifts to all of humanity, born of a civilisation that understood knowledge as worship and scholarship as service.
It is that spirit – generous, rigorous, open to the world – that the Islamic Civilisation Centre seeks to revive. The forum adopted a declaration committing its signatories to manuscript digitisation, international scholarly networks, youth olympiads in the Islamic sciences, and coordinated advocacy at the United Nations and UNESCO. These are not empty gestures. They are the architecture of a movement.
I return to Cairo renewed in conviction. What has been built in Tashkent is proof that heritage can be made living, that the past can illuminate the present, and that a single leader’s vision, backed by genuine institutional will, can change the terms of a civilisational conversation.
That is what I witnessed in Uzbekistan. Not nostalgia. Not spectacle. A beginning.
Negm is senior advisor to the Grand Mufti of Egypt
