Change is not always evolution; it is not always progress or development or growth. Regression is change. Disintegration is change. Turning from righteousness to sin, is change. Not all movement is advancement.
Young people (and immature older ones) often do not make these distinctions. The ever-changing conception of right and wrong, we are told, is a hallmark of intellectual and moral development. This is the basis for “free thinking”. Just because our ancestors thought certain things were wrong, we do not need to accept their judgment, because, over time and experience, we may have become more enlightened than they were. So, we discard these antiquated notions, and feel we are intellectually liberated, and this abandonment of former concepts of morality, we tell ourselves, signifies the maturing of human society.
We think this makes us independent thinkers, we think it makes us unique. But, the truth is, this is absolutely banal and common. It does not take any intellectual prowess to accept and approve of anything and everything; to discard social mores and long-standing moral concepts merely because they are long-standing. This is intellectual deficiency, not superiority. We do not admire this type of recklessness in any other area. An architect who questions the necessity of weight-bearing support pillars in a structure would not be praised as a “free thinker”, he would be ridiculed as an idiot. A doctor who dismisses hygiene as an old-fashioned prerequisite to performing surgery, would be ostracized for his ignorance. Every advance in any scholarly discipline builds upon what has been established to be reliably, observably true by that discipline’s earlier thinkers and practitioners; not by abandoning them.
The moral relativism of the West, the ever-shifting definitions of what is right and what is wrong, signifies ignorance and immaturity on their part, and that their sense of moral judgment is apoplexed, not enlightened.
In Islam, if we take architecture as the metaphor, we have been building solid, stable structures for centuries; and the West is telling us that our designs are outdated, and that we should adopt their approach, though they have not built a single structure that can last for even one generation.