Few films this year have arrived with as much anticipation as Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. He has brought Homer’s epic to the largest screens on Earth, but its greatest lesson lies beyond its monsters, voyages, and wars. Nearly three thousand years ago, Homer understood something that many modern societies have forgotten: a civilisation does not collapse when it grows poor, technologically backward, or militarily weak. It begins to collapse when it abandons the moral law that once governed it.
In the world of the poem, that law is imagined as the law of Zeus. As Muslims, we reject Zeus as a false god. But we can recognise what the poet was reaching towards. Human beings, by their fitrah, know that society must answer to an authority higher than its own desires. Once that order is cast aside, greed replaces justice, desire overcomes restraint, and chaos follows. Whether Homer intended this full meaning or not, the story confronts us with an urgent question: can any civilisation endure, once it rejects the moral foundation upon which it was built?
The law of the guest
We must be careful not to lose that warning in the spectacle. If you strip away the mythical creatures, the moral architecture of the poem exposes itself. The law the poet venerates is not abstract. It has a name, xenia, the sacred duty of hospitality. It governs how a man treats the guest at his door, the stranger on the road, and the traveller who arrives with nothing. It is no accident that the same Greek root that gives us xenia, the welcome of the stranger, also gives us xenophobia, the fear of strangers. [1] In Homer’s world, the treatment of a stranger is one measure of whether a people is civilised. Nolan takes that principle and makes it central to his film. Honouring xenia preserves order, while violating it marks the beginning of the end.
Throughout the film, characters whisper about “the people from the sea”, a foreign horde blamed for the disorder spreading across the region. Only near the end do we realise that these people from the sea are the Greeks themselves, Odysseus and his soldiers, returning from Troy having shed every law of civility they once claimed to defend. [2] The enemy at the gates was always inside the walls. Odysseus eventually recognises this.
As he tells his wife,
To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire, including his home.”
The man who broke Zeus’ law did not merely doom a distant city; he doomed his own house in Ithaca.
In his long absence, a crowd of suitors has occupied his house. They devour his wealth, abuse his servants, dishonour his household, and plot the murder of his son. They are not foreign invaders. They are the leading young men of the land, its elite. Without a king and without the law he embodied, they recognise no authority above their own appetites and turn the house into a place of consumption and violence. Ithaca does not fall to a stronger army. It rots from within.
The witnesses
It would be easy to dismiss this as the sentiment of one pagan poet. Yet similar conclusions have been reached by historians and philosophers, including some who did not share Homer’s religious world or our own.
The historian Arnold Toynbee spent decades studying the rise and fall of civilisations and reduced one of his central conclusions to a sentence:
Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” [3]
For Toynbee, civilisations ultimately break down from within. Their elites cease to serve the common good and begin to consume it. The suitors, in other words, are not a fable. They are a recurring historical type.
Will and Ariel Durant also spent decades tracing the history of civilisation across eleven volumes. They wrote:
The soul of a civilization is its religion, and it dies with its faith.” [4]
Their study led them to conclude that religion had historically provided civilisations with their moral centre.
Most striking of all is the testimony of Friedrich Nietzsche. His “God is dead” (The Gay Science) was not a celebration but a warning. Europe had rejected the Christian foundation of its morality without knowing what would replace it. Nietzsche feared that nihilism and catastrophe would follow. Dostoevsky explored the same fear in a single distilled thought — if there is no God, then everything is permitted. [5] More recently, the secular writer Douglas Murray has described a Europe that has lost confidence in its own story and no longer knows what its inheritance is meant to preserve. [6]
These are not the voices of the mosque or the pulpit. They are historians, philosophers, and critics, and they arrive, by their own roads, at the doorstep of a single truth: strip a society of the law above it, and you have not made it free. You have condemned it.
Our own Ithaca
We do not need to imagine what such a society looks like, because we are living in one. Modernity has done precisely what Homer feared: severed itself from any law above the self. The liberal order that inherited the West made a wager that a people could keep the fruits of a moral tradition after discarding its roots. That justice, restraint, and human dignity would survive the God who commanded them. That wager is now failing, and the consequences are visible across society.
First, the self has been enthroned where the sacred law once stood. “My truth” has become the highest court of appeal and personal desire the final authority. This change is dissolving the family, the oldest institution of every human society. What one generation knew to be shameful, the next is taught to celebrate. Marriage weakens, family bonds fracture, and loneliness spreads through the most connected population in history. The same disorder shapes the economy. Pornography, gambling, manufactured desire, and endless debt generate wealth by feeding the very cravings that consume those who indulge them. Above it all sits a financial order built on interest, allowing a small class to consume the common good, precisely as the suitors consumed the house of their king.
The Qur’ān describes the result:
Corruption has spread on land and sea as a result of what people’s hands have done.” [7]
The rise and the fall
Nolan does not end on despair. As the Bronze Age passes, the film gestures towards something new rising from its ruins. The insight is sound. Civilisations are not eternal; they rise and they fall, and another is always raised in their place. Revelation teaches us that this is not merely an accident of history. It belongs to the sunnah of Allah: His unchanging way of dealing with nations.
Allah says:
You will find no change in the way of Allah.” [8]
The Qur’ān returns to this pattern again and again. The people of Nūh, the towering ʿĀd, the rock-carving Thamūd, the empire of Pharaoh — every one of them convinced that their power would preserve them, every one of them gone.
Allah says:
Have they not travelled throughout the land to see what was the end of those [destroyed] before them? They were far superior in might; they cultivated the land and developed it more than these [Makkans] ever have.” [9]
No amount of power, wealth, or sophistication exempts a nation from Allah’s law. The only question a civilisation ever really faces is whether it will submit to that law or be removed to make room for a people who will.
The return
Here the diagnosis of the poet ends, and only revelation offers the cure. For all his insight, Homer directed his reverence towards a false god. Yet he felt the shape of the truth: a people must submit to a law above their own wanting. Islam identifies the source of that law. Its first principle, tawhīd, is to worship Allah alone and submit the whole of life to the One who alone has the right to command it. It leaves no room for the self or its appetites to become objects of worship. Where the suitors served their bellies and egos, the believer serves his Lord, and everything else follows from which of the two a civilisation chooses.
And what Islam restores is not a vague spirituality but a complete moral order, aimed with uncanny precision at the very things now collapsing around us. It protects the family and dignifies marriage. It guards wealth from exploitation by forbidding riba, through which wealth and power become concentrated in fewer hands. It commands us to honour the orphan, the poor, the neighbour, and even the stranger.
The Prophet ﷺ said,
Whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day, let him honour his guest.” [10]
The hospitality praised in Homer’s world is made an act of faith. Islam also identifies a deeper cause of this ruin, kibr, the sin that caused Iblīs to place himself above the command of his Maker.
Islamic thought also explains how this decline takes place. Roughly five centuries before Toynbee, the Muslim historian Ibn Khaldūn watched dynasties rise and fall across North Africa and identified the law beneath the pattern. Ibn Khaldūn argued that societies are held together by ʿaṣabiyyah: a shared solidarity that religion can strengthen, but which luxury and complacency gradually weaken. [11] He traced how, over several generations, the ruling class loses the strength and discipline that first brought it to power. Ibn Khaldūn therefore gives us a systematic account of the same internal decline dramatised in the story of Ithaca.
The Qur’ān had already given its cause:
Whenever We intend to destroy a society, We command its elite [to obey Allah] but they act rebelliously in it. So the decree [of punishment] is justified, and We destroy it utterly.” [12]
The suitors, the parasitic elite, the decadent dynasty — one verse holds them all.
The house reclaimed
A civilisation cannot remain without a moral centre for long. Another set of values inevitably takes its place. As the modern West exhausts its inherited moral resources, the question is not whether it will be succeeded, but by what. Islam remains a complete alternative because it binds sacred law to the whole of life and directly addresses the diseases now weakening the West. Islam does not merely critique the ruins. It offers the house rebuilt.
Allah has promised those of you who believe and do good that He will certainly make them successors in the land, as He did with those before them; and will surely establish for them their faith which He has chosen for them.” [13]
But this promise also places a responsibility upon Muslims. It is not handed to a people by their numbers, nor by the mere collapse of their rivals. It is granted to people who worship Allah, establish justice, protect the family, reject riba, honour others, and convey Islam with wisdom and beauty. It is not granted merely to those who inherit the Muslim name. Our gravest failure would be to possess the medicine and neglect to take it ourselves: to call others towards an Islamic order while neglecting it in our own lives, families, and communities. The responsibility is ours before it is anyone else’s. We are asked to be the living proof of the truth, not only its keepers.
Finally the ancient story turns from warning to instruction. Odysseus returns to a house overrun — its wealth consumed, its order gone, and its occupiers certain that no one can challenge them. He takes up the bow no other hand can string, and he restores the law to the household. That is the image to hold as our own world darkens. For Muslims, its lesson is to recover the courage and discipline required to restore moral order through worship, strong families, effective institutions, service to others, and the wise presentation of Islam.
The West resembles Ithaca in the hands of the suitors; the law has been forgotten, and the house is being eaten from within. But a house can be reclaimed — not by the strongest or the richest, but by those who still remember what it was built for and are willing to devote themselves to rebuilding it. Homer imagined the return of rightful order, but he could not identify its true source. We have been given something greater, revelation from the One who created the house and its inhabitants. The question left for us is the one we must answer with our lives: when the old world falls, will we be a people ready to raise something better in its place?
Source: Islam21c
Notes
[2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/07/23/odyssey-civilization-collapse-history/
[3] A Study of History, Arnold J. Toynbee
[4] The Story of Civilization: The Age of Reason Begins, Will and Ariel Durant
[5] The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
[6] The Strange Death of Europe, Douglas Murray
[7] al-Qur’ān, 30:41
[8] al-Qur’ān, 35:43
[9] al-Qur’ān, 30:9
[10] Sahīh al-Bukhārī, 6,135; https://sunnah.com/bukhari:6135
[12] al-Qur’ān, 17:16
[13] al-Qur’ān, 24:55
