Islam and the Global Society: A Religious Approach to Modernity
2003; Brigham Young University; Volume: 2003; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0360-151X
Autores Tópico(s)Education and Islamic Studies
ResumoI. INTRODUCTION With post-September 11 world fixated on terrorism and war to combat it, larger question concerning compatibility of Islam with a global culture that is rapidly enveloping Muslim world has gained increasing attention from Western journalists, academics, and foreign policy analysts. Newspaper columnists such as Cal Thomas and William Safire have issued credible claims that, in words of Thomas, the growing number of extremists who take Koran as a declaration of war against all non-Muslims has become a clear and present danger, not only overseas, but increasingly in our own country.1 Similarly, Western scholars such as Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington2 have speculated that cultural rift between Muslim and Western societies is too great to be bridged by simple expansion of material affluence and export of liberal conceptions of human rights. Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations?, insists that humanity's future battleground not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain most powerful actors in world affairs, but principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations.3 Huntington's thesis is especially sobering to an intellectual community grappling with this supposed chasm that exists between Muslim and Western cultures, nations of which are seemingly at odds over first principles.4 The colliding civilizations theory insists that long-employed instruments of Western paternalism-the expansion of markets, export of democratic ideals, and promotion of human rights-are ineffectual, or perhaps even counterproductive, in resolving intercultural problems with Muslim world. Bernard Lewis explored rise of Islamic fundamentalism as a consequence of Muslim culture's growing attraction to Western values as far back as 1990 in his essay The Roots of Muslim Rage. In this essay Lewis suggested that Islamic fundamentalism has given an aim and a form to otherwise aimless and formless resentment and anger of Muslim masses at forces that have devalued their traditional values and loyalties and, in final analysis, robbed them of their beliefs, their aspirations, their dignity, and to an increasing extent even their livelihood.5 Yet one must question whether responses of fundamentalist groups are in any way representative of broad spectrum of Muslim society respecting encroachments of modernity.6 Globalization, as one of principal encroachments, encompasses those processes in interaction of human cultures that have succeeded in compressing and intensifying humankind's knowledge of world such that traditional boundaries and separations created by politics, and even those divisions resulting from physical properties of space and time, are increasingly inconsequential.7 The question addressed here is whether this simultaneous compression and intensification of knowledge and activities on a global scale, and consequences thereof, is in any way incompatible with Islamic worldview. The clash of civilizations thesis assumes much about Muslim attitudes toward rise of a global society, and it may exaggerate fundamental nature of perceived incompatibilities between Muslim and Western culture. Consequently, danger of a self-fulfilling prophecy exists with regard to Islam and global community in that presumed gulf between cultures may well be realized if those presumptions harden attitudes between Islamic nations and rest of world. Thus, while several conflicts such as Israeli-Palestinian quagmire can be traced to particular historical, political, and geographical circumstances, future global conflicts could arise without any such justification. The mere existence of misperceptions between Islam and West may be sufficient to inflame hatred and precipitate conflict. …
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