Islam and the Global Society: A Religious Approach to Modernity

I. INTRODUCTION With the post-September 11 world fixated on terrorism and the war to combat it, the larger question concerning the compatibility of Islam with a global culture that is rapidly enveloping the 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 the words of Thomas, "the growing number of extremists who take the 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 the cultural rift between Muslim and Western societies is too great to be bridged by the simple expansion of material affluence and the export of liberal conceptions of human rights. Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations?, insists that humanity's future battleground "will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the 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, the 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, the export of democratic ideals, and the promotion of human rights-are ineffectual, or perhaps even counterproductive, in resolving intercultural problems with the Muslim world. Bernard Lewis explored the 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 the otherwise aimless and formless resentment and anger of the Muslim masses at the forces that have devalued their traditional values and loyalties and, in the 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 the responses of fundamentalist groups are in any way representative of the broad spectrum of Muslim society respecting the encroachments of modernity.6 Globalization, as one of the principal "encroachments," encompasses those processes in the interaction of human cultures that have succeeded in compressing and intensifying humankind's knowledge of the world such that traditional boundaries and the separations created by politics, and even those divisions resulting from the 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 the consequences thereof, is in any way incompatible with the Islamic worldview. The clash of civilizations thesis assumes much about Muslim attitudes toward the rise of a global society, and it may exaggerate the fundamental nature of perceived incompatibilities between Muslim and Western culture. Consequently, the danger of a self-fulfilling prophecy exists with regard to Islam and the global community in that the presumed gulf between cultures may well be realized if those presumptions harden attitudes between Islamic nations and the rest of the world. Thus, while several conflicts such as the 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 the West may be sufficient to inflame hatred and precipitate conflict. …