Chapter X
C ON C L U S I O N

At the beginning of the new millennium, the Islamic world finds itself politically impotent, economically weak and socially confused or in disarray. Despite their resources that have fattened others, the Muslim countries are a strange combination of power and utter helplessness. They possess all the ingredients of power, for example, wealth, vast territory, huge human potential, large armies, stocks of all sorts of most lethal and sophisticated arms, still, they can be pushed around.

The Muslim countries represent one-fifth of world population but produce only 5 per cent of the world GNP. The combined output of 53 Muslim countries amounting to 950 billion dollars annually is less than the GNP of France that exceeds 1200 billion dollars. Their exports amounting to 7 per cent of the world trade consists largely of raw materials the prices of which are falling, thus reducing their buying power. In fact the price of oil has fallen bac k to the 1973 level in terms of real purchasing power.

The level of illiteracy remains far too high in the Muslim world. To give some examples, in Male it is 90%, Afghanistan, 88%, Pakistan 79%, Saudi Arabia, 85%, Bangladesh, 78%, Sudan 75%, Iraq 74%, Morocco 72%, Algeria 65%, Egypt 60% and in Somalia and Iran the figure is 50%.

This represents a very dismal picture of the state of development of the Muslim countries and their standing in the world. Islamic world does not figure in current listings of the centres of power emerging in the today's post-cold war world. These include, apart from the US, the European Union, Russia, China, Japan and the possibility of India making the league in the future.

Ironically, this very Muslim world which has suffered at the hands of the West in the past and which remains even today weak materially, economically, technologically and militarily, is now being projected as a threat to the West.

Several factors shed light on the current problems: 1) the lingering shadows of colonialism; 2) the legacy of a leadership in Muslim countries whose vested interests somehow coincide with the interests of certain elements in the West, and 3) the failure of the leadership in the Muslim world during the last five decades to serve its own society, realize the ambitions of its own people, be accountable to them, and ensure freedom of expression, human rights, and political participation.1

It may be argued that the last fifty years of Muslim "independence" have been only in theory. They remained as much controlled and dependent on the former colonial masters as before. Independence should have brought a spurt in self-reliance efforts but the ruling elite took to easy ways of development through foreign aid and purchasing arms and industry from the industrialized world. Perhaps in their thought, it was the shortest cut to showing results and buying social peace. Also, it was the shortest cut for them to get rich through kickbacks. This policy, howe ver, has reduced the Muslims to the status of purchasers in the strait jacket of the industrialized countries.

It might be too harsh a judgment on a mere five decades of independence, but the fact remains that the Muslim states, and the rest of The third World remained a junk-yard of outdated technology, governed by a bunch of dim-witted rulers who made "foreign aid" a permanent feature of their national economies and mortgaged their people to the "donors". Worse, the ruling elite has acquired slavish attitudes and developed a perpetual client mentality. It may be appropriate to say that the Muslim elitist systems are a part of the broader elitist systems of the world with centres located in the west.

However, lava is already fomenting under the seemingly quiet surface. The great gulf between the Muslim masses and their compromised rulers and elite, whose loud voice is mistaken as the opinion of the majority, is now seems beyond repair. As demonstrated in Shah's Iran, it can be a mistaken notion. Popular reaction against the US bombing of Iraq in December 1998 is another vivid example of the wide gap between the masses and ruling elite.

Despite their poverty, technological backwardness and political structural defects, Muslims have traditionally been anti-colonial, with an enduring belief in themselves. Islam remains an ideological threat to the West with its firm belief in equality, justice, and simplicity of belief in the unity of God. No doubt, there exists a Muslim resistance to the Western domination since the West is practicing a double standard. In cases where the Muslim actions are in the Western interest, though they do not conform to Western values, they consider the Muslims as friends or allies. In other cases, when the Muslims resist Western domination, they are considered with negative connotations such as extremists or even terrorists.

he Muslim reaction is understandable. To borrow from Hippler, the reservations of a Muslim towards 'the West' may be based on a number of very real experiences that do not always have religious roots. The earlier experience of colonial oppression and exploitation, the experience of cultural arrogance, of the West's economic and technological supremacy, the exploitation of the natural resources of the Middle East, the experience of double standards or military domination -- these and much else are reasons enough for skepticism or hostility towards the West. Whether someone then chooses to express this skepticism in secular or religious terms is their business. Criticism of the West or of one's own regime should not be automatically ignored simply because religious terms are used. References to European and American politics of supremacy or to the neo-imperialist policies of the West in the Middle East do not become invalid just because they are made by a practicing Muslim or Christian." 2

There is an abiding sense of injustice felt by the Muslims everywhere at the way in which they are portrayed in most Western media. Why, someone will occasionally ask, don't the newspapers write "Roman Catholic" or "Protestant" terrorist when covering Northen Ireland? Why, as the California school textbook critic Shabbir Mansuri queries, do social studies texts write things like "The Bible says" this or that, whereas "Muslims believe" that their Quran teaches this or that? In this example, the Bible is taken as an unquestioned authority, while the Quran is held at a distance and qualified.3

Randa Abdel Fattah, Law Professor at the Melbourne University, provides a detailed description of the technique used by the western media to portray Muslims:

1.The first technique used is probably the essence of television, newspapers and magazines-images. When it comes to portraying Muslims or Islam, the images chosen are usually negative and denigrate the entire Muslim community.

2. The second basis of media manipulation is the use of stereotypes, which encompass all methods really. Some examples of stereotypes: Arab Terrorist, Islamic Fundamentalist, Oppressed Muslim Women, Sword of Islam, Holy War.

3.The third technique is generalizing. The media assume a sort of homogeneity among Muslims so that the actions of one Muslim are almost always represented as a reflection of the uniform actions and intentions of all Muslims.

4.The fourth method is sensationalism. This is often used to attract attention to the story by presenting captions and headlines that are provocative, controversial, eccentric, extreme and so forth.

 5. The fifth method is to deliberately distort the story. I can't think of any better example to use than the current civil conflict in Israel. The emphasis on the Hamas suicide bomb as being violent and damaging to the peace process is a deliberate distortion of the facts. The media dares not thoroughly discuss what events provoked such actions or how the building of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem is a mockery of any plans of peace. In most cov erages of this sort, the provocation of actions by such so-called Islamic groups is never raised. Muslims are merely presented as perpetrators of violence. 4

A 20th Century Fox film "The Siege", released in November 1998, links the Arab culture and Islamic religious practices and terrorism. According to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the film links Islamic religious practices such as prayer, the ritual washing before prayer, the call to prayer, supplication, beards, Quranic recitation and even the green color with terrorism. For Example, terrorists are shown making abolition and the next shot is of making or wearing bombs. Practicing Muslims are shown as terrorists while the non-practicing Muslim is shown in a positive light.5

The desired consequence of the media campaign is as Nixon said: "Many Americans tend to stereotype Muslims as uncivilized, unwashed, barbaric, irrational people. …No nations, not even Communist China, have a more negative image in the Am erican consciousness than those of the Muslim world".6

Despite their weaknesses, the Muslims in their collective conscience have a feeling of togetherness as an ummah. The Muslim conscience is shaped by thirteen hundred years of basking in the glory of Muslim history created by the Prophet, Muhammad, the Four Caliphs, the Umayyads and the Abbasids in the Middle East and Spain, the Ottomans in Europe, the Mughals in South Asia, the Safavis in West Asia, the Tumerides and Seljukes in Central Asia and the Middle East. Normally such feelings of a glorious past do not die among its inheritors easily. Western writers mention this feeling but only as if it was wrong to have them.

In the fifties and the early sixties Muslims had veered too much in one direction. Secular nationalism then seemed to have become the dominant ideology of the Muslims of a greater part of the world and the idea of trans-national Muslim unity seemed to be receding into oblivion. After the six-day Arab-Israeli war of 1967 , however, the tide began to turn and the idea of Muslim solidarity gradually emerged as a force to contend with. This idea eventually found expression in several inter-Islamic organizations, especially the 43-nation Organization of Islamic Conference and the expanded Regional Cooperation for Development. It is true that uptil now the Islamic unity has not been able to express itself, at the institutional level, with the desired degree of effectiveness. But over and over again Muslims have unmistakably shown that the feeling of Muslim unity flows in their veins.

According to Nixon, although, at present, there is no central representation or politburo of the Muslim world which can lead them and keep them united, the immense resemblance between their common values, their ways of thinking and their social and political attitudes is a great binding force. If an incident takes place in any Muslim country, Muslims all over the world feel it as one body and show their reaction to it. "Some solidarity do es exist among Muslim nations. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Moscow's relations with Muslim countries from Morocco to Indonesia chilled…The perception that the US backs Israel uncritically…has been a major impediment to closer US ties with all Muslim countries."7

Esposito corroborates Nixon when he quotes Charles Krauthammer: "The political awakening in the Islamic world…is Pan-Islamic. It is 'global intifadeh,' embracing not only the Islamic heart lands but also the peripheries of the Muslim world where Islam confronts the non-Muslim communities--in Kashmir, Azerbajian, Kosovo in Yugoslavia, Lebanon and the West Bank."8

Broadly speaking to the West, any manifestation of Muslim "nationalism" even within the confines of their states is equal to Islamic threat to its existence. Movements for Islamic solidarity are repugnant to the West. What shows through this hate campaign is that while Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus, Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, Car dinal Mendzeti, Popes and Cardinals can be in politics, and political parties in Europe may be named as Christian Democrats, it is only the mixing of Islam in politics that is objectionable to the West.

Apparently, the Western aim is to eliminate Islam as a political force in any form, in national politics or inter-Muslim states relations. By a strange logic, they identify Islamic forces with terrorism. The terrorist acts of a few desperados, which is a microscopic minority, is equated with the Islamic forces. Such acts of terrorism happen only when a country disallows organized political activity, incapacitating seasoned leadership to channelize discontent into a healthy political action. Such individual acts of terrorism have shaken the West out of its wits, and made it equate Islamic resurgence with terrorism out of a paranoid state of mind

Martin Indyk, the US Assistant Undersecretary for Near East and South Asian Affairs, suggested "containment" of the Islamic forces on the same pattern as "communism" was once contained. He advocated that "the containment approach to dealing with the revival of the political expression of Islam is based on the idea that Islamic states and political parties are hostile to Western concepts of pluralist democracy, human rights, and the operation of the world capitalist system of economics."9

The resurgence of Islam is the most significant transitional phenomenon of the contemporary Muslim world. To single out Muslim resurgence as fanatical and fundamentalist is not going to change the realities on the ground. It only effects the credibility of the Western leadership in the minds of the Muslim people.

One could agree to a certain extent with Khurshid's assessment that the Islamic resurgence today is not merely a product of certain specific contemporary challenges, but one must see it in the context of historical continuity and the response of Muslims to the challenges of the contemporary world. It has to be understood in its historical perspective. Without going deeper into history, one can discern three phases in the contemporary history of Islamic resurgence:1) pre-colonial; 2) colonial, and 3) post-colonial.

Throughout the Muslim history, there have been ups and downs, ebbs and flows. In other words, there is no linear progression and for a number of reasons, mostly domestic, Muslim society in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth centuries, that is in pre-colonial times, was in a state of decline, not capable of creatively responding to challenges, particularly in the fields of science and technology, agriculture and industry, and military power.

Muslim confrontation with the West in the second phase, which is known as colonialism, has been one in which the Muslims were on the decline and by the end of the nineteenth century, almost the entire Muslim world was under colonial rule, leaving only four small countries of hardly any great significance. During this period, Islam acted as a rallying point to resist colonialism, Western penetration and invasion of Muslim lands. When colonial rule was established, again it was the Islamic instincts of honor, national identity, and political independence which provided continuous resistance to colonial rulers. In the post-colonial phase of the 20th century, Islam has been one of the major forces in confronting both the legacy of colonialism and the reordering of society.

In the final analysis, it seems realistic to conclude that the capitalist development and imperialist conquests have created the situation of Islamic resurgence we are experiencing.

One of the central problem facing the Muslim community across the world is this: how much of what may be called as "historical" Islam can they today carry in framing their responses to the multi-faceted problems of the modern world. More so in a world where Western propaganda is busy painting Islam as barbarous, and Muslims as a body of fundamentalists and terrorists. Unfortunately Islam today i s being confused with an archaic system of table of punishments and suppression of segments of population such as women etc. This can hardly be called Islamization of society. Such misguided enthusiasm and misplaced emphasis can only prove counter-productive and self-defeating.

In this regard, what Osman Bakar has to say is very instructive: "For many Muslims, religious revival means asserting and exhibiting Islam's particualism. There is very little emphasis on its universalism. Through their words and deeds they also demonstrated their indiscriminate rejection of the West, something that is contrary to Islam's universal doctrines. Various expressions of extremism in many parts of the contemporary Muslim world are clearly in conflict with true civilizational identity of Islam. But we believe these are mere episodes in Muslim history that are peripheral to Islamic civilization. They have occurred mainly as hasty and uninformed responses to the evils and injustices of the contemporary world out of sheer ignorance and a sense of frustration. While this is understandable, acts of extremism are not to be condoned for Islam clearly teaches that ends do not justify means."10

It may be hard to deny that the Ulema (traditional Muslim religious leaders) by and large are incompetent to understand and handle the problems and potentials of modern times. There is no concept of "clergy" in Islam and hence the total elimination of "Papacy." A Muslim's relationship is directly with God and hence there is no priesthood, according to which a section of the Muslim society has taken upon itself the right to pronounce arbitrarily laws and volitions on God's behalf. There is no organized Church or ordained clerical hierarchy. The real unity of the Muslims lies in their attachment to the Quran and the Sunnah.

The civilization identity of Islam is as much defined by its distinctive religious traits as by its universal doctrines and perspectives. Universalism and particularlism are tw o sides of the same coin of civilizational identity, not just of Islam but of every civilization. Even contemporary Western civilization, which we all agree is the most dominant right now and almost overwhelms every other civilization, is not completely universal. Many of its civilizational features and characteristic, and many of the ideas, values and norms that have been in currency in that civilization really represent the particularlism of Western society. The problem of the non-West with the West concerns that aspect of Western cultural imperialism, which seeks to impose, consciously or unconsciously, its particularlism in the name of universal culture and civilization. This pretentious universalism will be opposed by other non-Western civilization, whether it pertains to politics, culture, art or the social ethos.11

We should not forget that there is no such thing as a value-free social science. One of the basic cannon of sociological theory and cultural analysis is that no knowledge is value-fr ee; no knowledge is free of supposition. Dr. Khurshid Ahmad is perhaps right when he says: If in the Muslim mind, Western powers remain associated with efforts to impose the Western model on Muslim society, keeping Muslims tied to the system of Western domination at national and international levels and thus destabilizing Muslim culture and society directly or indirectly, then, of course, the tension will increase. Differences are bound to multiply. And if things are not resolved peacefully through dialogue and understanding, through respect for each other's rights and genuine concerns, they are destined to be resolved otherwise. But if, on the other hand, we accept that this is a pluralistic world, that Western culture can coexist with other cultures without expecting to dominate them, that others need no necessarily be looked upon as enemies but as potential friends, then there is a genuine possibility that we can learn to live with our differences.12

Modernization is not a package deal. Muslims can adapt to their culture. But the West insists on adopting it in full, including abandoning their basic tenets of belief. Many Western scholars equate modernization with westernization. Whatever be their reasons, modernization, as held by the Muslims, is different from westernization and stands for change in implements of production and material conditions. Westernization means change in the value system as epitomized in the West.

According to Dr. Koreshi, "Muslims have been rejecting "modernization" for a long time equating it with westernization. Japanese were the first among the Asians, followed by Chinese and Indians, who realized that importing modernization (of science and technology) did not mean acculturation. Modernization had another facet -- of improving techniques, managerial skills, and acquiring new tools of production, which should have been sought."13

The religious tradition of any culture is as integral to it as the chemical composition of the bloodstream is t o the life that it sustains. To change the metaphor, the roots of all our language, our art, of all our values, are to be found in our religion. Most of the time, we may be unaware of this.14 Pure secularization exists only as a theoretical model. Nowhere today is the state wholly neutral in matters of religion, nor are religious establishments at all neutral when it comes to political affairs. When religion has been displaced from social domains to the exclusive province of the individual, it attempts to intrude back into society. Secular domains, moreover, contain remnants of the holy, which is the main component of religion.15

The socioeconomic problems in the Muslim world are quite acute and are likely to grow more in time to come, as can be gauged from the statistics given by late President Nixon's Seize the Moment. According to him, the "global population explosion centres are in the Muslim World. The population of the Middle East alone will double by the year 2010.16 "The people of th e Muslim World are candidates for revolution. They are young: 60% are under twenty years of age; they are poor."17

For the Muslims, the 20th century ended in problems. The world in the third millennium, like the second millennium, is most likely to continue to be one of violent power politics because, to borrow from Jon Dunn," one powerful strand in Western political thinking, especially prominent in the study of international relations assumes, that for all practical purposes it is the struggle for wealth and power which will determine the human future, and that in that struggle moral or spiritual factors will be of little, if any, lasting consequence."18