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Islam and the West

By Nayeefa Chowdhury - posted Tuesday, 19 July 2005


Fukuyama’s “modernisation” issue

Speculation on the prevailing dearth of democratic systems in Muslim societies has made Fukuyama perceive the Islamic world as retrogressive, inherently undemocratic and anti-modern. This kind of over-simplification broadly misses the underlying complexities and multi-faceted elements that build a national polity.

Despotic forms of government in any society have always pursued an agenda of using religions or even secular ideologies to prop up corrupt regimes. Interestingly, the West has been seen to be persistent in its support for autocratic and repressive regimes including the Shah’s Iran, Saddam’s Iraq in 1980 and now Islam’s Uzbekistan, where democratisation would raise the likelihood of the “client states being transformed into … less predictable nations which might make Western access to oil less secure”.

Religious traditions are capable of having multiple and major ideological interpretations. For an instance, the Judeo-Christian tradition once supported divine right monarchies and political absolutism, and later, was re-interpreted to accommodate the modern Western democratic states. In the same manner, the Islamic ideals have been interpreted in the 20th century to support democracy, dictatorship, republicanism and monarchy, as opposed to Fukuyama’s presupposition of the rigidity of “Islamic theocracy”.

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Islamic principles of reform had left a legacy of fresh interpretations in the matter of religion. Muslim reformers advocated for a wide array of secular developmental paths following the encounter of Western colonial power. The Muslim revivalist thinkers of the post-colonial, post-independence period - partially influenced as well as affected by the forces of globalisation - sought to delineate Islamic forms of democracy based on the concepts rooted in Islamic principles. However, they differed with the precise meaning of the term “democracy”. This is not atypical as analysts argue that indeed “democracy itself has had multiple meanings”.

Political Islam: a challenge

Islamic fundamentalist political activism possesses a shared concern with other religious fundamentalist movements against the “anti-foundationalist” discourse of post-modernism, wherein the liberal political theories preclude “a metaphysical conception of the good”. For instance, the ratio of the share in the global income of the world’s richest 20 per cent and poorest 20 per cent people having been doubled from 30:1 to 61:1 in the past 30 years, free-market capitalism is seen by many as morally bankrupt and a euphemism for neo-economic imperialism. In many respects Islamist movements emphasise the shortcomings of post-Enlightenment rationalism and seek to re-establish a moral ethos into modern discourse.

Conclusion

Huntington’s theory tends to exaggerate the civilisational hostility between the Muslim world and the West, while the real sources of conflicts are the competing political, socio-economic and strategic interests of the nation-states. Fukuyama’s schema portrays a misleading conjecture that the Muslim societies are monolithic and retrogressive.

Ideologically not a monolith, the Muslim world presents a broad spectrum of perspectives on the issue of modernisation, while being selective about the Western model. Muslim societies, following their economic empowerment, have been seeking to inject ethical and moral considerations into the socio-economic principles and political ethos associated with secularism, as the Western models of secular modernisation are perceived by many to be contributing to economic exploitation, corruption and social injustice.

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About the Author

Nayeefa Chowdhury is the founding director of an Internet-based Islamic information service (Light-of-Islam.net). She writes in English & Bengali, and has contributed chapters to two books, also published in periodicals, including magazines, scholarly journals, and newspapers.

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