You might want to check out some of the works of Professor Madawi Al-Rasheed. Not done this myself but she's written about this subject and I hear she's quite insightful.
I'm not sure if these were what you had in mind but it's a few things I found.
The Erosion of Islamic Ideals in the Creation of Modern North American Muslim Communities
By Hooman Keshavarzi, Adjunct Faculty of Psychology, Argosy University (Schaumburg, IL)
To understand the challenges and problems common to the Muslims in developing an Islamic community in the West, one must understand the Islamic perspective on human interaction and the concept of community. As conceptualized by psychologists, cultures are divided into the individualistic and collectivistic dichotomy (Oyserman, Sakamoto & Lauffer, 1998). Collectivism places an emphasis on the extended family, interdependence, humility, authority, putting the needs of the community above one’s own, and a strong interconnected community. Individualism on the other hand is rooted in the nuclear family, autonomy, independence, and an ultimate focus on the self (Oyserman, Sakamoto & Lauffer, 1998). The Islamic culture can be viewed as being collectivistic in nature. The rules of Islam have also been fashioned to complement this worldview. Therefore, if one does not understand the Islamic perspective with regard to the community, they may have trouble understanding its rules. This is because the North American community at large is the opposite of the Islamic community. The concept of individualism where families are isolated in the nuclear family does not exist in Islam, nor is it compatible with its rules. This is also the case with gender roles and interactions in Islam. If one does not understand the Islamic perspective with regard to the complementary roles between the genders in this community, it will be difficult to understand the rules designed for such a system. For example, Islam divides the domains of the world into two spheres of life, the public and the private. The public sphere of life is the domain of men, the private sphere that of women. Therefore, the man is supposed to be the traditional breadwinner and the woman a homemaker who takes care of the children and maintains the household. Each one can be seen as a guest in one another’s domain. The woman, when entering the public, is expected to remain “private” by concealing herself and metaphorically taking her house with her (Popenoe, 2004). By this, she communicates that she is outside her domain for some necessity. On the other hand, when the man enters the home, he is made aware of the happenings of the household and is informed of the responsibilities that need to be carried out in the household. Consequently, men are ordered to pray all of their prayers in the mosque and promote a strong community, and the females are to remain indoors, maintain the house, and raise the children. Both report to one another about the happenings of one another’s domain and take counsel on their respective roles. These gender roles can be characterized as complementary within the system (Popenoe, 2004), as responsibilities are distributed equally. However, in keeping consistent with the collectivistic nature of Islam, the woman does not remain isolated in her home, as is the case with the attempt to apply the rules of Islam in the modern North-American Muslim family. She rather receives social and emotional support through the proximity and availability of the individuals within her community, which include her friends, family, and neighbors. Also, she does not feel isolated as a mother because Islam instructs families to have lots of children and to support one another. Essentially, communities and extended families raise children, in stark contrast to the nuclear-family structure, where the woman would be isolated in her house with her children. This way both children and mothers have social outlets.
Additionally, the emotional and social attachment between the spouses in the modern era is unprecedented. This has increasingly become the case with the formation of the nuclear family. This is a natural attempt to compensate for the lack of a community, thus attempting to plug in the family as a micro community. This complicates matters for Muslims, in this type of system; the woman does not have any social supporters other than her husband. Consequently she becomes dependent upon him for support. When he is not available or unable to provide this support it creates tensions in the relationship. Furthermore, if a man desires an additional wife, this attacks the wife even more. She feels that she is being abandoned by her strongest and only companion. This exacerbates her feelings of isolation and may cause depression. Traditionally, Muslims were not as attached to their spouses as they are in the present North-American Muslim family. This is because Muslims in the East historically have had a strong sense of community. The spouses were not the only members of their community. It would not be uncommon for men to have more than one wife, travel frequently on business trips, study religion, and spend time in the community. Women, on the other hand, would frequent one another within their communities, spend time with their extended family, and let their children stay with their grandparents, have women’s religious gatherings, lessons and entertain guests.
In light of all of this, it is evident that the current Muslim community in North America can be likened to atoms that have not yet formed a molecule. Muslims are fitting the mold of the nuclear family and are becoming acculturated as individualists while attempting to follow the rules designed for collectivism. This is dangerous and flies in the face of the Islamic perspective. The first generation of Muslim immigrants have attempted to replicate some of the collectivistic notions in North America, but most have resulted in communities based more on ethnicity than religion. Immigration to this part of the world was for most not a religious venture, but upon arrival it became clear that stronger religious practice became a necessity. As a result, clerics were brought over to fill the functions of the mosque and were restricted to just that. This can be likened to the Christian concept of the separation of Church and State, where the primary function of the churches is ritual worship. Because of the diversity of the North-American Muslim community, this can only maintain itself for a short while before it breaks down.
Finally, it is necessary that Muslims not attempt to assimilate into the normative patterns of the nuclear-family construct, but aim instead for a higher goal. This requires a transition toward re-establishing a community rooted in the essence of religion and a lesser or secondary focus on the legalistic tradition. So long as the foundations of an Islamic community is absent in North-American communities, the symptoms of depression, marital dissatisfaction, gender-role confusion and distress will remain. Psychological literature suggests that the strongest elements of religion which functions to alleviate psychological turmoil and permits positive mental health are related to the degree of social support and networking that religion has to offer (Adamcyzk & Palmer, 2008; Gorusch, 1995). Muslim communities must, perhaps now more than ever, serve as a model for Americans Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
http://www.ilmgate.org/the-erosion-of-islamic-ideals-in-the-creation-of-modern-north-american-muslim-communities/Islam and the West: Deciphering a Contested History
Ibrahim Kalin
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat.
—Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)
There are no two world civilizations whose histories have been as closely intertwined as Islam and the West. From the earliest polemics of Theodore Abū Qurrah, Bede, and St. John of Damascus, to the Crusaders, the Andalusian convivencia (coexistence), or the fascination of American transcendentalists with things Islamic in the manner of their German master Goethe, the two worlds of Islam and the West have for the last fourteen centuries negotiated various modes of sharing world history. It is a history filled with clashes and confrontation, competition and challenge, admiration and hatred, acceptance and rejection, and a host of other conflicting feelings, attitudes, and experiences. No matter how one defines the terms "Islam" and "the West"—or whether one chooses to do away with them altogether—the self-perceptions and identity claims of those who live in Muslim and Western societies have been shaped by these checkered histories. That is one reason among many that relations between Islam and the West never seem to lose their relevance for the state of our world—from politics and international relations to interfaith relations and discussions of pluralism. A brief overview of this long history reveals three main areas of interaction: religious, cultural, and political.
The Religious Challenge.
As a monotheistic religion, Islam defines itself as the last of the three great Abrahamic faith traditions. The Qurʾān and ḥadīth (the two canonical sources of Islam) and the later scholarly traditions reveal an acute awareness of Judaism and Christianity. The two sources contain numerous references to Jewish and Christian themes, calling upon Jews and Christians to unite in a robust monotheism against Meccan polytheism and its profligacy. Born into a multireligious and multicultural environment, early Muslims were in contact with the various Jewish and Christian communities of the East in the eighth and ninth centuries.
The polemical works of Byzantine theologians were as much theological in nature as cultural and political. As the lands once under Byzantine rule rapidly became part of dār al-Islām (the abode of Islam where Muslims lived as a majority), Islamic theology posed a set of religious challenges. While Jews and Christians were recognized as the People of the Book (ahl al-kitāb) and were granted some religious freedom—a license no other religion has ever granted—they were invited to a serious theological dialogue, "a common word between us and you" (Qurʾān, Āl ʿImrān 3:64). The fact that Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, among other Biblical figures, were given a prominent place in the Qurʾān and the ḥadīth became a source of consternation for many Christian theologians in the East and later in Europe.
The medieval Christian theologians interpreted the themes common to Islam and the Biblical tradition not as a matter of "creative borrowing," as nineteenth-century Orientalists would call it, but as a sign of outright heresy. St. John of Damascus, known in Arabic as Yūḥannā al-Dimashqī (d. 749), called Islam the "heresy of the Ishmaelites," referring to Arab Muslims as descendants of Abraham's son Ishmael, and called the Prophet of Islam an "impostor." The Christian apocryphal literature on the Prophet Muḥammad was more than polemical. If Embrico of Mainz's (d. 1077) Vita Mahumeti and Walter of Compi�gne's Otia de Machomete a century later are any indication, it was also an elaborate means of constructing a religious "other" for medieval Christendom. The refusal to speak to Muslims on their own terms continued throughout the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment. A section of Pascal's Pens�es called "Contre Mahomet" pits Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad against one another as embodiments of two contradictory qualities: the former utterly godly and merciful, the latter completely of this world and ruthless. The famous British Orientalist and later Rector of the University of Edinburgh, William Muir (d. 1905), went so far in his weighty Life of Mahomet as to call the Prophet Muḥammad a "psychopath." More recent epithets include "terrorist" (Jerry Falwell) and "demon-possessed pedophile" (Jerry Vines).
There were, however, attempts at what we call today interfaith dialogue. Following the tradition of St. Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) and Ramon Llull (d. 1315), John of Segovia (d. 1458), the so-called "first missionary to Muslims," believed that the only way to counter the menace of Islam was not to build up armies, which the Europe of the time was in any case unable to do, but to convince Muslims to accept Christianity. He thus proposed a most unexpected meeting, a contraferentia, as he called it, of Christian and Muslim scholars to discuss theology. John's meeting never took place, but it was taken up by Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464) in De Pace Fidei, in which he imagined a meeting of a Jew, an Arab, an Indian, a Persian, a Syrian, a Turk, a Tatar, and an Armenian, each in the end acknowledging the Christian truth.
While Nicholas of Cusa's interfaith conference did not lead to a movement of interfaith dialogue, it did represent a new and creative point of view. Today, Muslim-Christian relations are an important part of Islam-West relations. Numerous interfaith initiatives and dialogue programs are taking place at different levels and between different communities. Ever since the declaration of the historic Nostra Ætate , the Catholic Church has been engaged in various dialogue initiatives with Muslims. The most recent and prominent meeting took place November 4–6, 2008, at the Vatican when a delegation of Muslim scholars attended a meeting with Catholic scholars and met Pope Benedict XVI. Numerous other interreligious initiatives are under way between Muslims, and Protestant, Anglican, and Orthodox Christians, as well as with Jewish communities in Muslim-majority countries and in Europe and the United States.
The Cultural Divide.
Culture is another contested area in the history of Islam-West relations. The influence of Islamic culture and civilization on medieval Europe was decisive and largely irresistible. Medieval Europeans hated Islam as a religion but admired it as a culture and civilization. The works of Muslim philosophers, theologians, scientists, belletrists, poets, storytellers, artists, and mystics penetrated the European cultural landscape from the ninth to the sixteenth century. St. Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the greatest Christian thinker of the Middle Ages, spent much of his intellectual career refuting what he considered the heresies of (Latin) Averr�ism, a much contested school of thought founded by the European followers of the Andalusian Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd, known in the West as Averr�es (d. 1193). While the ideas of Ibn Rushd were officially banned by the order of Bishop Tempier in 1277, other areas of the world including the Andalusian cities of C�rdoba, Granada, Toledo, and Seville enjoyed a culture of tolerance and critical inquiry in which Jewish, Christian, and Muslim seekers of knowledge studied in the same schools, conducted research in the same libraries, and studied the heavens from the same observatories. It was in Toledo that many Arabic works including the Qurʾān were translated into Latin, leading eventually to what Charles Haskins has called the "Renaissance of the Twelfth Century."
Even the Crusaders, who were among the first European Christians to set foot in the lands of Islam, could not help but admire the advanced, vibrant, and clean cities of the Muslim east. The captivating stories and descriptions of Usāmah ibn Munqidh's Kitāb al-ʿItibār are as much a testimony to the Muslim views of the Crusaders as the European perceptions of Muslims in the twelfth century. As early as the ninth century, a Spaniard named Alvaros was voicing a heightened sense of cultural insecurity:
My fellow Christians delight in the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the works of Mohammedan theologians and philosophers, not in order to refute them, but to acquire a correct and elegant Arabic style. Where today can one find a layman who reads the Latin commentaries on Holy Scriptures? Who is there that studies the Gospels, the Prophets, the Apostles? Alas! The young Christians who are most conspicuous for their talents have no knowledge of any literature or language save the Arabic; they read and study with avidity Arabic books; they amass whole libraries of them at a vast cost, and they everywhere sing the praises of Arab lore.
Despite such warnings, medieval Europe maintained its love-hate relationship with Islamic culture. Dante's Divine Comedy contained references to prominent figures of Islam from the Prophet Muḥammad and Ibn Sīnā to Ibn Rushd and Saladin (Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ayyūbī). Saladin, hailed as a chivalrous commander and just ruler, was romanticized in Walter Scott's The Talisman (1825) and treated favorably in Ridley Scott's movie The Kingdom of Heaven (2005). Dante's interest in Islamic themes, however, went beyond populating his Hell with Muslim figures. The Spanish scholar Miguel Asín Palacios traced the influence of Islamic themes in Dante's work in his Islam and the Divine Comedy and claimed that the main plot of the Divine Comedy was in fact inspired by the miʿrāj tradition of the nocturnal journey of the Prophet Muḥammad into heaven and hell.
The cultural relations between Islam and the West took a drastically new turn when Europe arose as the dominant and unchallenged force of the modern era. From politics and education to science and art, modern European culture changed Islam-West relations once and for all. Combining a Judeo-Christian past with a secular present, Western culture has created a rift between Westernized elites and traditional communities in the Muslim world.
The Muslim world has, over the last two centuries, adopted four major positions with regard to the rise of Western modernity. The first is a total adaptation of Western culture as the culmination and common heritage of human history. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey and Shah Reza Pahlavi in Iran sought to modernize their countries by adopting Western culture and institutions. The second position is outright rejection and denouncement of Western culture as cultural imperialism. This attitude is generally couched in the language of conservative Islamism as in the case of modern Wahhābī and Salafī movements. But it is equally a statement of identity politics which sees the West as a selfish and materialistic culture.
The third position is critical engagement with Western cultural values and institutions advocated by reformist Muslim thinkers. From the Ottoman intellectuals Namik Kemal and Mehmed Âkif Ersoy to their colleagues the Iranian Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī and the Egyptian Muḥammad ʿAbduh, the reformists sought to unlink the Western value system from the material achievements of Western civilization, that is, science, technology, democracy, and constitutionalism. Their assumption was based on a clear distinction between an objective material civilization, which was represented by the modern West, and spiritual values, which the Muslim world did not need to borrow from the West. While this view is still widely held in the Muslim world, extreme modernization and globalization have made such distinctions impossible.
The fourth position can be described as traditional Islam in which the majority of traditional ʿulamāʾ as well as ordinary Muslims believe that a more elevated ethical and spiritual dialogue with the West (and the rest of the world) is possible while maintaining one's cultural tradition. In the case of Alija Izetbegović, the Muslim philosopher-president of Bosnia, this means placing Islam outside the categories of East and West. As his Islam Between East and West seeks to show, even though the Muslim sense of time and space differs from that of the West, the Islamic and Western worlds can to a certain extent be brought together. In his Traditional Islam in the Modern World, Seyyed Hossein Nasr argues that while the Western and Muslim worlds have different historical experiences and cultural traditions, they can trace their religious history to a shared spirituality. But all of these call for a reformulation of contemporary Islamic thought which has been shaped by its encounter with the modern secular West. The Muslim world is confronted today with the steady invasion of Western culture and shares with the rest of the world a sense of cultural loss and disempowerment.
The World of Politics.
Like religion and culture, the political and military histories of the Islamic and Western worlds are deeply intertwined. Islam's encounter with the Byzantine Empire was a watershed event in both Islamic and European history. It was no secret that the first Muslim community clearly favored the Byzantine Empire over its arch rival the Sassanid Empire because the former was Christian and its Christian king Heraclius was held in high esteem in early Islamic scholarship. Given the development of Europe as we know it, Henri Pirenne's thesis in his Mohammed and Charlemagne (English translation, 1939) still merits consideration. If the Islamic conquests of the eighth and ninth centuries had a decisive impact on the formation of Europe, one cannot study the history of the Mediterranean, the Balkans, the Baltic regions, and Western Europe without studying the northward and westward expansion of various Muslim empires. One case in point is the history of Umayyads in Andalusia, and another is the long military and political engagement of the Ottoman Empire in Europe where all sorts of apocalyptic expectations and stories about the "terrible Turk" were widely circulated, as evidenced in Martin Luther's letters "against the Turks."
Political history is always more than the history of rulers and commanders. In 1458, only five years after the fall of Constantinople (one of the forsaken jewels of medieval Christendom), Pope Pius II extended an unprecedented invitation to the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II Fatih to convert to Christianity in order to bring all Christendom under his rule. The Pope's proposal was to make the Ottoman sultan the "emperor of East and West." If he heard it at all, Fatih must have smiled at the Pope's suggestion that his westward march depended on accepting a "small amount of water" in which to be baptized.
From the battle of Lepanto (1571) to the second siege of Vienna (1683), Ottoman military power weakened and gave way to European powers as the new forces of global dominance. The rapid expansion of the European colonial system shook the Muslim world from West Africa to the Philippines. By the middle of the nineteenth century, large parts of the Muslim world were under direct European control. The most dramatic shock, however, came with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798. In contrast to the loss of the "peripheries" of the Muslim world, the heartland of Islam was now under French occupation. Napoleon's famous edict in Alexandria and the response he got from the Egyptian historian ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jabartī in his ʿAjāʾib al-athār fī al-tarājim wa-al-akhbār makes for one of the fascinating encounters between Islam and the West at the end of the eighteenth century. Napoleon's mission civilisatrice was countered by al-Jabartī's utter rejection of everything French and European. Not only were the French ruler's armies abhorrent, al-Jabartī wrote, but his praise of Islam, its Prophet, and the Ottoman Sultan was deceitful. There was one way left for al-Jabartī and his generation of Muslims to fight the domineering armies of the French Republic, and that was to take refuge in their unshakable belief in Islam.
The legacy of colonialism continues to make a profound impact on Islam-West relations today. Many Muslim countries fought wars of liberation against European powers but after independence found themselves dependent upon their former colonizers. The current distribution of global power, once wielded by Europe and now by the United States, fuels a sense of alienation, frustration, and mistrust in the Muslim world. In addition to pressing policy issues, Samuel Huntington's implicit claim in his Clash of Civilizations (1996) that there is a collision between the fundamental values of Islamic and Western worlds and that "Islam has bloody borders" was viewed as epitomizing a point of view that justifies the current global power imbalance to the detriment of non-Western cultures and societies. The events of September 11th and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have further increased tensions between various Muslim and Western groups. Many in Europe and the U.S. see extremist groups in the Muslim world as a threat to the existence of international security and to the future of Western civilization. Many in the Muslim world see the "war on terror" as a war on Islam and Muslims. As Esposito and Mogahed show in Who Speaks for Islam (2008), the overwhelming majority of Muslims subscribe to the universal principles of human rights, rule of law, and democracy, which are also Western values. But they also want the West to respect Islamic culture, religion, and tradition. This entails a more reasoned and balanced discussion of Islam-West relations than equating Islam and Muslims stereotypically with terrorism, violence, irrationalism, oppression, or cultural backwardness. In this regard, Islamophobia, the unfounded fear of Islam and Muslims, and the hatred arising from that fear are a major source of tension.
Relations between Islam and the West are constantly changing. A new element in this long and varied history is the rise of Muslim communities living in the West. While seeking to be active participants in their societies, the Muslim communities of the West are also struggling with issues of integration, discrimination, and minority rights. As their negotiation of a space within Western societies is a process that concerns both worlds, their potential to play the role of bridge-builders is increasing. Tariq Ramadan's To Be A European Muslim (1999), for instance, invites Muslims living in the West to call Europe and the U.S. their cultural and political "home." Like many of his counterparts, Ramadan's plea is for Muslims to salvage Islam from being a phenomenon of immigration and for Muslim communities to claim a vital place for themselves in the Western world.
Looking Ahead.
Future relations between Muslim and Western societies will be shaped by three differing views. The first view is held by those who see Islam and the West as locked on an unalterable collision course with the two holding irreconcilable worldviews and political theologies. They see clash and confrontation as the only path between the two, and there is no shortage of either on the Western or the Muslim side. The second view, held by Westernized elites and governments, considers the current tensions as useless and based on old-fashioned theologies. It holds that the remedy for the Muslim world is more modernization and more secularization, by which Muslim societies, it is assumed, will enter the international community of "civilized" nations. The third view, held by scores of scholars, intellectuals, and community activists in both Muslim and Western worlds, argues for critical engagement and eventual reconciliation between the worlds of Islam and the West.
From international politics and religion to media and education, there is a vibrant process under way to renegotiate the legacy of Western modernity and chart a new way for future relations. Both grassroots movements and high-level leadership engagements such as the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations seek to bridge the religious, cultural and political gap between Muslim and Western communities. Such critical engagement and a possible move toward historical reconciliation will involve revisiting the current self-perceptions of the Islamic and Western worlds and their views of one another. This is a daunting task but one that is essential for global peace.
http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/Public/focus/essay0409_west.htmlIslam and its Challenges in the Modern World
I. Bruce Watson
Islam today is facing challenges from within and from the wider world. The critical problems are the fundamental tensions within Islam. The attitudes and criticisms common in the outside world can be ignored as misguided or hostile, but the tensions within Islam throughout the world must be confronted. In a simple geographical sense, Islam has to come to grips with its changing centres. The religious centres define the heartland: Saudi Arabia maintains its guardianship of the shrines at Mecca and Medina, and the conduct of the hajj, against the claims of Shii Iran, the Shii tradition, and other sects disillusioned with Saudi Arabia's credentials within the ummah. Saudi Arabia enjoys much of its strength to repudiate other claims because it remains the economic centre of the ummah. It takes a combination of the incomes of Kuwait, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Iran and Yemen even to come close to Saudi Arabia's oil wealth. However, this wealth is based on finite resources, and in the years to come the economic centre will shift to those parts of the Muslim world with sustainable resources and reproductive assets. West Asian financial investments recognise this long-term problem, but they remain overwhelmingly located in the Western and non-Muslim economies. The intellectual centre of Islam is Al-Azhar in Cairo. The ideas and attitudes taught here are spread throughout the ummah, particularly through the population centres of Islam: Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Malaysia. The relative power of the different centres is shifting. Over time the claims on and against the heartland from and by the peripheral Muslim communities will exacerbate the tensions already present. The conservative centre will be under greater pressure from the more vigorous, prolific and liberal Muslim societies on the periphery.
Despite the ideals promoting an equitable and productive material life, the overwhelming majority of Muslims experience living standards which are hardly enviable by any standard. This frequently appears to be a greater paradox in the wealthy oil-producing Muslim countries. Where justice and brotherhood are recommended by the ideals, in such countries we see the conspicuous consumption of the very rich, the purchase of very expensive military technology and armaments, and we see the exploitation of 'guest workers': fellow Muslims from Palestine, Pakistan, the Philippines, among others. The plight of these groups was obvious during and after the Gulf War in 1990-1991. Unemployment of masses of people; rapid urbanisation; unbalanced development - all need to be addressed quickly by the ummah, if the ummah is to become the social force of international Islam. The wide imbalances in the distribution of incomes and wealth between Muslim societies are obvious, but since effective redistribution is not happening within most Muslim societies it is unlikely to occur to any major degree between different Muslim societies.
Development investment in Muslim countries is slow simply because investors are put off by the more extremist agitations and the perceptions in the West about Islamic legal proscriptions of such financial mechanisms as interest. Muslim investors appear quite happy to send their money into the non-Muslim economies, where greater profits are available and the political and social circumstances are much more settled. In other cases, where people are trying to help their communities they often encounter problems from unlikely sources. The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh has been lending small sums of money, mostly to rural women so that they can engage in small enterprises, but also to collective groups. The sums are small and the interest is fixed, with the principal being repaid first and the interest calculated on the diminishing principal. Twenty per cent interest per year still seems high, but it is tiny when compared with the twenty per cent per month or ten per cent per day demanded by the traditional money-lenders, or the compound interest at Bangladesh's commercial banks. The Grameen Bank lends money to people who would not be eligible in the normal commercial sense. People are helped to determine the best way to satisfy their needs and are helped by the bank's officers in the villages. The Grameen Bank goes out to its clients and it permits the good sense and honesty of its clients to prevail: it has a recovery rate of some ninety eight per cent. The bank faces conflict from the traditional money-lenders, the commercial banks which claim that the scheme is too small to create the economic growth necessary in Bangladesh, and from the Muslims who see the scheme emancipating women in the villages. The bank fulfils the ideals of Islamic thinking, but is attacked by established interest groups defending their interpretation of Islamic practice.
Economic frustration and unequal opportunities are fertile breeding grounds for dissent and protest. Equally important is the failure of most Muslim governments to confront the demands of general education. "Modernity, the circumstance of being 'modern', is, in a central sense, inescapable. It is the necessary context for every tolerably well-informed life-journey undertaken in the contemporary world"(1). Being modern does not mean being Western but it does mean that some degree of secular knowledge will have to be given far greater prominence in Muslim epistemologies. Dr Mahathir bin Mohamed has made the point that there can be no separation between secular and religious knowledge because all knowledge, all life, is encompassed by Islam. It is interesting that so prominent and successful a Muslim leader as Dr Mahathir had to tread a fine line: advocating on the one hand an independent and progressive Muslim attitude to acquiring the widest possible knowledge, while placating the traditional sensibilities by insisting on the moral rectitude of learning as the only way to protect the faith. There are Muslim intellectuals working to understand what it means to be a Muslim in the modern world, but they do not receive the prominence given to the extremists in Western reports. Western media are more interested in the violent and emotional than they are in quiet, but deeply significant, debates about the eternal values that remain, despite the anarchic individualism of Western communities, the essence of being human. Not only are Muslim intellectuals under pressure from the conservative elements of their own societies, they are not receiving the recognition and support they deserve from the West. Yet it is at this level of ideas and reassessments that Muslim leaders will have to convert the de facto modernisation of their societies into general acceptance. The renaissance of ijtihad will be needed to reinterpret the principles of Islam, to retain the critical moral core while jettisoning the dubious accretions of traditional and worldly Muslim authorities.
The whole panoply of modern knowledge and technology is acceptable, but its Western manifestations are to be avoided if all they achieve is the perpetuation of the Muslim world's dependence on Western developments. A fundamental problem here is that which bedevils Western societies: can the use of and reliance upon new technologies alter perceptions, change desires, force social changes? Do the people who create and maintain the new technologies become the new high-priests. All knowledge and technology entail more than the physical and objective characteristics; they also contain the moral questions about how the new technologies should be used, what controls should be placed on them and who should be responsible for the implementation of the regulations. These are moral questions the simply secular authorities cannot answer, if only because utilitarian arguments lead us only to numerical quantities not qualitative priorities.
There is a very real danger involved if Muslims are not critical enough of Western world perceptions and if they take things for granted. There needs to be an increase in criticism in the light of Islam criteria. Without a heightened critical faculty Muslims are in danger of considering "Islam as a partial view of things to be complemented by some modern ideology rather than as a complete system and perspective in itself, whose very totality excludes the possibility of its becoming a mere adjective to modify some other noun which is taken almost unconsciously as central in place of Islam...He who understands the structure of Islam in its totality knows that it can never allow itself to become reduced to a mere modifier or contingency vis-à-vis a system of thought which remains independent of it or even hostile to it"(2).
The main danger arises if Muslims accept the more extreme view of the difference of Islam and the insistence on establishing 'the third way'. If everything Western is to be discarded, then the creative and productive dynamism inherent in Islamic traditions will be suppressed yet again. Is Islamic resurgence giving enough attention to the challenges of poverty and hunger, disease and illiteracy? Have Islamic resurgents gone past, or are they still stuck on, their rhetoric regarding education and knowledge, science and technology, politics and administration, economics and management in their preferred Islamic order? To what extent have Islamists become pre-occupied with forms and symbols, rituals and practices? Do they regard laws and regulations in a static rather than a dynamic manner ? Is there a tension between the extremists' positions and the principles of the Quran and sunnah about the roles of women in society and the place of minorities in Muslim societies? Is the main problem a betrayal of the spirit of the Quran in the extremists' exclusiveness in a variety of matters ranging from charity to politics? Are the activities of extremists encouraging sectarianism in the umma through their insistence on their interpretations being the only correct ones? Have extremist views contributed to the factionalism and fragmentation of the ummah (3).
The moral question is at the heart of the matter. Fazlur Rahman stated the position precisely. Islam needs: "some first-class minds who can interpret the old in terms of the new as regards substance and turn the new into the service of the old as regards ideals"(4). Can the modernists who want modernisation without Westernisation expect to realise their hopes? There is evidence enough in Western society that modernisation, with all its technological developments, has radically changed values by putting traditional attitudes under pressure and then instituting a new ethic. Untrammelled economic growth and development has resulted in consumerism, institutionalised selfishness, ill-gotten wealth, rising expectations, laxity in sexual behaviours, the dissolution of the family, essentially independent electronic media, the influx of foreigners and foreign values, the materialism of modern science and technology and greater amounts of secularism(5).
In an increasingly secular world, can Islam unite a modern society? Western secular politics is based on the notion that sovereignty belongs to individuals who select their governors through political consensus arrived at during free and regular elections. Islam believes, in theory at least, that sovereignty belongs only to God and that a legitimate temporal government is so only for as long as it implements God's will and the Sacred Laws. Whatever the theory asserts, the reality is that governments have to find the equilibrium that produces social prosperity and harmony under the guiding impulses of a strong moral code. The problem is made more complex when the moral code is itself subject to sectarian divisions: between orthodox and heterodox claims to revelation and legitimacy. We have to return to the questions: whose Islam, what Islam, where and when? It is clear that in states which have declared Islam as the ideology of political order, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan, there has been little reduction in domestic conflict or the reduction of conflict with their neighbours, Muslim or otherwise. In these states there is little real evidence of effective redistribution of wealth or substantial economic and social benefits flowing down to the general population. The benefits promised by Islam are not being realised.
In the Muslim communities with an emphasis on the secular ideology of politics, such as Turkey and Egypt, the general welfare is only slightly better, although there appears to be a greater freedom of belief and action. The majority of Muslims live under governments with a qualified acceptance of a secular ideology. These states have taken Western models for modern political and social institutions and have imbued them with a strong Islamic character(6). The problem remains: how does Islam deal with public morality and public order? What institutional frameworks can define, separate, and regulate private vice and public morality? What arguments can be raised in favour of, and against, the devout who insist that there exists already a definitive, well-known and comprehensive path revealed by God? In our reflections on the issues, we must remember to distinguish between the genuinely devout people and those utilising religious symbols to promote their own positions.
Political Islam is under challenge from its own rhetoric and message to be self-critical: to live up to its own standards; to live up to the principles it espouses and demands of others; to avoid and denounce excesses committed by governments and movements that identify themselves as Islamic; to take or share responsibility for the failures of Muslim societies, and not simply to blame the West for all the problems(7). One of the central questions will be the treatment of minorities under Islamic governments, and the behaviour of Muslim minorities in other countries. At present the political ideology of Islam cannot entertain an equal and pluralist society of Muslims and non-Muslims(
. This is not just a matter of tolerance: it entails the recognition in ideal and reality of the unqualified equality and citizenship rights of people of all faiths irrespective of whether they are male or female. The role and influence of political dissent, trade unions, and the media will have to be re-examined along with the social and legal issues. A new equilibrium will have to be reached between the legitimate demands of the individual and the legitimate demands of the society in which he or she lives.
In the same way, Muslim minorities will need to reach a new accommodation with the ruling groups in their countries. Indian Muslims (about one hundred millions, or twelve per cent of the population), and Muslims in the Philippines (about six millions, or eight per cent of the population), will have to control the extremist elements within their communities. The examples of Pakistan and Bangladesh are clear demonstrations that separatism is not a viable option. Religious homogeneity is no more capable of establishing a harmonious society than is the ethnic homogeneity being attempted by the Bosnian Serbs. The spread of Islamic terrorism into the emerging Muslim states in Central Asia, in Africa, as well as the sporadic outbreaks in Western countries, will need to be suppressed. At the same time the legitimate demands of Muslim minorities must be recognised by the governments of their countries. Some fifty million Chinese Muslims cannot be ignored even within a population as large as China's.
In international terms, Islamic states are increasingly significant economically, financially and politically. Across the ummah local interests and national politics appear to be more important than simple identification of interests based on Islamic traditions. The Islamic states antipathetic to the West (Libya, Iran, Iraq, Yemen) are balanced by those which are firmly supportive (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Brunei). This is not to say that the states with positive relations with the West are not critical of the West. Many of the criticisms of leaders such as Dr Mahathir, Lee Kuan Yew, and Goh Chok Tong (Prime Minister of Singapore), among others, are incisive and go to the heart of many of the problems in the West.
Despite the overwhelming global influence of Western ideas, the West, of course, is not a monolithic presence. The twentieth century has proved beyond any doubt that the ideals espoused in the West do not prevent hypocritical justifications for untenable attitudes towards the rest of the world, nor do they prevent total war between European nations.
The West has to understand Islam; not because Islam is the next great threat, but because Islam contains so many ideas and moral values that the West, for all its rampant secularism, still shares. The West must also recognise the diversity of Muslim experiences across the world. Muslim societies do not only suffer from 'Islamic' problems; they suffer the same problems long familiar in the West: political, economic, ecological, social and moral development. As such, these are shared human experiences and the beneficial resolutions: in science, technology, medicine, education should also be shared equitably. If Western nations believe in the value of their defining concepts: individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, and the separation of church and state(9) then they will have to be shared through sympathetic dialogue, not forced upon others. The idea of contending world views which define the good states from the bad states will have to be scrapped. It has not worked in the West's relationships with China, where the hypocrisy of the West's stance on human rights has been highlighted by the West's attitudes towards Algeria and Bosnia. Western support, especially that by the United States, for the authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Pakistan while denigrating other exclusive Islamic authorities in Iran, Syria, Iraq, and the Sudan, does not generate confidence among Muslim societies around the world. Western nations supported the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, yet helped to oppress Palestinians through support for Israel. The continued existence of Israel is not negotiable, but the ways in which Western nations have treated the concerns and sensibilities of the Palestinians have not been sympathetic enough. Neither have the more aggressive Muslim attitudes helped the situation.
Western attempts to propagate ideas about Western civilisation as 'universal civilisation' have resulted in significant reactions against a new imperialism: 'cultural imperialism', 'human rights imperialism', and so on. The religious revivals and reaffirmations of local, traditional values, among the younger generations in Islamic and Hindu cultures especially, are often reactions against the insidiousness of Western cultural influences.
Just as Western societies must reassess their ideas about the superiority of their ideals, so too must Muslim societies understand that their traditions need reinterpretation. It is pointless for the ulama to keep on insisting that Islam is not simply a different tradition: it is a superior tradition. In this light Western ideas are not only inferior, they are inapplicable and irrelevant to Islam and Muslim society(10). At the level of ideals the arguments depend eventually on the leap of faith: whether divine authority rests in the Torah, the Bible or the Quran. People who accept the superior divinity of only one of these not only have the problem of repudiating other claims, they must also address the people who do not accept the authority of any divine revelation. It is useless to quote the authority of the Quran to people who do not accept it. The arguments have to be conducted on other levels: rational and empirical levels. Here the ideals can be seen to have been debased over the centuries by the practical realities of living. This does not mean that the ideals are worthless, but it does mean that demands for a return to the simplicity of Islamic principles must be tempered by courageous and clear-sighted analysis of the differences between the Quranic ideals and their historical development.
Islam and the West have much to offer each other. Nothing productive will develop while the dominant attitudes are those of suspicion, bigotry, and fear. Islam once played an essential role in preserving knowledge during the ignorance and barbarism of Europe's 'dark ages'. The rediscovery and refinement of this knowledge helped to set Europe on the road to its modern dominance of science and technology. The grip of worldly and corrupted religious leaders was broken in Europe. At the same time the suppression of ijtihad and rational dissent within Islamic societies by similar sorts of rulers caused the decline of the Islamic world, permitting the Europeans to indulge in imperialism and colonialism from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. A sympathetic exchange of knowledge, flowing this time from Western societies to Islamic societies, may well revivify Islam and permit Islamic societies to enjoy a more creative and significant role in the modern world.
Simple material transfers are not enough. There has to be a reworking of the central ideas in both societies. It may seem an obvious point, but in the bigotry of the religious confrontation it is necessary to emphasise that non-Muslims must recognise as a fact God's revelation of truth to Muhammad. If we can accept our own monotheistic traditions and the role of prophets we must recognise the genuine prophetic claims of others. We can critically examine the traditions but we must do so from recognition and knowledge not from denigration and outright rejection. Islam offers much to Western societies presently dominated by the anarchic demands of rampant 'isms': individualism, materialism, consumerism and secularism. Islam has preserved the central position of moral values as the defining character of human society. Francis Lamand, President of the French Association 'Islam and the West', considers that: "Islam can contribute to the rebirth, in the West, of three essential values: the sense of community, in a part of the world that has become too individualistic; the sense of the sacred; and the legal sense. This can be the contribution of Islam to Western societies"(11) In return the West has to control its arrogance and reassess its stance towards the rest of the world. The notion of there even being a 'rest of the world', from whatever perception, is something we all have to change.
You may also be interested in the videos here
http://www.islamicstudies.harvard.edu/expressions-of-islam-in-contemporary-african-american-communities/
Topic: Soulside