Islamic Civilization in Globalization:
From Islamic futures to a Post-western civilization

Sohail Inayatullah

Abstract:

Islam can be seen as a counter discourse to globalization, to the expansion of economic space and the fulfillment of the dreams of the social darwinists. However, even as Islam attempts to create new possibilities for globalism, national politics doom it to a politics of reaction, of reducing diversity and innovation. This is especially perilous as the next phase of globalisation promises to end historical notions of reality, truth, nature and sovereignty. In this dramatically changed world, Islam can join with other counter discourses to create a moral vision of a planetary society, an alternative vision and reality of globalization.

Countering Globalization: 

At one level, Islam can be seen as a counter-globalisation[1] in that globalisation – at least in its dominant face – is essentially about expanding the economic circle in our lives at the expense of the social, the spiritual and the cultural. It is the expansion of the world capitalist economy into every sphere of our lives.  It is also the continuation of social darwinism, that the fittest – the most entrepreneurial - should lead the world.  Finally, globalism continues the ideal of progress, of creating the perfect society, the positivist/scientific world, of forever removing religion and irrationality from human history.  The latest technology that promises to deliver this future is germ-line engineering, creating a world of flawless human beings. But in whose image of perfection will these individuals be created in? Certainly not Islamic notions of the good, rather, they will continue in technocratic and western definitions of health, beauty and intelligence. 

In this move to hyper-globalization, the Islamic world stands both as an imagined past – feudal, low-tech – but also as a civilization based on an alternative distinction between the public and the private, between individual space and collective space and between the secular and the religious.  

However, globalization - if we ask not what is globalization but which globalization – along with the globalization of economy and the globalization of technology (its acceleration) also consists of: (1) the globalization of awareness of the human condition (of hope and fear); (2)  the globalization of responses to market and state domination (the emergent global civil society of transnational organizations); (3)  the globalization of governance (both below and above); (4) and, finally globalization is both the expansion of time (creating a discourse of the long term future) and its elimination (creating the immediacy of space). 

In this more exhaustive definition of globalization, where stands Islam? Islam in these globalized worlds, defined more eclectically, is first about an alternative to the Western project, that is, a promise of a more spiritual society based on a the unity of thought, of an alternative epistemology, an alternative notion of science and political economy.

Islamic Paradigm: 

Generally this alternative paradigm as articulated by various Muslim writers consists of the following:[2]

            There are ten such concepts, four standing alone and three opposing pairs. Tawheed (unity), Khalifah (trusteeship), ibadah (worship), ilm (knowledge), halal (praiseworthy) and haram (blameworthy), adl (social justice) and zulm (tyranny) and istislah (public interest) and dhiya (waste). 

Tawheed articulates the larger Islamic unity of thought, action and value across humanity, persons, nature and God. Khalifah asserts that it is God who has ownership of the Earth. Humans function in a stewardship, trustee capacity, taking care of the Earth, not damaging it. The goal of the Islamic worldview is adl, social justice, and it is based on the larger needs of the people, istislah.  To reach these goals, ibadah, worship or contemplation is a beginning and necessary step. From deep reflection, inner and outer observation, ilm or knowledge of self, other and nature will result.  One's action then are halal, praiseworthy and not haram, blameworthy. Moreover with this framework, dhiya (waste) of individual and collective potentials is avoided as is zulm, tyranny, the power of a few, or one, over many, or the power of a narrow ideology over the unity within plurality that the Islamic paradigm advocates. The science that emerges from it is not reducationist objective but synthethic and values based, focused on an emotional commitment to understanding Allah's world. 

While the above presents an alternative paradigm of Islam, it is the vision of an ummah, a global community of believers and non-believers that defines this alternative globalism.  At heart, Islam desires to reintegrate the individual as part of the natural order. While Western civilization has come to life in long drawn out battles against the tyranny of royality (from the Magna Carta to the Glorious English Revolution) for muslims it has  been the most recent battles againt colonialism and imperialism that has unleashed a humanistic spirit.  The vision of the ummah, writes jailed muslim leader, Anwar Ibrahim, "must be able to transcend cultural specificity [and] inhabit the realm of universal ideas."[3] 

This means that the vision of the Ummah must draw on the cultural resources from Islamic history using them to engage with other civilizations through inclusive dialogue.  However, the universal must be stated within evolutionary terms, as part of the human unfolding drama. 

But behind this idealism lies the current reality of an Islam, that while dramatically increasing in numbers, is decreasing in conceptual unity,[4] decreasing in its viability to create a new politics and economics, indeed, culture, that is, while muslims trust in Allah, they are not doing enough to tie their camel – to become culturally and technologically innovative. 

Writes muslim scholar, Munawar Anees: [5] 

Perpetuation of despotic rulers, such as Mahathir in Malaysia, is achieved  through a systematic corruption of the civil, judicial and the police  departments. The invertebrate state-controlled media serve the self-fulfilling  prophecy while anti-Semitic slander with sham retractions is not uncommon for sleazy political gains. Greedy multinationals and the Western corridors of power are clearly reprehensible for propping up these client regimes as their economic and political mercenaries.  

Given the intellectual bondage and political and economic subservience of the Muslim world to the West, prospects for the future, either programmed or desired, remain gloomy. There seems to be an inexplicable fatalism that continues to envelope the Ummah - the global Muslim community. It has ceased moving from opinion to knowledge. And employing knowledge for social evolution. In the footsteps of the Prophetic Tradition - beside trust in the Divine mercy - are not Muslims required to tie up their camel? 

Can muslims, asks Zia Sardar, recover the dynamic principle of ijtihad – sustained and reasoned struggle for innovation and adjusting to change – that has been neglected and forgotten for centuries? [6] Can Islamic civilization avoid the future being programmed by globalization and create an alternative modernity, that is, not destroy tradition but adopt it critically, challenging feudalism and patriarchy and authoritarian knowledge politics, and creating a world, modern, but different from the West? 

The possibilities are mixed. With the ascension of the West, muslims have internally adopted the Orientalist codes, seeing themselves not through their own historical eyes – gaze – but through the lenses of Western categories. What results then are imitations of the West, instead of multiculturalism or anti-West rhetoric for local power politics.  The strength of globalization in terms of shaping the world economy as well as world culture – the politics of idea production, how Hollywood movies shape world notions of self – do not bode well for other cultures (except in exoticized or museumized forms).[7] 

Technology transforming modernity: 

But as we venture into the future, globalization is not just about expanding economy and technology as well as the  dialectical responses of civil society and reflexive awareness but also about dramatic changes in the nature of reality (through virtualization) in truth (through challenges from postmodernism and multiculturalism) in the nature of nature (from genetics particularly germline engineering as well as from feminist/poststructural thought) as well as sovereignty (making the self and the nation-state far more porous than the legacies industrialism has given us).  Within these frames can we still imagine not just a vital Islam but any Islam? Or is Islam likely to be left behind by .com fever and the new economy (virtualization), by genomics (the end of the natural), by the relativization of newtonian stability and globalized economics (and international organizations and corporations spearheading the end of ideology)? 

Virtualization will challenge all religions as it contests historical definitions of reality. Computer games are already a larger revenue industry than films and the trends are that this will keep on increasing. But there are significant problems ahead. First, virtualization leads to social isolation, which leads to depression, which already in 1990 accounts for five of the ten leading causes of disability.  Psychiatric conditions are expected to play an even greater role in the global burden of disease in the future, becoming in 2020 the leading cause of the loss of life years. [8] Virtualization is likely to further fragment the western self, creating the desolation of postmodern anomie.[9] The lack of access to the Net may prove not as disastrous as it appears now – communication, and not merely solitary information transfer – will remain important in the Islamic world.  This relates to the second problem. Virtualization further weakens social ties, community (even as new net communities are created). Again, for the Islamic world, with less net access, this may prove a boon. However, as the Islamic world opens up to the net, we should expect individualization.  The personal computer revolution may also create spaces for software that reduces the interpretive authority of mulllahs. For example, by placing the Quran on cdrom, direct access to interpretation will be possible. This expansion of knowledge democracy could be one factor in challenging the dominating feudal structures in the Islamic world. It could also help create an alternative cyberculture, modern, but differently so from the hegemonic West.  This alternative culture would be one that allows group experience of virtuality, thus creating new realities, innovation without the loss of the family orientation of Islamic culture. 

For the Islamic world, the challenge will be to – as with the adoption of all non-indigenous technologies – to appropriate and use ICTS and their future developments (web-bots, the always-on, wearable computers) without being used by them, that is, to use the net to unleash local innovation without succumbing to the dark side of cyber futures.[10] 

But a greater challenge than virtuality will be the end of the natural through developments in genetics. Cloning, gene therapy and germline engineering all contest evolutionary views of what is natural – that is, humans preselecting genetic dispositions, characteristics. The slippery slope from genetic prevention (reducing the probability of developing certain diseases) to genetic enhancement (height, “intelligence”) to new species creation will be quick and almost unstoppable within current globalized and technocratic science.  While this will challenge all religions, religions of the book, derived from stories of Adam and Eve will be especially made problematic. Buddhist and other Indian perspectives with far more liminal views of self, will find negotiating an artificial world far easier. The works of Indian philosopher P.R. Sarkar are especially instructive in developing a spiritual perspective of new technologies.[11]    

The muslim view of gene therapy is generally best described by Munawar Anees and Abdulaziz Sachedina: Anees writes:[12] gene therapy (not to mention cloning) transgresses everything that Islam is about, about what is natural and what is wrong. 

Adds Sachedina: [13] 

In Islamic discussions in eugenics, there is almost a consensus among Muslim scholars that it  "having better rather than worse genes" does not play a part in the recognition of the good qualities of human beings; it is something that is designed by God, and therefore, it should be left to God, so there is no incentive for the improvement of the genetic composition of individuals to increase the value of that individual. Rather, the value of  the individual depends on faith. … 

… There is no encouragement of any kind to improve genetic composition through any kind of surgical or any kind of medical or choices to the marriage decisions; rather, the will of God is regarded as the one that really creates human beings the way there are, and there are potential improvements within that if faith is maintained, if moral and spiritual awareness are maintained within the life 

These new technologies pose the most dramatic problems for those who consider the natural as fixed instead of as constantly changing and in the process of recreation. Strict traditionalists (those who do not take a dynamic view of knowledge, wherein ijtihad (reasoned judgement) gives way to taqlid (blind imitation), in particular, will find the next twenty or thirty years the best and worst times. The best because the forces of tradition will flock to them; worst because the technological imperative and humanity's struggle to constantly recreate itself and thus nature will not be easily forced back.  For the Islamic world to survive, it will not only need to debate these technological developments but articulate an alternative science. 

For religions in general, there are three possibilities.[14]  First is the return to an imagined past with strong feudal and male structures, identity defined by in-group exclusive bonding. Second is to adapt to the future by seeing the past as metaphor, as a story to ethically guide oneself. The latter may become far too fluid for most leaders, however, over time, a new layered religious framework may develop, that is, integration at a different level. For individuals, too, a similar choice remains: return to an integrated but exclusivist self or create a liminal constantly changing self. This postmodern self, the salad bar theory of pluralism, may lead to total fragmentation or alternatively may, as Sarkar argues, create a layered, neo-humanistic self that moves beyond ego (my way is the only way), family (concern for only my future generations), geo-sentiment (my land, territory), socio-sentiment (my religion or race) as well as humanistic sentiment (humans above all), that is, a dynamic, layered inclusive self with incorporates other humans as well as plants and animals. A neo-humanistic self thus moves through the traumas of ego, territorial nationalism, exclusivist religion, racism as well as speciesism entering the universalistic transcendental. 

Sovereignty: 

Combined with virtualization and geneticization is breakdown of sovereignty. While the passport office remains threatening, capital is now free to roam, as is pollution. Governance too has moved to world levels with the institutionalization of world organizations around activities of health, climate, economy, refugees, to name a few.  However, while capital and state have expanded, the peoples sector has challenged its domination. Non-governmental organizations have been quick to pick up the slack when transnationals refuse to observe triple bottom line accounting measures (profit plus social responsibility plus environment).  The internet too has challenged national sovereignty with cyberlobbying quickly becoming a new form of local/globalist politics, forcing states to be far more transparent than they would like to be. Governments that have resisted this have found themselves losing propaganda wars. Still, the revolution from the past – of feudalism, of control and command structures, as practiced by many nations claiming themselves to be Islamic – have not disappeared. Indeed, while individuals may have transcended geo- and socio-traumas, nations use these traumas to shore up identity. 

SCENARIOS 

What then of the future. What futures will these transformations lead to? Four scenarios are probable. 

Artificial Society: 

The first is the artificial society where the victory of liberal ideology, the science and technology revolution make states far less potent. Islam as currently constituted would not play a role in this future, nor would most nations. It would remain a fast growing religion but only in terms of population and not in terms of defining the agenda for the next century. The population of believers would be poor and angry, searching for someone to blame.  Local leaders would be quite willing to play the extremist card convincing believers that by returning to the past, they would be safe from globalization. The losers would be the most vulnerable – women and minorities as well as modernist muslims. 

However, there will be plenty of the poor to draw on to challenge the system.

 

Global inequality (share in percent)

Source: UNDP (1999). Human Development Report, p. 22.

 Writes Lydia Krueger:[15]

 While the income gap between the fifth of the world’s people living in the richest countries and the fifth in the poorest was 60 to 1 in 1990, up from 30 to 1 in 1960, it has risen to 74 to 1 in 1997.  The same development of global polarization can be described looking at wealth and poverty in a different way: While there are still 840 million people malnourished and 2.6 billion people have no access to basic sanitation, the world’s 200 richest people more than doubled their net worth in the four years to 1998, to more than $1 trillion - with the assets of the top three billionaires alone surpassing the combined GNP of all Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and their 600 million people. 

Is this likely to change? 

In 1993 just 10 countries accounted for 84 percent of global research and development expenditures and controlled 95 percent of the US patents of the past two decades. The dye is set, technocracy will further create a divided world, with the right to the net and the right to genetic therapy and modification becoming the battle cry of the next decades. 

Setting up walls against technology will be the easiest path for Islamic nations. Far more useful would be to develop technologies based on Islamic science – that is science and technology focused on problems in poorer areas as well as science and technology that was nature-based, what has been called nature-oriented technologies. 

Dialogue of Civilizations: 

But instead of the artificial society, there are moves for a pluralistic dialogue of civilizations. Not a clash  (as this merely transposes realistic politics on civilizational theory) but a deep dialogue of ways of knowing, of understanding that we can longer export our problems to other, be they weaker nations or the environment. This holistic view of the world challenges realist notions of power and examines the future from the margins, from new models of organizational cooperation (as with Net companies that are far less patriarchal and hierarchical). An enlightened Islam that instead of projecting its own defeats on the West and instead finding compassion for all human suffering can provide a model of this alternative future. 

What this means is the creation of a world community around shared ideals. In postmodernity's decentring of the world, space has been created for civilizations to articulate their own self-images. Of course, the framework remains Western and secular but the multicultural ethos now even challenges postmodernism .   

For the Islamic world, what in detail would such a future look like, mean? 

Ummah as an Interpretive Community – a preferred future 

First, Ummah as an operating framework for the future challenges the three world thinking of first, second and third worlds.[16] As a concept it means three things: (1) The Ummah is a dynamic concept, reinterpreting the past, meeting new challenges and (2) the Ummah must meet global problems such as the environmental problem. "The Ummah as a community is required to acknowledge moral and practical responsibility for the Earth as a Trust and its members are trustees answerable for the condition of the Earth. This makes ecological concerns a vital element in our thinking and action, a prime arena where we must actively engage in changing things." [17] (3) The Ummah should be seen a critical tool, as a process of reasoning itself 

To create a future based on the Ummah equity and justice are prerequisites. This means a commitment to eradicating poverty. It means going beyond the development debate since development theory merely frames the issue in apolitical, acritical language.

This means rethinking trade, developing south-south trade as well as "new instruments of financial accounting and transacting ... and the financing of new routes and transportation infrastructure."[18] But perhaps most significant is a commitment to literacy for all.  As Ibrahim writes: "Only with access to appropriate education can Ummah consciousness take room and make possible the Ummah of tomorrow as a personification of the pristine morality of Islamic endowed with creative, constructive, critical thought."[19] 

Thus what is called for is not modernism but a critical and open traditionalism that uses the historic past to create a bright future – a post-asian and postwestern dream. But Ummah should not become an imperialistic concept rather it requires that Muslims work with other civilizations in dialogue to find agreed upon principles. We need to recover that historically the Ummah meant models of multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-religious, and pluralist societies. A true Ummah respects the rights of non-Muslims as with the original Medina state. 

However, as possible is a future without any name, a future of Islam but no muslims, that is, a future with continued struggles between factions in the Islamic world and between sects with the West continuing its millennium struggle against its projected other. A bright future is possible but not certain. 

What will the West do? 

While the idealist vision of an alternative more pluralistic softer Islam remain, one that is future-oriented, ecological, community-based, gender equal and electronically-linked, we are struck with not an attempt to imagine a new politics for the Islamic world but to offer imagined histories. Moreover, attempts to create alternatives remain mired in strategic politics as with the Iranian revolution – in fighting for survival space -  or with creating a fortress to stop globalism as with the Taliban. 

But dramatic changes in the nature of reality, truth, nature and sovereignty bode not well for the West as well. Indeed, if we add the dramatically ageing population to this mix, the future of the rich nations is in peril. With an entire age-cohort of youth workers not available – with the median age moving from 20 to 40 and the ratio of worker to retiree slipping from 3-1 to 1.5, what will the West do?[20] It can dramatically enhance productivity thus eliminating the need for labour and immigration or it can create new species of humans, or at least through eugenics ensure its own genetic stock through eugenics. The seeds of eugenics are not outside of Western history but squarely with Darwin. "We civilised men to our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and sick; we institute poor laws; an our medical men exert their utmost skills to save the life of everyone to the last moment. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No-one … will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man," wrote Darwin. [21] The relaxation of natural selection  was leading to genetic deterioration, to a large number of children of the "scum."[22] 

Alternatively it can allow the other into its shores and create multicultural societies. But authentic multiculturalism challenges the sovereignty of the nation-state at its roots, as does globalization. Once in, there is no way back. Globalization thus sows its seeds for a planetary society, or a return to brutal tribalism. 

At heart then the issue is not merely the future of the Islamic world but the future of the entire world. Can we move to a gaia of civilization, an interpenetrating dialogue of traditions where the damage of five hundred years of the victory of the West is undone and the ways of knowing suppressed to achieve hypermodernity are tamed? 

Can we create a postwestern view of the future? At the very least to do so, we will need to imagine a future that integrate ideational and sensate civilizations; integrates linear notions of progress with cyclical notions of time; integrates economic growth with distribution; imagines identity not only in the postmodern sense of fluid selves but in a layered neo-humanistic sense where identity moves from the most concrete to the most expansive and subtle. 

Does humanity have the wherewithall to do so? The signs are mixed. Just as the expansion of human rights continue, the battle of local and national leaders to hold on to privilege strengthens. Nationalism becomes a method of reducing some of the excesses of globalization but it does so at an incredible cost, creating a politics of identity that is generally culturally violent. 

The dream of a good society, a postnational world,  has not gone away, however. Globalism pushes back moral space but it does not vanquish it. The hope of Islam –in dialogue with other civilizations - its offering to the future, is essentially about that, asking what is the right future for us, how can we make sure to include the ethical in all our decisions, in our magical ride to the stars, to cloning, to creating a global governance structure. In this sense the hope of Islam is the creation of a global ecumene that transcends any particular religious framework, that opens up the possibility of a more just society. 

From a realist view, this is impossible, the interests of the powerful will always overwhelm those of the weak. Battles within religions, between strong and soft, are far more important than a dialogue of civilizations.[23]  Even if a new world system develops, it is likely to be Western-based, technocratic, and based on notions that only will only appear sensible to the West. The rich will take flight in their genetically created fool proof bodies, the rest will die tortuous deaths on a planet in environmental crisis.

Still, without a vision of the future, we decline – we do not battle slavery, we acquiesce to injustice. The vision pulls us forward, ennobles and enables us. It calls out the best of us. Muslims have had glorious periods in human history, these can be recovered and used to move onward. 

In a workshop with leading Islamic scholars, activists and technocrats, muslims called for a vision of the future with five key attributes.[24] 

·        self-reliant ecological communities

·        electronically linked khalifa, politically linked

·        gender partnership – full participation of females

·        an alternative non-capitalist economics that takes into account the environment and the poor

·        the ummah as world community as guiding principle based on tolerance

·        leadership that embodies both technical and moral knowledge 

These points may or may not come about. The structures of oppression, the weight of history pulls us away from our desired futures. But our desires gives us agency. The future can be door into an alternative world. If we take this door, then the policy and implementation question comes back but framed as: how can we make the moral the rational, the easier path? 

If we don't, we should take heed from this warning:

Isn't it here that you take a half step wrong and wake up a thousand miles astray.[25] 

References