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| Volume XII, Fall 2005, Number 3 |
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EXCERPT
The Arabs, Islam and Globalization |
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| Fauzi Najjar |
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Dr. Najjar is professor emeritus at the Center for Integrative Studies, College of Social Science, Michigan State University.
...[T]he Arab intelligentsia is divided into three different attitudes toward globalization. There are those who reject it as the “highest stage of imperialism” and a “cultural invasion,” threatening to dominate people, undermine their distinctive “cultural personality” and destroy their “heritage,” “authenticity,” “beliefs” and “national identity.”
The second group of Arab thinkers, secularist by inclination, welcomes globalization as the age of modern science, advanced technology, global communications and knowledge-based information. It argues that it is no longer possible for people to be “cocooned” within their own boundaries to ruminate upon their heritage, be its captives and nurse nostalgia for an “imagined” past. It calls for interacting with globalization and for benefiting from its “positive opportunities” in knowledge, science and technology, without necessarily losing their Arab-Islamic cultural individuality.
A third group calls (probably naively) for finding an appropriate form of globalization that is compatible with the national and cultural interests of the people. Globalization cannot be wholly accepted or rejected, it argues. The attitude of this group has been described as “positive neutrality,” a self-interested pragmatic outlook, seeking a middle ground since globalization is an inevitable historical phenomenon with which the Arabs will have to interact. In between, there are other variations in attitudes toward globalization. This paper will focus primarily on the cultural implications of globalization for Islam as viewed by Muslims, in particular the Islamists, who express the greater suspicion of this development and, instead, seek to promote an Islamic “universalism” that, in their view, is superior to any cultural paradigm imposed by the Christian West.
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