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Islam and Globalization: Secularism, Religion, and Radicalism
Sean L. Yom*
Far from being incompatible with it, Islam will
have its place in the globalizing world. Islamic revival
is part of the world-wide religious resurgence that
corrects the secularist bias of European modernity.
Globalization is a driving force in this process.
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What is Islam’s place within globalization?
Many prominent scholars characterize the religion
as incapable of adapting to a globalized society because
Islam instinctively opposes globalization and the secular
values it entails. However, this explorative endeavor favors a multidimensional rather
than polemic approach, one that views the recent Islamic
revival, radical Islamic militants, and the broader return
of religion around the globe as critical aspects of globalization.
This investigation does not so much advance a centralized
argument as it acts as a web of possibilities, linking concepts
and realities together under a global framework in the hope
of positing a broader appreciation of Islam and its evolution
vis-à-vis globalization and the normative context within
which it lies situated.
At the end of the Cold War, partly in response to the ideological
lacuna left by the collapse of international bipolarity
and partly in reaction to the realization that globalization
was inexorable, numerous scholars proposed new paradigmatic
theories of international relations that expressed a new
dynamic of global conflict.
These architects, whom Sadowski memorably labels
“global chaos theorists,” described globalization as a fragmenting
process, eroding the sovereignty of states and fomenting
the rebirth of new social, cultural, and religious loyalties. They forecasted a world divided along religious-civilizational
lines that “seemed to be slipping over a precipice into
an epoch of ethnic and cultural violence.” As such, the revival of religion—particularly
Islam—heralded a mutiny against modernity, globalization,
and even secularism. Globalization, defined as “[T]he inexorable
integration of markets, nation-states, and technologies
to a degree never witnessed before, enabling individuals,
corporations and nation-states to reach around the world
farther, faster, deeper and cheaper,”
was merely an euphemism for “the revenge of history.” Connolly vividly adumbrates this spiritual
rupture: “The end of the Cold War and accelerated economic
globalization, population migration, tourism, and cross-national
cultural communication combine to increase the sense of
insecurity among numerous constituencies. People encounter ideas, faiths, identities,
foods, skin tones, music, sexual practices, and languages
that disrupt presumptions to universality… And ‘the nation,’
so recently the site of calls to overcome corruption, division,
and fragmentation, now seems too small to overwhelm these
insecurities.”
Quintessentially, these global chaos theorists computed
a calculus that equated globalization to fragmentation because
the variable of religion, most of all Islam, signified profound
differences in the political visions between civilizations;
due to globalization and the insecurities it bred, Muslims
would predictably contest and clash with the non-Islamic
world.According to this argument, Islam operates as a collective
agent whose tendencies to violence and traditionalism transpose
the religion as an intransigent enemy to global pluralism,
representing its greatest threat and most defiant opponent. Certainly, this argument has gained new theoretical
currency after the iconic events of 9/11, particularly as
the broad war on terrorism has implicated a number of Muslim
states into its front and cast new light on burgeoning networks
of Islamic fundamentalism. In fact, current formulations of Islam both
inside the popular imagination as well as within the academic
perimeters of global chaos theory allude to the stereotypical
pictures of John Buchan’s 1916 novel “The
Greenmantle”: “Islam is a fighting creed, and the
mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Korean in one
hand and a drawn sword in the other.
Supposing there is some Ark of the Covenant which
will madden the remotest Muslim peasant with dreams of Paradise? Then there will be hell let loose.” Islam rests beyond the interpretative limits
of reason, the nation-state, and the pluralist zeitgeist
of globalization.
This characterization of Islam, however, is fallacious. Almost sixty states exist today whose majority populations adhere
to Islam; nearly 1.2 billion people across the globe call
themselves Muslims. To assume that they will all contest globalization
and engage in some epic “clash of civilizations”
or participate in a “coming anarchy”
erases much of the discursive and ideological map of possibilities
that fervently awaits the Muslim world.
Moreover, the revival of Islamic identities and the
emergence of new Muslim movements, including radical fundamentalist
networks, compose only one element of a broader magnanimous
trend: the resurgence of religion as a salient dynamic that
has been reshaping identities, behavior, and orientations
at the late stages of globalization.
The following investigation arrives in three parts. The first examines global chaos theories of Islam, which attempt
to argue that Islam and globalization are intractably opposed,
and problematizes them with theoretical and empirical observations
on radical Islam’s modes of political praxis.
The second section directs attention to the rise
of secularism as a dominant discourse, one that has shaped
the relationship between globalization and religion.
The third part inspects the relationship between
the Islamic revival and globalization, explicitly weighing
questions about the religion’s salience within globalizing
processes. It concludes that Islam changes and adapts
to exogenous influences and pressures, constantly flowing
and ebbing in its ideological, structural, and legitimating
effects, and that it is this remarkable capacity that allows
the religion to not only flourish but also contribute to
globalization.
This much is clear: Islam distinguishes itself from other
major world religions.
It is a communal faith that presents a sweeping,
internally cohesive set of legal and moral rules for the
organization of collective and individual life. It addresses both spiritual and material concerns, in the theological
and political spheres; the religion is not merely a set
of functional beliefs, but a permeating layer of reality
that shapes the duties of the Muslim in relation to God,
fellow
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The revival of Islamic identities
and the emergence of new Muslim movements, including radical
fundamentalist networks, compose only one element of a
broader magnanimous trend: the resurgence of religion
as a salient dynamic that has been reshaping identities,
behavior, and orientations at the late stages of globalization.
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Muslims, and non-Muslims.
It emphasizes the role of community and explicitly
outlines various individual obligations and prescriptions
vis-à-vis that community; thus, it transfers the social
dimensions of its traditions into the private realm. And, unlike its sister Abrahamic religions, it also began as a political
tradition centered on the surrender of complete sovereignty
to God (Allah) and the juridical distinctions between the
purviews of the divine and the humane.
In turn, this tradition has filtered throughout the
centuries through social institutions, political governance,
legal structures, and normative values which craft the interpretative
lens by which Muslims perceive the non-Muslim world.
Notably, the key assumption informing this analysis is
that increasing economic, cultural, and political interaction
between nation-states, cultures, and populations will continue.
Such a forecast rests firmly upon the presumption
that globalization moves with its own self-propelled, contingent
logic within the anarchical system of extant nation-states
as the teleological end of micro-level interactions, regardless
of whether they are motivated by realist concerns (such
as the search for stability and security) or by liberal-institutional
desires (such as interdependence between states that aims
to bring collective benefits to all players of the game).
As such, this inquiry assumes that globalization
is inevitable; it questions not if it will continue, but
only how—on what terms, on whose grounds, and in what relation
to Islam’s various faces.
Globalization, Chaos, and Islam
The Global Chaos Theorists
Global chaos theories describe Islam as incapable of peacefully
coexisting with other civilizational and religious entities
in an age of globalization, where the destinies of cultures
and peoples inexorably intertwine. They interpret the “new wars” of the post-Cold
War era as evidence that when identities are based primarily
upon religion, such as Islam, conflicts will undoubtedly
erupt.
In the flushing afterglow of the Cold War victory, Fukuyama’s
‘end of history’ thesis articulated that because the history
of mankind has been molded by the dialectical clash of ideas,
the collapse of the Soviet Union and international communism
signified the triumph of Western ideas and the end of history
and the exhaustion of other ideologies. Ideational competitors, such as socialism,
had attempted to organize society according to a specific
blueprint, but ultimately fell to the manifest good of Western
liberal democracy. Taken to its logical end, the argument implies
that if the engines of globalization, such as the nodes
of technology, communications, and economic capital, rest
within the West, and no competing ideas threaten its ideological
dominance, then the course of globalization will occur according
to Western values, beliefs, and norms.
In response, however, prominent thinkers claimed that not
only had the end of history never occurred, but new ideological
forces would create constant sources of violent conflict
that would disrupt the smooth flow of globalization.
For instance, Hadar coined Islam as the “Green Peril,”
green being the symbolic color of the religion, and described
the dominant perception of Islam as “a cancer spreading
around the globe, undermining the legitimacy of Western
values,” as represented by the “Muslim fundamentalist, a
Khomeini-like creature armed with a radical ideology and
nuclear weapons, intent on launching a jihad.” Barber more bleakly illustrated this discord
as a “Jihad vs. McWorld” struggle, in which globalization
confronted the “retribalization of large swaths of humankind
by war and bloodshed,” in which Islam functioned as a stubborn
source of parochial, anti-globalist identity.
However, the most scathing broadsides have been launched
by Bernard Lewis, Robert Kaplan, and Samuel Huntington.
A Middle East historian, Lewis contended that Islam
had historically experienced periods of inspired hatred
and violence, and that “it is our misfortune that part,
though by no means all or even most, of the Muslim world
is now going through such a period, and that much, though
again not all, of that hatred is directed against us.” The contemporary “political language” of Islam—from
the body politic to expressions of authority over communities
of faith—revolved around great disappointment with the “talismans”
of constitutional governance and post-colonial independence. A wave of angst rampaged through the Muslim
world due to its traumatic domination by the West, and many
Muslims were thus immanently opposed to Western civilization
and its creations—capitalism, democracy, even liberalism.
He observed that “It should by now be clear that
we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the
level of issues and policies… This is no less than a clash
of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic
reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian
heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion
of both.”
Significantly, in this and other passages, Lewis calls secularism
and its ‘worldwide expansion’ (that is, globalization) as
flashpoints on which the Muslim world would wage a struggle
or resistance.
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Islam operates as one of the more
destabilizing factors in the globalized world because
globalization unmasks and unleashes previously hidden,
obscured tensions.
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More so than Lewis, Huntington presented his ‘clash of
civilizations’ thesis as a thinly veiled polemic against
Fukuyama’s sanguine prediction. He argued that if large parts of humanity still
refuse to see the obvious superiority of Western ideas,
it is because of deeply rooted incompatibilities in the
collective makeup and value systems of their civilizations.
Some ideas remained so incompatible that any sort
of rapprochement would lead to conflict.
For instance, the Islamic notion of a global “ummah”
(community of believers) that links Muslims across
borders and states by faith alone threatened the normative
basis of the Western concept of state sovereignty. Thus, the Islamic civilization will clash with
the West, especially given the strength of the Islamic revival,
which he correctly defines as “a broad intellectual, cultural,
social, and political movement” within the last 40 years
that aimed to revive “Islamic ideas, practices, and rhetoric
and the rededication to Islam by Muslim populations.” This endangers globalization, which he calls
the result of “broad processes of modernization that have
been going on since the eighteenth century.” Moreover, Huntington contended that the “Muslim
propensity toward violent conflict,” as proven by various
contemporary conflicts involving Muslim states, indicated
the growing violence that would characterize Islam’s relations
with other religions and civilizations.
Finally, Kaplan observed that while Western values originated
from secular humanism, other cultures derived much of their
value from religion, such as Islam. Differences between alien cultures erupt in
irrational violence, impervious to rational restraints and
epitomized in the intrastate wars wracking much of Africa,
South and Southeast Asia, and the Balkans.
Furthermore, historical rifts between cultures and
religions still held influence over present-day events;
the ancient rivalry between Islam and Christendom, for instance,
guided the horrific ethnic pogroms in the former Yugoslavia. The “House of Islam” will clash with other
civilizations and cultures in episodes of violence that
could “ripple across continents and intersect in no discernible
pattern.” Hence, Islam operates as one of the more destabilizing
factors in the globalized world because globalization unmasks
and unleashes previously hidden, obscured tensions. Whereas Huntington and Lewis maintained that the West would receive
the brunt of Islamic reactions, Kaplan extended the range
to include the entire non-Muslim world, essentially broadening
the scope and intensity of the conflicts that would erupt
via globalization.
The Critique: Against the Monolith
While each of these authors wrote from different perspectives,
they all assume that something about the Muslim world, and
the operation of Islam as a cogent religious, ideological,
political, and cultural exposition of beliefs, rituals,
and signs, opposes globalization, the West, or a combination
of the two. According to them, powerful segments of the
Muslim world will unify under the aegis of Islam and direct
their anger and violence against globalization and contest
its pluralist dreams with their own parochial visions of
Islam’s superiority. Second,
the arguments all presume that religious lines will become
manifest more sharply than any other marker of identity;
particularly for the Orient, religion functions as the most
irreducible, impermeable difference between Islam and the
rest of the world. Third,
they all characterize Islam as a religion that will have
little role in global civil society, world state, or any
form of global governance, because its history, traditions,
and reaction against alien values determines its future
as the hostile Other, the Green Peril, an obstacle to globalization.
This portrayal of Islam, however, lacks theoretical and
historical validation. Moreover, it lends itself to essentializing
visions of Islam as static or monolithic. This process of
self-reification, one that assigns fixed meaning to Islam
by freezing its symbols and discourses in a single frame,
operates as “the referent for a modern social science discourse
that has tended to create conceptions of an unalterable
incompatibility between ‘Western’ and ‘Islamic’ civilization,”
which oversimplifies the trajectories and complexities of
Muslim communities, states, and organizations. In remedying this, a wider understanding of
Islam must be explicated, one that accounts for the presence
of multiple interpretations of its beliefs.
There already exist powerful criticisms against the global
chaos view of Islam that need only brief mention here: that
the Islamic world is certainly not a unified bloc, as vicious
contestation still erupts in political circles over the
concept of an authentic Islam;
that Muslims actually engage in more conflicts against one
another rather than against non-Muslims, proving that religion,
even Islam, does not compel individuals into cooperation
on all issues;
that most of Islam cannot be mistaken for its fundamentalist
versions, whose cries for violence fall in the extreme minority
of global Muslim voices, and constitute an explicitly modernist,
rather than traditionalist, project;
and finally, that religion, even as a primordial, ascribed
affiliation, cannot solely induce people into civilizational
blocs (witness, for instance, the impossibility of Canada,
Mexico, and the United States unifying for the reason of
professing Christianity). In summary, Islam does not prescribe violent
war as its modus vivendi, much less desire bloody war against
the forces of globalization that supposedly threaten its
values.
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Islamism is a heavily contextual
phenomenon whose major goal is to articulate and redress
the various grievances held by disparate Muslim groups
across the Islamic world. Its causes are found within the social and
political contexts of different Muslim political actors,
not in any textual trap door or scriptural loop hole in
Islam.
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While these arguments accurately pinpoint some of the errors
of the global chaos view, contemporary scholarship has missed
its greatest flaw: its implicit reliance upon a polarized
model of Islamic international relations derived from cursory
interpretations of the Qura’n, Sunna, the Hadiths, and other
texts. This view
elucidates that Islam constructs the world into two realms:
“Dar-ul-Islam” (abode of Islam), the domain of peace and
faith where Muslim states and communities reside, and “Dar-ul-Harb”
(abode of war), the domain of disbelief, corruption, and
“Jahili” (barbaric, non-Islamic societies) constituting
the enemy of Muslims. According to this characterization, Muslims
in Dar-ul-Islam are required to wage “Jihad” (holy struggle)
against those in Dar-ul-Harb until all are converted; “this
proselytizing zeal and quest for the achievement of Islam’s
universalist vocation… endows it with an intrinsic expansionism.” Jihad manifests as “one of the basic commandments
of faith, an obligation imposed on all Muslims by God;”
both personal and political, it encases a moral obligation
“without limit of time or space,” a duty on part of Muslims
and Islamic polities to convert or subjugate non-believers
“until the whole world has either accepted the Islamic faith
or submitted to the power of the Islamic state.” In the contemporary age, the cosmopolitan,
capitalizing, globalizing parts of the world constitute
Dar-ul-Harb, while Dar-ul-Islam represents an embattled
Muslim city on a hill, encroached on all sides by the dark
forces of globalization.
In turn, this black-white image of Islam rests on
two absolutist assumptions: first, that the main impetus
behind Muslim states behavior towards non-Muslims is the
desire to spread the message of Islam or become martyrs
trying; and second, that Muslims will not rest until Islam
becomes the universal creed.
As a result of this unsophisticated vision of Islam’s destiny,
the idea that most Muslims endorse radical Islamic thought—the
type of Islam upon which Osama bin Laden, for instance,
issued the “fatwa” (religious decree) to “kill the Americans
and Jews” — has become popular.
Fortunately, some political leaders have taken great
pains to separate mainstream Islam from its radical variety;
for instance, President Bush spent several minutes in his
first public speech after 9/11 to discuss the differences
between the fringe Muslim terrorists who had hijacked Islam
and most other peaceful Muslims.
Missing, however, is a sincere explanation of why
radical Islam emerged in the first place; why its sociopolitical
grievances wrack Muslim countries; and why, in the face
of globalization, many thousands of the Islamists have turned
to “excavating and reinterpreting” the scripturalist foundations
of Islam in order to apply them to contemporary social and
political reality. Without an explanation of radical Islam’s history
and objectives, arbitrarily drawing a line between the rational
“we” (the West and those palatable elements of mainstream
Islam) and the irrational “they” (radical Islam and all
of its violent manifestations) can only denote the immediate
strategic interests of the agent who marks that line—for
instance, Bush’s statement may simply indicate that the
U.S. does not want to alienate its Muslim allies, rather
than signifying a sincere respect for Islam. The critical observer thus cannot ignore deeply
rooted differences in context and belief that separates
radical Islamic from the rest of the world’s one billion
Muslims.
Islamism
Radical Islam, or Islamism, is “a political agenda where
the application of Shari'a is central” and manifests as
a mobilized political movement willing to use violence in
order to implement its goals. Its various constituents and leaders wish to
“shift the frame of reference in the public realm to one
in which Islam, in its various interpretations, is a major
shaping force.” In practice, this means that they wish to follow
the model of the Iranian Revolution and institute theocratic,
purely Islamic law (Shari’a)
and political structures that would transform their societies
into the ideal versions of a Muslim polity, in the footsteps
of Prophet Muhammad’s utopian community in the early seventh
century A.D. Its
vibrancy and rapid growth from the subaltern has led some
scholars to call the last thirty years as “the most exciting
period in Islamic religious history since the twelfth century.” Certainly, all governments of Muslim populations
have had to confront the Islamist trend over the past several
decades. Moreover,
Islamist groups have committed public acts of violence predicated
on exegetical justifications against the state in countries
that share little commonality save religion, such as Morocco,
Uzbekistan, Yemen, and the Philippines; various guerilla-terrorist
groups, such as those that wage war under the name of Islam
in Algeria, Afghanistan, and Chechnya, also fall under this
category. Despite the arguments of some scholars that
believe that Islamism cannot last as a viable ideology due
to its lack of comprehensive political action beyond mere
violence, the movement has not only endured, but has grown
and entrenched itself.
It becomes imperative, however, to avoid the seductive
allure of assuming that the growth of radical Islam means
that the entire religion has somehow undergone a violent
transformation, or that some hidden “truth” in the Qura’n
or other holy texts has spawned and legitimized radical
Islamist ideology. As Nair testifies, “In accepting that a singular
definition of Islam is impossible, its variety of thought
and practice must also be accepted. […] However, the contexts
in which Muslims find themselves are as likely to influence
their behavior as the sense of the universality of their
faith. The senses
of community which derive from faith and practice are necessarily
interpreted and shaped in distinct ways in different places,
times, and societies.” In this manner, Islamism is a heavily contextual
phenomenon whose major goal is to articulate and redress
the various grievances held by disparate Muslim groups across
the Islamic world. Its causes are found within the social and
political contexts of different Muslim political actors,
not in any textual trap door or scriptural loop hole in
Islam. For instance,
in many authoritarian countries, such as Saudi Arabia and
Jordan, Islamism’s rise can be explained by the frustration
of middle-class activists who constantly faced repression
by the government, and therefore engaged in more militant
behavior in order to overturn the political system. In relatively democratic Turkey, radical Islamic
identities are mobilized and politicized due to cultural
and social pressures from below rather than political suppression
from above. Hence, radical Islam did not begin as a new,
distinct branch of Islam from a uniformly trained cadre
of clergymen and reformers, but rather as a reactionary
mode of thought by mostly middle-class professionals and
students who sought to explain and explicate their grievances
in a powerful language.
Furthermore, almost every Muslim government today rejects
Islamism, which both validates the distinction between mainstream
Islam and its radical counterpart as well as further angers
Islamists. Most
Muslim states are largely secular in structure and institution,
if not in language; “the secular state in the Muslim world,
through oppression and accommodation, has by and large stayed
its ground and in large measure contained Islamic revivalism.” As Sudan and Iran show, the seizure of power
by openly radical Islamist groups does not “reshape the
existing state system in any significant way.” Islamism is easily co-opted and manipulated
by governments in their strategic interactions with their
domestic oppositions and their geopolitical opponents.
Often, as in the case of Algeria authoritarian regimes’
attempts to brutally repress Islamism lead to cases of mostly
internal terrorism and violence but never broad-based, mass
revolution;
in other cases, as in Jordan, compromises between the most
vocal of Islamists and the incumbent state produce novel
(although not always successful) tactics of inclusive governance
and containment strategies. Still in other instances, Islamism does not even manage to capture
the popular imagination beyond a few civil society movements
and plays little role in the course of the government—Turkey
typifies this case.
Thus, rather than embodying the entire Muslim world in
its praxis, Islamism does not enjoy uniform support by Muslims
in most Islamic countries, and in fact almost every Muslim
government has attempted to pacify or suppress Islamist
voices. Such discordance is a far cry from the idea
that the entire Islamic world is at once up at arms with
globalization and the West.
Thus, despite the views of Huntington, Kaplan, Lewis,
and other global chaos theorists, little in Islam per se
contests globalization, and the radical Islamists which
they denigrate do not share much with the vast majority
of Muslims. However, another dynamic aspect of radical Islam’s curious career
is the broader rise of religion around the globe. Islamism can be contextualized as a component of two larger phenomena—the
Islamic revival which has swept the Muslim world and the
global religious reawakening that counts Islam as only one
interlocutor among many.
The next two sections will discuss these trends and
their relevance to Islam’s relations with globalization.
Secularism and Religion in an Era of Globalization
It has been commonly assumed that religion would retrench
its role as globalization continued.
For instance, Harvey Cox’s 1965 book, The
Secular City, announced the collapse of religion to
the extent that most of humanity within decades would be
atheist or agnostic, as societies slowly democratized, pluralized,
and modernized. However, this supposition has faced tremendous
contestation in the form of a religious revival in all parts
of the world within the last half-century.
Indeed, the “global religious resurgence has challenged
the expectations of modernization theory, the progressive
secularization and Westernization of developing societies.
Religion has become a major ideological, social and
political force.”
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The rise of the nation-state as
the defining mode of existence — that is,
the organization of peoples into “imagined communities”
in both the mind as well as on the map — operationalized secularism through the separations of church and state
throughout the Christian world, and then the rest of the
world via colonization and conquest.
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The reassertion of Muslims as conscious, rhetorically skilled
political actors across the Muslim world, and even in non-Muslim
countries like Russia and now much of Western Europe, is
one facet of a broader reality—namely, that the global religious
resurgence signifies a deep desire by considerable portions
of the world population to establish meaning and order in
a rapidly changing, fluid environment.
All such religious movements, including the Islamic
types, “share in common a return to the foundations or cornerstones
of faith. They reemphasize
the primacy of divine sovereignty and the divine-human covenant,
the centrality of faith, human stewardship, and the equality
of all within the community of believers.” From the new impulses of the Orthodox Church
to the powerful religious right in America, an apparent
“desecularization,” or at least a “resacralization,” has
occurred across the world. These new religious movements attempt to address
the grievances of the temporal by appealing to the powers
of the spiritual; “religious revivalisms often represent
the voices of those who, amidst the failures of their societies,
claim both to ameliorate the problems and to offer a more
authentic, religious-based society.” Thus, religion functions as a vertical point
of reference across the continuum of political order. All of these descriptions decode the Islamic experience as much
as they do other religions.
What remains to be observed, however, is how and
why the religious revival within Islam, of which radical
Islam is only one small part, arose. It requires an examination of secularism and
its relation to religion, as well as the connection between
globalization and secularism.
Secularism as Dominant Discourse
The secular character of the state was a European invention
that entered Western political imagination during the 17th
century. Rooted
“in the desirability of grounding knowledge and the governance
of society on nonreligious foundations of scientific rationality,”
secularism closely relates to the founding of modern states,
the division of humanity into discrete, organized territories
that denied the primacy of transcendent religious loyalties. This represents a genuine paradigm shift from
the medieval era, because the secular state required the
loyalty and obedience of citizens within finite, bounded
spaces. While convoluted and complex, the secular trend revolves around
some major events and developments: the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia
marks the starting point of the international system of
states, and therefore also the rise of the secular state;
the Enlightenment, with its views on rationality and reason
as derivative of the human mind, cemented secular philosophy
as a dominant discourse that ordered, signified, and produced
structures and domains of human knowledge; and finally,
the rise of the nation-state as the defining mode of existence
— that is, the organization of peoples into “imagined communities”
in both the mind as well as on the map
— operationalized secularism through the separations of
church and state throughout the Christian world, and then
the rest of the world via colonization and conquest.
The experience of the Third World holds special significance.
Non-Western countries deliberately emphasized their
secularism during and after the decolonization, as such
a tradition “is not indigenous to such countries and as
an artificial implant is not nearly as deeply rooted in
the cultural life of such societies.” As Falk discovers in his studies of Turkey,
Pahlavi Iran, and China, the rhetoric of secularism ironically
acquired an almost religious overtone in terms of its language,
functions, and symbols in governments’ attempts to desperately
disentangle any political institution from religion.
Secularism, thus, represents a “posture toward reality”,
a perspective on human relations with epistemological and
geopolitical components. It played a profound role in the transition
between the medieval and the modern; it contributed “an
ethos of tolerance that greatly pacified the struggle within
Christianity between Protestant and Catholic rulers… that
opened the way for the rapid growth of science and industry.” It also colonized and authenticated itself
within the structures of states, whose collective constitution
of the international system further replicated secularism
through colonialism. It excluded consideration of religious identity
as a viable expression of statehood, and attempted to enclose
religion within the private sphere.
As a result, in so-called modern societies, religion
“commonly is regulated by government, and forbidden from
particular expression in certain areas of public life, such
as schools and government.
Religion simply is not as institutionally prominent
in modern societies as in traditional ones.”
However, secularism did not spontaneously arise, nor did
it hierarchically trickle down from the political dictates
of the state. As
with any regime of power and knowledge, it works “not through
the commands of a supreme sovereign but through the disciplinary
practices that each individual imposes on his or her own
behavior on the basis of the dictates of reason.”
Globalization problematizes
and destabilizes secularism.
From its discursive birth, secularism fused itself with
a technocratic, scientific rationality, which denounced
religion as irrational, traditional, and therefore anti-modern.
It became embodied and personified in the constitutional
arrangements, institutions, and structures of the state.
Whereas God formed the center of the Christian worldview,
secularism held as its deity the notion of reason, the idea
that statements could be verified by reference to ordinary
human experience or by reasoning from objective, empirical
premises. Secularism
became known as a humanizing and liberating tradition due
to its conscious dislocation from the tyrannical, non-reasonable
dictates of religious faith.
The secular ethos, a worldview that championed reason
and science, prevailed. Much Western political theory has since labored
under a secularist bias. As a result of the secular bias and its encoding
into the fabric of reason and thought, the “religious dimension
of human experience has been generally excluded from the
serious study and practice of governance.”
Relations of Religion to Globalization
Globalization problematizes and destabilizes secularism
through the realization that “the boundaries of the state
are no longer very relevant.” Secularism attempts to privatize religion,
but as religious identities have strengthened, so too have
their believers in perpetuating and sharing their narrative
visions of the past, present, and future.
“Thus, in a globalizing world the relevance of secularism
seems limited… There are special concerns about the way
in which a religious state handles a range of worldly matters,
but whether the secular logic of strict separation is a
useful approach seems very much in doubt.” The return of religion, therefore, implicates
the dimensions of autonomy, identity, and belief; it represents
a new metric of identity.
It indicates “undeniable evidence of a deep malaise
in society that can no longer be interpreted in terms of
our traditional categories of thought,”
a comment especially true in the case of Islam.
Moreover, that the religious resurgence has occurred precisely
during the decades when globalization has intensified wields
two strong implications. First, the religious revival reacts against
the appeal of cultural and political cosmopolitanism. Much as post-colonial peoples have asserted traditional practices
and institutions from the belief that such traditions were
different and therefore held more value than modern, artificial
constructions (regardless of their actual efficacy and utility),
various portions of the global population, from the Catholic
liberation theologies of Latin America to the Muslim “jamats”
(brotherhoods) of the Middle East, have realigned religion
as their source of identity that lies necessarily separated
from the rest of the planet. This claim rests upon “a right to locality”
and “the primary rights of place, culture, and community”
that must be asserted amidst the twin vessels of what they
perceive as the global juggernaut, “ideological hegemony
of neo-liberalism and the legal dismantlement of national
sovereignty.” It indicates a vital quest for identity, authenticity,
and community within and against swiftly changing conditions
that globalization has wrought. In totality, regardless of whether the threats
it interprets are constructed or real, religion embodies,
in Foucault’s words, “a plurality of resistances,”
a strategic assertion of identity that also connects to
a performative view of the world and a plan to improve it
in this life or the next. Second, the religious revival actually owes
its strength to worldwide pathways of information exchange
that only globalization has instituted.
It harnesses modern technologies and communications
to spread its sociopolitical message; stark proof comes
in the form of the videotapes featuring Osama bin Laden
which surfaced in Afghanistan in late October 2001, copies
of which had been distributed via Internet and global air
mail to thousands of seminaries and schools across Africa,
the Middle East, Southeast Asia, even Europe. Ironically,
then, however much it attempts to contest it, religious
resurgence needs globalization for its strength.
The Dialectics of Globalization
and the Islamic Revival
If secularism has so thoroughly dominated as a discourse
that governed politics, laws, and norms and that replicates
itself in both the minds of men and the structural apparatus
of states, then why has religion, particularly Islam, experienced
a revival? Chatterjee
provides the answer: “[N]o matter how adroitly the fabric
of reason might cloak the reality of power, the desire of
autonomy continues to range itself against power; power
is resisted… Hence one cannot be for or against modernity;
one can only devise strategies for coping with it.” Echoing Foucault, where there is power, there
is also resistance. Yet
this does not simply mean that religion views itself as
the antithesis to globalization; it signifies that across
the world, various individuals have consciously chosen to
evince religious identities in their personal, micro-political
struggles in order to make sense of what has occurred in
and around their lives. This perspective helps explain the meaning
of the Islamic revival and the place of radical Islam within
it.
The Re-assertion of Islamic Identity
Radical Islam constitutes one small part of a wider religio-political
project on the part of millions of Muslims over the last
several decades. This project is the Islamic revival, the renaissance
of Islam and its ethos in all sectors of Muslim societies,
from culture and political life to private beliefs and civic
networks of faith. The movement emerged most conspicuously with
the 1979 Iranian Revolution, but the revival had actually
began decades earlier.
A general “heightening of Islamic consciousness among
the masses” had occurred since the post-World War II period. It became manifest in more frequent and conspicuous
displays of Islamic identity, such as dress and prayer;
an increasing appreciation of Islam’s impact in the political,
social, and economic arenas; an intellectual flowering of
scholarship centering upon all aspects of Islam, such as
its holy texts, its mystical content, and the life of the
Prophet; a greater willingness of all Muslims to invoke
either Islam or God into their daily discussions; and finally,
of highest visibility, the formation and spread of radical
networks of Muslim fundamentalists that have often resorted
to violence in order to implement their narrow vision of
Islam’s destiny. What ties these individuals and groups together
is the derivation of their ideas from the original texts
and scriptures of Islam, and the belief that their faith
and investment in certain Islamic ideas creates a vital,
reforming energy that can eventually better human society.
What does not tie them together is the resort to
violence that only a handful of militant Muslims have shown,
who in fact represent only the smallest minority of the
religious revival. To
demarcate further, conceptual divisions transpire on two
levels: first, between the general religious resurgence
and one of its elements, the Islamic revival; and second,
between the Islamic revival and one of its own components,
radical Islam.
__________________________________________________________________
Islam does not exist in a vacuum:
it evolves, reinforces, and replicates itself through
globalization.
__________________________________________________________________
Muslim societies faced a profound crisis, one that touched
cultural, political, social, economic, psychological, and
spiritual dimensions; when by the late 1960s secular ideologies
and models of development failed to produce prosperous societies
that could match the sheer strength of the West, Islamic
revivalist movements surged into the public sphere, promising
a return to Islamic greatness and dispelling the “hopelessness
and pessimism” that pervaded Muslim societies.
The raison d’être of Muslim revivalists can be succinctly
articulated as the fact that “the very integrity of the
Islamic culture and way of life is threatened by non-Islamic
forces of secularism and modernity, encouraged by Muslim
governments.” Significantly, their struggles not only focus
upon external actors, such as the West or globalization,
but also upon their own governments, which have failed to
solve the problems inherent in their societies.
In this context, globalization is viewed as an aggrandizing
influence that heralds patently non-Islamic ideas and practices,
such as secularism, liberal democracy, consumerism, et cetera—essentially,
the products of the West.
Against
the Secularist Bias: the Quest for Global Participation
Globalization has transformed not only the structural environment
of the world, but also the social relations that envelop
different religious followings: “By global, we mean not
just transformed conceptions of time and space but the new
social meaning that this has involved… we understand this
as the development of a
common consciousness of human society on a world scale.” This description provides the contextual backdrop
against which Islam may be judged.
Indeed, the “position of Islamic societies must be
viewed within a global framework of experiences if its special
resources and liabilities are to be understood.” For instance, as Esposito and Voll observe,
“even the world of radical extremists committed to distinctive
and parochial causes is cosmopolitan in its connections
and interactions,” a fact verified tragically on 9/11, when
terrorist events were the end result of a well-funded, worldwide
network of operatives and specialists whose brutal efficiency
depended upon the openness and interactions that globalization
heralded. Thus, Islam does not exist in a vacuum: it
evolves, reinforces, and replicates itself through globalization.
Globalization is a narrative that posits an awareness of
the totality of human social relations.
However, because religious experiences are excluded
from consideration as either viable modes of relations or
legitimate products from the world of knowledge, secularism
has essentially colonized and directed the ideational structure
of globalization using non-religious terms. Thus,
the argument that Islam will contest globalization is based
on the deeply rooted secular-religious dichotomy.
Any religious system sets forth three basic components:
“a worldview, a way of life, and an account of the character
of the social entity that realizes the way of life and explains
that way of life through the specified worldview.” The silence of these elements within the global
framework signifies the dominance of secularism, which does
not so much attempt to refute these aspects of religion
as it hides them by denying their ontological and epistemological
subsistence. Islamic
revivalists, however, refuse to be silenced; “the transformation
of human experience on a global scale is accompanied by
greater demands for participation and for recognition of
special identities.”
Thus, despite its political catalysts and social causes,
the Islamic revival must not be seen as an unsophisticated,
revolution-minded force that seeks to violently institute
a new sociopolitical order in simple opposition to globalization,
for it rests within a much broader historical and comparative
frame. Secularization manifests itself as the reification
of particular conceptions of reason and rationality, but
even the radical, violent Islamic movements are not predicated
purely upon a destruction of the secular and upon the universal
sovereignty of God. Rather, the fundamentalist Islam they espouse
forms a referential system that requires the existence of
secularism in order to establish its difference and distance
from it, just as much as secularism needs the existence
of a religious Other to legitimate its practices.
In this paradoxical consanguinity, “tradition must
not only deny or suppress the historical and philosophical
grounds of its foundational interdependence with the other,
but must also constantly recreate the ‘difference’ between
itself and the other by defining the other’s mere existence
as a threat to the
universality of the practices, traditions, order of the
self.” In this dichotomy, secularism represents reason
and modernity, and religion the irrational and anti-modern. Secularism, represented by globalization, and
religion—represented by Islam—are given fixed meanings that
do not change over time and space.
This binary view, however, is false; it is precisely
the fiction that girds global chaos theories of Islam and
its impending battle with globalization. Each representation is not a uniformly stable set of meanings, divided
from the Other by insurmountable differences, but rather
a kind of “moral enclavism” that defines its traditions
and goals in terms of what the other is not. Hence, each
mode of thought constitutes the other; they transform one
another in a mutually dependent relationship.
__________________________________________________________________
Ironically, globalization, predicated
and articulated through a secularist bias, strengthens
Islam by furthering its range and extensive influence.
__________________________________________________________________
Secularism has not been as rigidly pervasive in the West
as commonly thought. “The reality is that for centuries the separation
between Caesar and God in Christianity was less clear-cut
as is often believed while the separation between the two
in Islam has been more pronounced than is usually assumed.” From the empire of Charlemagne and the Holy
Roman Empire to the Pope and the kings of Great Britain,
Western political history is rife with examples with heads
of state who also claim sovereignty over the realm of faith,
and vice-versa. Moreover,
in his anthropological studies of religion, Asad observes
that while “European societies are presumed to be built
upon a profound separation of state and religious institutions,”
this popularization of secularism actually ignores the variety
of contemporary cases in Europe, Latin America, and North
America in which religion deeply connects to conceptions
of national identity while also giving de facto state power
to informal institutions that have as much, if not more,
persuasive capacities to move citizens into action than
the formal, secular state. In fact, the history of religion and the state
in the West since Westphalia has been “fraught with ambiguity
and cross-pollination; the line between sacred and secular
authority has remained equivocal, porous, and fluctuating.” Not until the monotheistic Protestant establishment
emerged as an articulate political actor in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries in America did secularism
as a distinct worldview coalesce and enter into public discourse
in Western countries. Even since then, the rumblings of religion
are still manifest in various court cases, political parties,
and social movements that attempt to merge state power with
religious intent in almost all Western countries, not to
mention the Third World. Secularism never fully completed its vision for a comprehensive
ordering of political and social relations, and so the assumption
that it a finished political project flies in the face of
historical and sociological evidence.
The
“Modernization” of Islam
Globalization actually engages Islam rather than denying
its relevance. Within the new public spaces created by globalization,
religious identities interact with modern ideas and technologies.
For instance, the advent of the printing press, which
arrived in the Islamic world centuries after it impacted
Europe, tremendously changed the structure of Islamic education,
the ways by which holy texts were read, and the conceptualization
of the Muslim world. As globalization continues, new technologies
have continued to change relations of authority and knowledge,
“reconfiguring notions of self and society” while lending
a certain consciousness to previously marginalized, subaltern
voices within the religion. For instance, the telecommunications revolution
and the Internet have generated new intellectual possibilities
for Muslim scholars wishing to both reflect upon as well
as criticize Islamic notions of the right and the good;
ironically, it has also allowed lay scholars and ordinary
citizens in Muslim states, from Egypt to Indonesia, to contest
the intellectual productions of Muslim scholars and teachers
and offer new, radical interpretations of Islam to a mass
audience, which consequently has helped form the basis of
the new Islamic movements. In these cases, transformations
within Islam have only occurred by the constant imposition
of modern values and capacities, products of secular thought
and alleged opponents of religion, into the discourses of
religion. Meanwhile,
that Islam has grown more rapidly than any other major religion
rests upon the strength of globalization; it would be difficult,
for example, for the faith to spread if the free movements
of peoples and ideas that globalization encourages did not
exist. Ironically
then, globalization, predicated and articulated through
a secularist bias, strengthens Islam by furthering its range
and extensive influence. This paradox constitutes simply one example
of how the secular-religious divide actually breaks down
into interdependence rather than xenophobic distance, and
how similarly the globalization-Islam opposition collapses
upon itself on further scrutiny.
Conclusion: Islam as Part of the
Globalizing World
Expressions of Islam function as “means of disciplining
ambiguity, creating boundaries and constituting, producing
and maintaining political identities.” This also applies to expressions against Islam,
especially for global chaos theorists and the intellectual
borders they have drawn around globalization that necessarily
exclude Islam. However, as this investigation demonstrated,
global chaos views on Islam were inaccurate for their reliance
upon simplified concepts and ideas that were hastily extracted
from Islamic texts. Their blurring of the boundaries between Islam
and radical fundamentalism hides the real distinctions that
separate these two traditions.
In turn, radical Islam finds itself as one small
element of the Islamic revivalist trend, itself part of
the global religious resurgence, which must be seen within
the broader secular-religious divide.
At every level of this conceptual chain, the relations
with globalization constitute interdependence and mutual
reinforcement rather than categorical denial and opposition.
__________________________________________________________________
Islam will certainly not recede
from globalization’s horizons.
It is very much a part of its heritage and future,
and therefore a crucial strand in the universe of possibilities
that awaits the globalizing world.
__________________________________________________________________
Debates about Islam and its role within the world as it
globalizes confront the question of secular modernity and
how it interacts with religion and Islam in particular.
Radical Islam, of course, conceptualizes itself in
opposition to modernity.
But most of the Islamic revivalists do not agree
with them. The deeper
critique here is that Islam, in all of its emergences and
expressions, cannot merely be characterized as a “self-contained
collective agent,”
one that seems to have a life of its own.
It must be understood as a performative, discursive
tradition, understood as an organized, socially significant
historical narrative that interacts with globalization;
it functions as one powerful voice among the choir of political
and moral options. Islam does not operate as some nebulous,
abstract variable; rather, actors that perform behaviors
under its mantle reconstitute, redirect, and reify it through
adherence to their own peculiar geographic, strategic, political,
and economic needs, ultimately contributing to their syncretic
identities. Ultimately, Islam does have a place in globalization,
as much as globalization has a place within Islam. Islam will not mindlessly contest globalization;
it derives meaning from it, which some Muslims—such as the
radical Islamists—might interpret as threatening, while
others derive more peaceful visions.
Regardless of this diversity, Islam will certainly
not recede from globalization’s horizons. It is very much a part of its heritage and
future, and therefore a crucial strand in the universe of
possibilities that awaits the globalizing world.
As pronounced in Ibn Warraq, Why I Am Not A Muslim (New York: Prometheus
Books, 1995).
For more on the secularism-religious conflict within Islamic
history, see Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
See, for instance, Gilles Kepel, Jihad, expansion et déclin de l'islamisme
(Paris: Gallimard, 2000), and Antoine Basbous, L'Islamisme, une révolution avortée? (Paris: Hachette, 2000).
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 96.
Sean L. Yom * 1981;
Graduate Student, Political Science, Brown University,
Providence, USA; Research Assistant, Carnegie Council
on Ethics and International Affairs in New York;
seanyom@netscape.net
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