Islam in Southeast Asia: Political, Social and Strategic Challenges for the 21st Century

12. MODERNIZATION AND THE PROCESS OF GLOBALIZATION: THE MUSLIM EXPERIENCE AND RESPONSES

231 Modernization and Globalization: The Muslim Experience 231 12 MODERNIZATION AND THE PROCESS OF GLOBALIZATION: THE MUSLIM EXPERIENCE AND RESPONSES Abdul Rashid Moten INTRODUCTION This chapter analyzes Muslim responses to the various challenges and opportunities associated with modernization, and processes of globalization. These two processes have aroused anxiety, suspicion, and opposition, especially in the Muslim world. Muslims regard modernity and globalism as a Western, particularly American, project for world domination. They believe that America’s attempt to homogenize the world would degrade all other countries into servants. When members believe their core faith is being corrupted, many are angered and some organize to rectify matters. The Western media, barring few exceptions, have mainly taken note of “Islamic fundamentalism” in its most violent manifestations — blowing up apartment blocks, kidnapping geologists and razing the WTC towers in New York to the ground. The West deploys “Islamic fundamentalism” as a pejorative term to disparage and discredit Muslims “as irrational, irresponsible and extremist forces, dedicated, actually or potentially, to the goal of international terrorism.”1 It is unfortunate that Muslim concerns about the global system and the globalization process have been sorely neglected by the dominant forces in the West. Is modernization and globalization 231 12 Islam Pt III_Ch 12 4/2/05, 10:42 AM 231 232 232 Abdul Rashid Moten compatible with Islam? How do Muslims perceive this process of globalization? What is the nature of their response and what alternatives do they provide to the ongoing process of modernization and globalization? MODERNIZATION, GLOBALIZATION AND ISLAM Modernization refers to the processes whereby society becomes modern. It implies industrialization, economic growth, increasing social mobility, and political participation. At the level of values, the process of change has sometimes been described as one of cultural “secularization” — a decline in the influence of religion and of traditional ideas as to the “naturalness” of social inequality, and correspondingly the spread of materialistic, this-worldly values and the ideals of universal equality and liberty. At the ideological level, this found expression, firstly, in nationalism and then in various formulations of democracy, whether the liberal parliamentary democracy of Western states or the more radical communist version. In the past two decades, modernization has been accelerated and accentuated by globalization. Modern institutions like the nation-state and liberal economics, with its emphasis on the creation of markets, have become the means through which the world is being made one. Giddens defines globalization as “the intensification of worldwide social relation which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa.”2 It is a technologically-driven process that increases commercial and political relations between people of different countries. A globalized system is characterized largely by capitalistic competition where goods, services, capital, ideas and even values cross national boundaries and acquire a transnational character. In short, globalization refers to the process of growing inter-connectedness by which the world is made into a single place economically, politically and culturally. It aims at creating a world system that shifts many former national concerns to the world geopolitical stage. Globalist ideology comes in many forms. Bill Gates wants to tie the entire world together through Internet and Microsoft. Greenpeace wants to save the world by fighting environmental degradation everywhere. A huge human rights network forced the United States and Britain to fight a war in Kosovo. However, it is the United States that has championed globalization. It has done so by systematically pressing to remove any national barriers to the free movement of capital, goods, and services. It has done so through international, now global, financial institutions, especially the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO). 12 Islam Pt III_Ch 12 4/2/05, 10:42 AM 232 233 Modernization and Globalization: The Muslim Experience 233 Although most Muslim societies have not yet experienced an industrial revolution, they have, as a consequence of colonization, witnessed an increase in commercialization and, perhaps equally important, in the influence of Western institutions, values, beliefs and ideologies. These factors, it has been argued by many, have generally worked to undermine traditional or precolonial values, beliefs and political institutions. While initially there was resistance to the intrusion of the West, gradually the Muslims realized that most of these values are not incompatible with Islam. From a historical perspective it would seem that of all the non-Western civilizations...