Islam in the Age of Globalization

© 2008 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 331–339, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00069.x

Islam in the Age of Globalization

Bruce Lawrence*Duke University

AbstractIf modernity is ambiguous, the relationship of Islam to modernity is still moreambiguous. This essay reviews the scope of change that has occurred in theMuslim world since the onset of the Age of Globalization. Marshall Hodgsoncoined the phrase ‘the Great Western Transmutation’, decentering the West andaccenting the cluster of traits that make moderns modern wherever they are.Hodgson’s analysis is amplified by current Muslim voices, such as ZiauddinSardar, Chandra Muzaffar, Omid Safi, and Ebrahim Moosa. The premise, as alsothe outcome, of this essay is to project modern day Muslims as global citizenswho can, and do, promote innovation, openness and pluralism as legitimate,natural dimensions of Islamic loyalty. Globalization, like modernity, becomes notthe enemy of Islam but its ally.

It is impossible to approach the question of Islam in the contemporaryera, that is, the Age of Globalization, without asking: has Islam, or anyother religious worldview, played a major or just a minor role in worldaffairs during the past 500 years? The assumption of modernizers is thatonly modernization finally works, and that religions, like cultures, mustbe judged good or bad by how congruent or dissonant they have beenwith forces, structures and goals of modernization. But Marshall Hodgson,the premier American Islamicist of the twentieth century, stands this questionon its head. For Hodgson, contemporary modernization, like globalization,is neither monolithic nor inevitable. It is not monolithic because it hasnot impacted all parts of Europe or America with equal success. Nor is itinevitable since it results from a concatenation of circumstances ratherthan any single cluster of ideal traits or the convergence of such traits withtechnical discoveries that produced what Hodgson calls ‘the Great WesternTransmutation’.

The Great Western Transmutation shares two features with all the greatcivilizations of pre-modern history: individual conscience and culturalcreativity. To claim that globalization, like modernization, promotes thetransference of traits found originally or mainly in Europe to other ‘unen-lightened’ regions – at once parochial and backward – misses the point:the allegedly exclusive traits of Hellenic-European-American Enlightenment

332 Bruce Lawrence

© 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 331–339, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00069.xJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

are not exclusive; they are instead part and parcel of universal civilizationalprocesses. Precisely because these are universal ideals, not unique to anyone time or place, they remain for Hodgson the twin ideals that led himto describe the axial shift of the sixteenth century as the Great WesternTransmutation. By the dawn of the twentieth century the transmutationhad become a colossus:

It was part of the transmutational character of the new Transformation[observed Hodgson] that it broke down the very historical presuppositions interms of which gradual diffusions had maintained parity among Afro-Eurasiancitied societies. In the new pace of historical change, when decades sufficed toproduce what centuries had produced before, a lag of four of five centurieswas no longer safe. The old gradual diffusion or adjustment was no longerpossible. . . . (At the same time that) the Western Transmutation, once it gotwell under way, could neither be paralleled independently nor be borrowedwholesale, it could not, in most cases, be escaped. The millennial parity ofsocial power broke down, with results that were disastrous almost everywhere.(Hodgson 1993, pp. 70–1)

Hodgson’s bleak vision of a ‘dominant West gone awry’ is shared bynumerous others. A spate of apologetic or polemical literature, written byboth Muslims and non-Muslims, echoes one central theme: lament of thisWestern colossus that has either lost its religious roots or trammels othersin the name of a Christianity is itself the companion of global hegemony,as much socio-economic as political and military.

Crucial to Hodgson’s analysis is the colonial experience. One cannotoverlook the darker side of three centuries of European colonial expansion,itself coincident with the rise of the West. One must challenge the twinassumption that the West rose by itself and then achieved global domi-nance on its intrinsic merits. Both dominance and hegemony are closelylinked to empire building and colonial (mis)rule, and religion, particularlyChristian proselytization, is deeply implicated in the debate about theorigin and scope of Euro-American global influence. In this reading,modernization, whether projected as ‘progress’ or globalization, is at bestambiguous, at worst nefarious.

For Hodgson, both modernization and globalization remained partial,circumscribed and fragile. He did hold out long-term hope for spiritualrecuperation, but saw it as a kind of rearguard transformation of humankind,one that might occur piecemeal in the aftermath of imperial hegemony,though not without running the risk of provoking its own violentsuppression.

Nearly 40 years since Hodgson’s untimely death in 1968 at age 46, onemust ask whether or not his analysis of the past, as also his vision ofdystopia, remains valid. Two conditions of the Information Age emergedonly after Hodgson’s demise: the radical extension of networking throughthe World Wide Web and the rapid growth of Muslim populations indiaspora.


Islam in the Age of Globalization 333

Consider the case of Islamism, or politicized Islam. There is not aneither/or chasm but a both/and set of choices that all Islamists conjuretoday. Islamists want to be, in Mark Juergensmeyer’s apt phrase, ‘religiousnationalists’. They strive to control the nation-state without succumbingto its secular structures, values and vistas. For instance, a moderate Islamist,such as the Egyptian born, Qatari scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi, feels that itis possible to be both ‘a Muslim citizen’ (Zeghal in Zaman/Hefner 2007,p. 127) and a passport-carrying citizen of a majority Muslim ‘secular’nation-state, whether Egypt or Qatar. Yet, not all Islamists would supportthis dual citizenship compromise. It requires an epistemic leap that is moreplausible for upper class ‘netizens’, that is, mobile, urbane Muslims linkedto one another through the Internet on the World Wide Web, than forthe mass of Muslims, those whose horizons remain transfixed by local,regional and also national loyalties.

Yet, the extent to which the Internet, a mere 15-year-old instrumentof global communication, has transformed Muslim options can be seenin the malleable notion of public space. Public space, once territoriallylimited, is now both transnational and virtual. The expansion of publicspace will impact Muslim as well as non-Muslim communities, but thereverse will also become more and more evident: each group or communitywill be assured a space in the public sphere insofar as their advocates offerall participants an unending dialectic of choice on the World Wide Web.

Indeed, to the extent that the future is now, both Islam and Muslimsare bound up with the Information Technology Revolution. Even thoseMuslims who are not netizens are influenced, and will continue to beinfluenced, by those who are. Who are Muslim netizens? They are thoseMuslims who gain access to cyberspace through the Internet. The Internetis the most dramatic but only the latest of several indices in the commu-nications revolution that marked the late twentieth century global economyand also transformed the nature of Muslim networks. There were cassettetapes that helped foster the Iranian revolution. There was satellite TV thatoverrode governmental controls on local TV stations to beam alternativeMuslim messages, including cleric talk shows, fatwa workshops and avariety of Islamic entertainment to Arabic-speaking audiences. Since1997, a major alternative to CNN style global news also has beenprovided through the Gulf-based Al-Jazeera. CD-ROMs, too, have becomepopular, circulating both literary texts and visual artefacts to broad Muslimaudiences. Finally, there has been the Internet, which offers manynetworking options, from chat groups to websites, and, of course, email.All these options for expanded exchange and alternative authoritiesrely on access and speed but, even more, on the need for new criteria oftrust.

These new conditions for the exchange of information have generatednew kinds of networks, most notably transnational alliances of womenwho are working for conflict resolution, human security and justice at the

334 Bruce Lawrence


local and global levels. Since the 1980s, and particularly since the 1985UN conference on women in Nairobi, networks of Muslim women havebeen fighting for their rights in a newly Islamizing political context wherewomen’s rights and roles are highly contested. Some of these women’snetworks are local, like the ones that have appeared in Pakistan, Sudanand Algeria. Others have a global reach, like the Women Living UnderMuslim Laws (WLUML) whose Islamic feminist agenda is to empowerwomen to seek their rights as observant Muslims. It further includesexchange of information about ways to deal with gender discriminationand also transnational collaboration to reform Muslim Personal Law sothat it could be more friendly to women (see http://www.wluml.org).

In the current era, as in preceding phases of rapid change, networksremain pivotal yet ambivalent. The war that inaugurated the twenty-firstcentury was the USA-led attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Bushadministration marked terrorism as, above all, Muslim inspired, even whileproclaiming that Islam itself was not to blame, just certain Muslims. Manynews groups have referred to Al-Qa’ida, the guerrilla organization linkedto the Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden and co-founded by the Egyptiandoctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, as a terrorist network. It is terrorist becauseit intends to destroy Western, specifically American, targets wherever itcan find them. And it is a network precisely because it is structuredaround nodes that communicate with one another in non-linear space,relying on neither a hierarchical chain of command nor conventional rulesof engagement. Al-Qa’ida might be best defined as a coalition of dispersednetwork nodes intent on waging asymmetrical warfare. Like Colombianand Mexican drug cartels, they feature small, nimble, and dispersed unitscapable of penetrating and disrupting, with the intent to destroy, massivestructures. Often they elude pursuit and evade capture, although in thecase of al-Qa’ida, its operatives kill themselves, or are killed by others, ineach nodal attack on a fixed target or group.

While the case of al-Qa’ida has become compelling in the aftermath ofSeptember 11, 2001, there is another case that demonstrates the long-termorganizational power of modern day Islamic networking. The women ofAfghanistan became a subject of intense scrutiny after the USA-led invasionin October 2001. Much media footage was devoted to the oppression ofveiled, secluded, and often brutalized Afghan women, yet decades beforeSeptember 11 a network of Afghan women had mobilized, and alsoprojected themselves, their history, and their cause, via the Internet.RAWA, or Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan,predated the Internet. It was founded in 1977, even before the Sovietinvasion, and it worked to defeat the Soviets but also to provide help forAfghani refugees in Pakistan. It was a network of transnational cooperationand multi-tiered resistance throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Its pivotalrole on behalf of Afghani women has been dramatized through cyberspace(http://www/rawa/org). RAWA, even more than al-Qa’ida, demonstrates

http://www.wluml.org

http://www/rawa/org



not just the persistence but the resilience of Muslim networks as a majorform of social and political organization in the Information Age.

Muslim networks are no longer primarily male-dominated structures.They include women and others who resist oppression and who participatein horizontal alliances that project Muslim values of justice. Above all,they seek to build structures that are at once democratic and capitalistyet not coeval with Euro-American imperialism. Thus, at one level, thecybernetic revolution has provided, and continues to provide, unprece-dented opportunities for local and transnational community formation.Whether Muslims aggregate in virtual associations, such as cybermuslimchat groups, or actual networks, such as WLUML, they project a commonpattern of fragmentation, dispersal, and re-aggregation. In this era of massmigration when violence and economic necessity have forced many totravel, diasporic Muslims are split from their birth communities. They arecompelled to negotiate multiple speaking positions as they imagine andproject national identities. Nationalism today, though geographically frag-mented, is socially networked through language and systems of meaningthat allow participants to share cultural practices and experiences. Peopleare able to diversify their participation in various communities to reflectshared interests rather than shared place or shared ancestry. They may alsoform contingent virtual communities to respond to emergencies at thecollective and individual levels, as well as to provide companionship, socialsupport and a sense of belonging.

Yet, the Information Age does not provide a silver bullet or a fullproof juridical tool for enacting democracy. It remains an age defined bymedia, whether print (newspapers), auditory (the radio and telephone), orauditory-visual (television and movies) or print-auditory-visual-tactile(the World Wide Web). There could be no World Wide Web withoutantecedent technological breakthroughs; yet, it represents the culminationof a process the further consequences of which no one yet knows. Muslimsdid not create the World Wide Web but have been among its beneficiaries,though mostly in those nodes of the global capitalist community whereMuslims work and live and pray, either in their own cosmopolitan centersor as part of the demographic pluralism of Western Europe, North Americaand South/South-East Asia. The impact of these networks has beenexamined in a spate of scholarly works (Eickelman and Anderson 1999;Bunt 2000, 2003; Mandaville 2001; Cooke and Lawrence 2005).

While some have predicted a cyberutopia, imagining that the WorldWide Web can fulfill the promises left on the table by developmenttheorists from the 1960s, differences in virtual space are proving to be asdurable and multiple as ground level disparities within the umma (for astill more radical notion of umma as no longer territorial, see Roy 2004,especially 335–40). Not only will there be a limited number of Muslimswho have access to the World Wide Web but those who do becomeMuslim ‘netizens’ will find many competing notions of Islamic loyalty and

336 Bruce Lawrence


options for ritual practice. It will also continue to matter where oneresides: in Malaysia or Turkey the government is less prone to monitor orto filter websites than in Saudi Arabia or Syria, and while hacking cantake place as easily within a cyber Islamic environment as elsewhere, itwill occur more often in border zones of actual conflict, such as Palestineand Kashmir. Because information technologies, like religious traditions,are inherently conservative, they tend to reinforce global structures andasymmetries rather than to bode a new era for civil society and trans-formative justice. Diasporic Muslims, precisely because they live in WesternEurope or North America, will benefit from the Information TechnologyRevolution more than will their homeland co-religionists. The disparitybetween North and South, between rich and poor will be as evidentamong Muslims as it is among non-Muslims, at least for the foreseeablefuture.

What would Hodgson have made of the information revolution andits impact on Muslim societies? I think that he would have seen it withinthe arc of postmodernism and empathized with the critique voicedby numerous Muslim intellectuals, none more so than Ziauddin Sardar,perhaps the most prolific cultural critic in the diasporic Muslim communityof Britain. For Sardar, the information revolution, like postmodernism,augurs neither an aesthetic movement nor a phase in intellectual historythat derived from Islamic thought or applies only to Muslim societies.Even though the Internet Age was not foreseen by the early post-modernists, it has reinforced the argument that they advanced, to wit, thatall truth is representational, that all language is fractal, imperfect, andincomplete, and that all claims to authority are unstable, assailable andreversible.

Sardar diagnoses postmodernism as itself but an extension of modernism,and so a movement with specifically Western origins, which applies to thesubjects and trajectories of Western Europe or North American societiesbut not to Muslims of Africa and Asia or to their non-Muslim citizen/neighbors. Challenging the core judgment that postmodernism isliberatory and promotes pluralism, Sardar argues that postmodernismeffectively promotes further marginalization of those already marginalizedby coloniality and modernity. In sum, it is a form of intellectual hegemony,mirroring even as it claims to correct the earlier excesses of Westerndomination over the colonized regions of Africa and Asia.

While Sardar expresses himself as a Muslim intellectual, he is a Muslimintellectual in sympathy with non-Muslim Asian others. At the same timethat he is critical of Islamic excesses (see Sardar 2004), he sees a non-Western cultural alliance, above all, in art, which avoids the ills and evilsof Western utopianism, aka modernity, or dystopianism, aka postmod-ernism. He titles his most comprehensive riposte to the insidious West:Postmodernism and the Other: The New Imperialism of Western Culture. In ithe offers a strategy for surviving postmodernism, especially through art,



including Chinese paintings imitating Mughal miniatures. ‘What we witnessin these paintings,’ observes Sardar, ‘is a thriving, dynamic culture readyto confront the problems of modernity and the nihilism of postmodernism:these parameters, as the paintings illustrate so breathtakingly, are commonto both Islamic and Chinese traditions, and by corollary to all non-westerntraditions’ (Sardar 1998, p. 273).

As the bold italics that I added to the above citation make evident, thisapproach is not only a survival strategy but an attempt to build alliancesalong a cultural fault-line demarcated as West/non-West. In other words,the Grand Narrative of Western universalism is replaced by a BinaryNarrative of East/West or non-West/West, with echoes of the familiarelements of modernism to build structures, traits and attitudes that defineand so homogenize large-scale collectivities. Sardar rejects postmodernismwith passionate insight, yet his own method encodes a post-postmodernismthat harks back to the antecedent dualisms of modernism.

On a practical level, the opposition to the West as a moral custodianof universal values is also challenged by other Muslims within a post-postmodern framework. Notable among them is the Malaysian activist,Chandra Muzaffar. Like Sardar, he is a prolific writer, and like Sardar, hespeaks as a Muslim but on behalf of all Asians, non-Muslims together withMuslims, who reject the New World Order. In 1992, Muzaffar establishedthe Just World Trust, a non-governmental organization with the goal ofchallenging Frances Fukuyama and all other West first advocates of globalcapitalism in the shadow, as also under the influence of the G9, or majorindustrialized economies. It was through Just World Trust that he publishedhis most scathing critique of the linchpin of global, universalist ethics, andhuman rights. Human Rights and the New World Order makes the argumentthat because a minority in the North, that is, the advanced capitalist economies,controls and dominates global politics, their leaders, independently butalso through the United Nations, have narrowed the meaning of humanrights. They have restricted human rights to individual civil and politicalrights, ignoring other rights – social, cultural, and economic – that affectthe majority of humankind, above all, in Asia and Africa (Muzaffar 1993).Ancillary to this project is the distortion and demonization of Islam throughimages of Islam and Muslims that are projected through contemporary media,global politics, and cultural wars (Noor 2003). The strategy of Just WorldTrust and its numerous supporters is to produce an alternate form ofknowledge that empowers individuals through revealing the distortionsof dominant structures and offering the South another vision of the future.

That vision has been clearly mapped in an edited book that brackets 14major Muslim voices under the rubric Progressive Muslims. The editor isOmid Safi, an Iranian-American historian of religion, and in this remarkablevolume, he tackles the themes of social justice, gender parity, and robustpluralism with ample critique of existing Islamic practices but also withhope for another, better way forward for the collective body of Muslims,

338 Bruce Lawrence


the umma. The final essay amounts to a manifesto from Farish Noor, oneof Muzaffar’s colleagues in Just World Trust, and like him, a Malaysianactivist. What is needed, pleads Noor, is ‘rejection of a dialecticalapproach to the Other’, to be replaced with ‘a new chain of equivalencesthat equates universal concerns with Muslim concerns and universalproblems with Muslim problems’ (Safi 2003, p. 332).

If that vista is to take shape and prevail, it also needs theoretical support,and nowhere is that support provided with greater clarity and detailthan in Ebrahim Moosa’s essay, also in the Safi volume. Moosa, a SouthAfrican activist, turned critical thinker and ethicist, charts a way into post-modernism that acknowledges indebtedness to European thinkers, suchas Kant, Weber and Habermas (see also Vahdat 2002), but uses post-modernism as itself a lens through which to revisit and reconsidermodernism, not just modernism but Muslim modernism. By embracingboth modernism and globalization as strategic values, Moosa argues thatmodern day Muslims, like their modernist predecessors, can promoteinnovation, openness, and pluralism as legitimate, natural dimensions ofMuslim tradition or ‘orthodoxy’ (Moosa 2003). Reason and rationality, inhis view, are not the opposite of faith but its other face. Globalization isnot the enemy of Islam but its ally. Hodgson would probably approve thedouble appeal to conscience and creativity, even while asking for moreevidence to support the claim.

Short Biography

Bruce Lawrence earned his PhD from Yale University in the History ofReligions: Islam and Hinduism. His research, ranging from pre-modernAfro-EurAsia to post-colonial nation-states, addresses institutional Islam inmultiple contexts, with special attention to network theory as it influenceshow religious movements emerge, succeed, and persist. He currently servesas the Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Humanities Professor of the Humanitiesat Duke University, where he also directs the Duke Islamic Studies Center.His most recent books include Messages to the World – The Statements ofOsama Bin Laden; The Quran – A Biography; with Aisha Karim, On Violence– A Reader and, with his spouse, Dr. Miriam Cooke, Muslim Networks fromHajj to Hip Hop.

Note

* Correspondence address: Bruce Lawrence, Duke Islamic Studies Center, Duke University,5717 Buck Quarter Rd., Hillsborough, NC 27278, USA. Email: [email protected]

Works Cited

Bunt, G, 2000, Virtually Islamic – Computer-mediated Communication and Cyber Islamic Environments,University of Wales, Cardiff, UK.



Bunt, G, 2003, Islam in the Digital Age – E-Jihad, Online Fatwas and Cyber Islamic Environments,Pluto, London.

Cooke, M, & Lawrence, BB, (eds.), 2005, Muslim Networks from Hajj to HipHop, University ofNorth Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC.

Eickelman, DF, & Anderson, JW, (eds.), 1999, New Media in the Muslim World: The EmergingPublic Sphere, Indiana University, Bloomington, MN/Indianapolis, IN.

Hodgson, MGS, 1993, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History,Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

Mandaville, P, 2001, Transnational Muslim Publics: Reimagining the Umma, Routledge, New York,NY.

Moosa, E, 2003, ‘The Debts and Burdens of Critical Islam’, in O. Safi (ed.), Progressive Muslims:On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism, pp. 111–27, Oneworld, Oxford, UK.

Muzaffar, C, 1993, Human Rights and the New World Order, Just World Trust, Penang, Malaysia.Noor, FA, 2003, ‘What is the Victory of Islam? Towards a Different Understanding of the

Ummah and Political Success in the Contemporary World’, in O. Safi (ed.), Progressive Muslims:On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism, pp. 320–32, Oneworld, Oxford, UK.

Roy, O, 2004, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, Columbia University, New York,NY.

Safi, O, 2003, Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism, Oneworld, Oxford, UK.Sardar, Z, 1998, Postmodernism and the Other: The New Imperialism of Western Culture, Pluto,

London/Chicago, IL.Sardar, Z, 2004, Desparately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim, Granta, London.Vahdat, F, 2002, God and Juggernaut: Iran’s Intellectual Encounter with Modernity, Syracuse University,

Syracuse, New York, NY.Zeghal, M, 2007, ‘The “Recentering” of Religious Knowledge and Discourse: The Case of

al-Azhar in Twentieth Century Egypt’, in R. W. Hefner and Q. Z. Muhammad (eds.),Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education, pp. 107–130, PrincetonUniversity Press, Princeton, NJ.

Islam in the Age of Globalization

Documents

Transcript of Islam in the Age of Globalization