Islam in the Modern World: Challenged by the West, Threatened by Fundamentalism, Keeping Faith with Tradition

Author:Seyyed Hossein Nasr [Nasr, Seyyed Hossein]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061905803
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books

Part IV

Postscript

Chapter Fifteen

The Islamic World

Present Tendencies and Future Trends

The survival of traditional Islam in the modern world, the intrusion of modernism into dār al-islām, and the recent resurgence of forces associated in either name or reality with Islam, including what has come to be known as Islamic “fundamentalism”—added to the global significance of events that have occurred in the Middle East during the past few years, ranging from the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) and the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1979) to terrorist acts committed in the name of Islam and the devastating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to speak of events in East Africa—all of these have helped to create not a few, but a flood of works in European languages on Islam, its future, and its relation to the West. Some of these are by the very people who but a few years ago rejected the very possibility that Islam might be a force to be reckoned with in the future. The works produced by this veritable new industry, often based on either passing political currents or conclusions hastily drawn from incomplete data, have made many predictions for the Islamic world, ranging in style from melodrama to science fiction, with a few more balanced judgments thrown in between. The aim here is certainly not to add one more scenario for the future to the already existing ones, especially since, according to a belief strongly held by all Muslims, the future lies in God’s Hands and He alone is aware of its content, as the Quran repeats in many of its verses. The goal, rather, is to delve beyond the surface in order to bring out the nature of some of the more profound issues, ideas, and forces at work within contemporary Islamic religious thought as well as in the Islamic world in general; also to cast an eye upon how these elements seem to be interacting with each other and with the world about them, especially with the West, and how they are likely to do so in the near future. At the same time, we must remain fully aware of the unreliability of all deterministic futuristic projections and extrapolations based on present-day tendencies.

In carrying out this discussion, it is important to distinguish between Islam itself and the Islamic world, in which it remains the most powerful and determining force. There are today many currents of thought, movements, affirmations, and rejections within the world of Islamic religious thought. There are also, needless to say, very complex forces and movements of a political and social nature at play in the part of the world that is called Islamic. The two are by no means identical and should not be confused with each other for the purpose of any scholarly analysis. Nor should they be totally separated either. Despite the advent of modernism and the spread of secularism in certain sectors of the Islamic world, that part of the globe called Islamic is still Islamic in the most profound sense,

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