Man & The Universe by Al-Badawi Mostafa

Author:Al-Badawi, Mostafa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Claritas Books
Published: 2018-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

social disorder

Industrialization uproots people from their villages and destroys their social support networks; social cohesion is lost in the anonymity of city life and the traditional responsibilities of the community toward each of its members is passed on to the state. In place of the normal support, based on ties of kinship, we have man-made institutions trying to come up with ad hoc solutions. In other words, the state, having created the problem, then proceeds to interfere with the victims along whichever line of thought is in vogue at that particular moment, creating a highly unstable situation.

Urban living itself is so fraught with problems that the reasonable thing to do, for everyone able to afford it, has become to live in the suburbs or rush out into the countryside at each opportunity. High-rise concrete blocks and matchbox apartments, scurrying about in cars, buses, and planes, being subject to rush hours, deadlines, pressures to produce, and competition of all sorts have evident adverse effects. The alienation of city life and the ignominy of becoming a more-or-less nameless unit in a production line lead to many kinds of abnormal behaviour in attempts to alleviate this estrangement.94 It also seems that the West, with its greater disruption of social cohesion, is less immune to the evils of urbanization than other societies.95

One of the greatest and most irremediable disasters of modern society is the destruction of the normal role of women as mothers and wives and its replacement with an ill-defined, ill-assimilated equality with men that has blurred the distinctions between the two sexes and relieved each of their specific responsibilities without offering a viable alternative. Western women are persuaded that they are being held down, trampled underfoot, despised, and iniquitously held captive in lowly roles. Mothering is devalued in favor of career achievement and pleasure seeking. By contrast, women never felt oppressed in Muslim societies until early in this century when, under the influence of Western education, the more affluent strata of society began to lead a dual life: a ‘liberated’ one in Europe, and a more conventional one at home. They then began agitating for more ‘ freedom, clamouring to remove their traditional veils and to be given equal chance in the labour market. The wheel has now turned full circle and young girls all over the Islamic world are reverting to dressing modestly, this time with full freedom, and often in opposition to the wishes of their Westernized parents. It should be said that in reality women were much less highly regarded in the West than in Muslim societies, which might explain the violence of their reaction to traditional Muslim women and also the lack of enthusiasm which most Muslim women exhibit in following the western model, contrary to the current popular Muslim practice of blind imitation of the West. We shall discuss the status accorded to women in Islam in a subsequent section.

An example of the way in which socially cohesive forces are destroyed in the name of individual freedom is that of the changing meaning and function of jealousy.

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