Word: islamics
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...never colonized Islamic countries, as, for example, Britain and France did. The U.S. has no large Islamic minority and thus, unlike the Soviet Union, has no record of bitter internal relations with Muslims. Besides (as some Muslim leaders know), Communism is far more inimical to Islam than capitalism. But in the past 30 years, the U.S. has been a chief participant in a cultural encounter that is in some ways even more traumatic to the world of Islam than colonialism: the full onslaught of secular, materialist modernization, 20th century civilization sweeping into the timeless Muslim villages. The vast apparatus...
Western science and technology have wounded the deep pride of Islam. The success of the unvirtuous, the infidel unfavored of Allah, is psychologically confusing. "Seen through Muslim eyes," writes Berkeley Historian Peter Brown, "the emergence of [the West] as the temporary master of the world remains an anomaly in the natural unfolding of the course of history." Muslims have recoiled from modernization in exact proportion to the force of its temptation for them. They have been attracted by secular materialism, have tried it in the guise of both capitalism and Marxism, but they have often been disappointed by it, have...
Some Muslims, of course, insist that Islam and modernization are perfectly compatible. Many Islamic countries supply the oil that is, for now, the indispensable ingredient of modernization, and they have tried to use their staggering and sudden wealth to buy the machines of progress without the devils that often inhabit them. Conservative Saudi leaders, for example, a pursue a selective strategy regarding the technological riches of the West: they seek to modernize without the garish libertine free-for-all that Western secular individualism has promoted...
...door to all the depressing vitality of the junk culture; it means the young leaving the villages and becoming infested with all kinds of Hefnerian tastes for hi-fis and forbidden pleasures. It is sometimes difficult for a Westerner to understand that to a Muslim, the cultural dismantling of Islam, the governing apparatus of his life and civilization, is a tragedy that amounts to a form of annihilation...
...Islam is not inherently or inevitably antiWestern, despite the often bloody encounters of the past. Muslims have historically occupied a geographically vulnerable position, which may account for their militant touchiness. But the religion has become the vehicle for certain antiWestern, anti-American resentments and antipathies. In some ways, the specifically Islamic religious component is almost incidental: Islam is, as much as anything else, the repository for grievances, envies and hatreds that Third World have-nots harbor for the privileged of the globe. Islam gives cohesion to complaints about the injustices of the world. The Muslim tradition provides the language...