Globalization and Muslims: The Concerns & Contradictions

Abstract

Globalization has been defined in many different ways as the subject has been dealt by many philosophers, social scientists and policymakers with various approaches. Here for the convenience to elaborate the subject, we use the definition of Roland Robertson a known scholar of the subject who applies  the term to ‘a consciousness of the growing connectivity and integration not only between countries and region of the world but also between all manner of economic, political and cultural spheres and processes’.

The earliest origin of the process of globalization is traced with the beginning of modernity after the Renaissance in the West. During eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the modernity emerged in European civilization with secular humanism and gradual decline of religion and morality. It was the time when Christianity removed from the public sphere but Christian morality particularly protestant remain still alive. That morality was intertwined and collaborated with the system of capitalism in economical and industrial terms, as the modernity and globalization is the direct out come of the industrial capitalism. The values of this system spread worldwide by the imperialism of Europe and later on of America.

Here, it is not possible to discuss the whole process of globalization and its ramifications, as the goal of this paper is just to analyze in brief the concerns of the Muslims in India and the world as a reflection of the process of modernity and globalization. It will explain why the Muslims are not ready to emulate the West as such. In this paper I am largely benefited by the ideas of Ejaz Akram, which he had expressed on the subject ‘The Muslim World and Globalization’.