GLOBALIZATION

The term globalization is used in various related senses to refer to the intensified integration of the world economy, declining autonomy and separation of the nation-states, the growth of international and transnational forms of governance, and the rapidly expanding communication networks across national, regional, and religious boundaries, especially with the advent of the Internet. With the exception of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Turkey, the impact of economic and financial globalization on the Muslim world has been smaller than in other parts of the world. The integration of Middle Eastern and North African countries into the global economy has been particularly slow, except for the case of Turkey, and the attempts at the privatization of the economy have been largely unsuccessful in the region.

By contrast, the Internet and e-mail have created rapid forms of communication linking different parts of the Muslim world, from Morocco to Indonesia, to each other and to the rest of the world, even though the spread of these electronic media has been slower than in many other parts of the world. This has sometimes been called "globalization from below," to distinguish it from economic globalization through multinational corporations and international financial institutions. The globalization of communication through the Internet, as well as somewhat older media, such as telecommunications and broadcasting, has had a significant and ongoing impact on Islam as a religion. There has also been unprecedented migration, both from the Muslim world into North America and Western Europe, and within the Muslim world into the Gulf countries. Last but not least, transnational political trends and international organization have also had a notable impact on the Islamic world.

The Push toward Universalism

The missionary expansion of the world religions among nations and across the frontiers of empires can itself be considered the prototype of the process of globalization. These religions have a tendency toward missionary expansion because they are in principle universalistic, which gives them a built-in tendency to overcome many forms of particularism and to expand their influence beyond familial, ethnic, and national boundaries. In practice, the ideal commitment to universalism is tempered by all sorts of compromises with the forces of particularism. As a result of globalization, however, these very compromises transform the character and terms of reference of particularism from local to what sociologists have called "glocal" (from the combination of "global" and "local"). Furthermore, globalization is an important factor in the contemporary resurgence of Islam and the growth of Islamic fundamentalism.

The Internet and satellite communication have weakened the very tight control of the states over national radio and television networks that had once compartmentalized the Muslim world into differently oriented nation-states, and have stimulated the growth of a new, transnational Muslim public space within the global context. These effects of globalization on Islam are interpreted very differently by different observers. Some see the combined effect of globalization as it impacts upon the world's one billion Muslims. They point to the growth of education and vigorous discussion of Islam in books and in public debates in the press, the audio-visual, and the electronic media as contributing to an Islamic Reformation. In this view, the current Islamicization of social life has been both far-reaching and dispersed, lacking any focus or single thrust. Whether or not one concurs with the value-judgment that it constitutes Reformation, it is undeniable that there is an unmistakable dispersion of the current trends in Islamization. The opposite view holds that globalization has put Islam on the front lines of a "Jihad versus McWorld" confrontation, creating a sharply focused and vehement anti-Western as well as anti-universalist struggle. This latter view tends to obliterate the distinction between Islam and Islamic fundamentalism.

The negative view on Islam and globalization, though widely shared by journalists and commentators, seems essentially mistaken. Not only is there variety in Islamic fundamentalism, but Islamic fundamentalism is by no means identical with all the contemporary manifestations of Islam as a universalist religion. Urbanization, development of roads and transportation, the printing revolution, and other contemporary processes of social change, including globalization, simply reinforce trends toward expansion and intensive penetration of society that are typical of Islam as a universalist religion. These trends remain distinct and are not swamped by fundamentalism.

The twentieth century also gave rise to a combination of internal subglobalization processes typical of the early modern period and externally stimulated globalization. On the one hand, the continuous improvement and declining cost of transportation since the Second World War has greatly increased the number of pilgrims to Mecca, and of missionaries from Africa and Asia to the main centers of Islamic learning in the Middle East. It should be noted that this aspect of globalization reinforces Islam's old universalism, which was institutionalized around the hajj. On the other hand, the postcolonial era has also witnessed the massive immigration of Muslims into Western Europe and North America, where sizable Muslim communities have formed. Meanwhile, there has been unprecedented global integration of Muslims through the mass and electronic media.

The international repercussions of the Salman Rushdie case are the best illustration of the impact of the media on a globally integrated Muslim world. The protests and burning of his Satanic Verses by indignant Muslims began in Bradford, England. Images of these protests were broadcast throughout the world, and stimulated more violent protests in Pakistan and India. In a particularly low point of Iranian post-revolutionary politics, after the book had been banned in India, South Africa, Bangladesh, Sudan, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini broadcast his famous fatwa condemning Rushdie, a non-Iranian writer who lived in England, to death for apostasy on 14 February 1989.

Particularism within Globalization

An interesting feature of globalization is the unfolding of antiglobal sentiments in particularistic, variety-producing movements, which seek local legitimacy but, nevertheless, have a global frame of self-reference. The flexibility of signing international conventions with reservations has allowed a large number of Muslim states to confirm their membership in the international communities by signing such agreements while retaining their own particularity of identity and interests. For instance, Muslim nations could sign onto the United Nations' human rights instruments, such as the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, but insist upon significant reservations that affirmed the priority of the shari?a rules.

More typically, however, global integration induces many Muslims to emphasize their unique identity within the frame of reference of their own culture, which can be said to be at once universal and local or subglobal. There can be no doubt that global integration has made many Muslims seek to appropriate universalist institutions by what might be called Islamic cloning. We thus hear more and more about "Islamic science," "Islamic Human Rights," an "Islamic international system" and a variety of organizations modeled after the United Nations and its offshoots, most notably the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which was founded in 1969 and has fifty-seven countries as its members.

The cloning here is unmistakable. Not only is the charter of the Organization of the Islamic Conference derived from the UN charter, but it has an Islamic Development Bank (modeled after the World Bank), a Commission of the International Crescent (corresponding to the Red Cross), and an Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (corresponding to the UNESCO). In 1980, the OIC voted to establish an International Islamic Law Commission to secure representation of the Islamic viewpoint before the International Court of Justice. The OIC has also set up the International Islamic University of Malaysia as a modern university for the study of Islamic subjects in accordance with global standards. This phenomenon is a direct result of globalization, not an outcrop of fundamentalism. It is a reactive tendency, however, and can be viewed as a form of defensive counteruniversalism. This defensive counter-universalism diverges from the old universalism of Islam as a world religion in its reactive character and "glocal" self-consciousness.

Despite its intent, however, the assimilative character of defensive counter-universalism is quite pronounced. It has already resulted in the assimilation of universal organizational forms, and albeit restrictively, of universal ideas such as human rights and the rights of women. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that, despite its intent, defensive counteruniversalism is inevitably a step toward the modernization of the Islamic tradition.

A Changing Islam in the Global Context

The increasing integration of the Middle Eastern states into the international system has exposed them to the global wave of democratization and the promotion of the rule of law. This exposure has introduced a new element of legal pluralism and generated ambivalent reactions throughout the Middle East. The impact of the human rights revolution on the legal culture of Middle Eastern societies has been significant, and constitutional and supreme courts of a few Muslim countries, such as Egypt and Malaysia, have insinuated international rights provisions into their national legal systems.

Among the human rights, the ones with the strongest social backing that results from structural and occupational changes in contemporary Middle Eastern societies are those concerned with women's rights. Women's rights are represented by official organs of the states, and by a growing number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that are increasingly linked with international NGOs and the United Nations agencies. According to some reports, the women's NGOs stole the show from the state delegates at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo (1994), and delegates from the Muslim countries were conspicuous in the Fourth World Conference on the Status of Women in Beijing (1995). In Iran, women constituted the largest group of President Mohammad Khatami's supporters, and the reformists in the Majles include a few prominent women. The Iranian women's movement has made significant gains since 1997, and is acting as a channel for the slow but continuous influence of international conventions on women's rights on Iran's administrative and civil law.

In contrast, the transnational Islamic resurgence has caused the rejection of the assertion of the universality of human rights, and has generated an official "Islamic alternative." This Islamic alternative is embodied in the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam. As is to be expected in an imitative document, much of the legal terminology of the international human rights conventions is swallowed, even as quite a number of rights are in substance nullified. For instance, the Cairo Declaration offers no guarantee of religious freedom. It prohibits the use of any form of compulsion or exploitation of poverty and ignorance to convert anyone to atheism or a religion other than Islam (Article 10). Article 22 of the Declaration bars "the exploitation or misuse of information in such a way as may violate sanctities and the dignity of Prophets, undermine moral and ethical values, or disintegrate, corrupt, or harm society or weaken its faith." It is interesting to note that, in flat contradiction to the historical experience and the public law of virtually all the signatory countries, Article 19 of the Cairo Declaration provides that "There shall be no crime or punishment except as provided for in the Shari?ah." Article 25 further declares the shari?a the only source for the explanation and clarification of the articles of the Declaration. While endorsing the Cairo Declaration, the Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers in April 1993 also confirmed "the existence of different constitutional and legal systems among [the] Member States and various international or regional human rights instruments to which they are parties." This amounts to a very significant qualification of the categorical recognition of the shari?a in the Cairo Declaration, as most Middle Eastern countries are signatories to several such international instruments. Iran, for instance, is among the signatories to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The acknowledgment, therefore, leaves open the kind of insinuation of the international law on human rights into national laws of the kind undertaken by the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt.

An increasing number of Muslim intellectuals are defending the right to the freedom of expression by insisting that religious liberty and freedom of conscience are clearly deducible from the text of the Qur?an. A number of Qur?anic verses strongly imply a form of "natural religion" among mankind, which entails religious liberty, and make explicit the concepts of freedom of conscience and religion, most notably, "there is no compulsion in religion" (2:256). Proliferation of the communications media beyond government control has made the freedom of interpretation of Islam itself a prominent feature of the emerging Muslim public sphere. In Iran, ?Abd al-Karim Sorush has gone so far as putting all the world religions on an equal footing in the 1998 essay, Saratha-ye mostaqim (Straight paths), the very title being a sacrilegious pluralization of a fundamental Qur?anic concept. In Syria, Muhammad Shahruhr has offered a similarly radically modernist interpretation of Islam.

See alsoInternet ; Networks, Muslim .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arjomand, Saïd Amir "Islam." In Global Religions: An Introduction. Edited by M. Juergensmeyer. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Eickelman, Dale F., and Anderson, Jon W., eds. New Media in the Muslim World. The Emerging Public Sphere. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Therborn, G. "Globalizations: Dimensions, Historical Waves, Regional Effects, Normative Governance." International Sociology 15, no. 2 (2000): 151–179.

Saïd Amir Arjomand