الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

@ @ Civilization or Political: The Reality of the Present Tension between the Muslim World and the West

models. Within a few decades of the commencement of the programs of modernisation, traditional modes and institutions of education, most of the waqf sector, the system of justice and the structure of the traditional market, were either supplanted or mercilessly undermined. The free and diversified modes of learning were replaced by the Prussian and Lancasterian models of schooling in which the whole process of education is tightly prescribed and centrally controlled. Similarly, the intimate, meaningful system of justice was abolished; in its place a codified, abstract law was enforced, administered by a new court system that proved, from the day of its emergence, unable to cope. In most parts of the modern Muslim world, justice could neither be done nor seen to be done. 22 The project of modernisation functioned in conjunction with western imperialist penetration, sometimes consciously and in others unwittingly. In large parts of the Muslim land, even before the arrival of the British and French armies and navies, economic penetration had already resulted in the undermining of local artisanship, inland trade, and subsistence agriculture. 23 Coastal villages, like Beirut and Jaffa, catering now for the foreign trade, grew to eclipse the great urban centres of Damascus and Jerusalem and ruin ancient trade routes that had for centuries connected Timbuktu with Cairo and Tashkent with Mosul. As the new age produced its own men and language, the ‘ulama class dwindled into a marginal position and the traditional moral order began to crumble. Society, to use Burke’s words, is joined in perpetuity by a moral 22 For a general overview on the nineteenth century modernization in the Muslim world, see William R. Polk and Richard L. Chambers (eds.), Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century (Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 1968). On Egypt, see Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of modern Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 11997). On Qajari Iran, see Ann Lambton, Qajar Persia (Austin: Texas University Press, 1987). 23 On the impact of European economic penetration, see Jacques Berque, “The Establishment of Colonial Economy,” in William R. Polk and Richard L. Chambers (eds.), Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century (Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 1968), 205-22; Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples , 265-78.

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