الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

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

Saudi Arabia, or are regarded as anti-western, such as Iran.

It is common now among social scientists and historians to speak of modernity as a shared world experience, contributions to which have come from the west European nations as well as the rest of the world community. This, however, should not obscure the fact that process of modernization in the Muslim world was on many occasions a disruptive and violent process. Although research in this field is still limited, we are beginning to recognize that the popular uprisings in Mosul, Jedda, Aleppo and Nablus, during the second half of the nineteenth century were not the making of Muslim fanatics, as the western Consulates’ reports at the time alleged, but rather expressions of pain and anger at the loss of livelihood and social cohesion. 29 Leila T. Fawaz’s study of the bloody sectarian events that engulfed the city of Damascus in 1860 is an important contribution to our understanding of the period. 30 In a similar vein, Khaled Fahmy has shown that the Egyptians were not, after all, docile recipients of Muhammad ‘Ali’s forceful programme of modernization and reordering. 31 As a result, Muslim societies have become deeply divided societies. This breakdown of consensus should not be confused with the sometimes- sharp debates raging in western societies. Complex cycles of civil strife, industrialization, imperialism and political re-structuring, enabled western societies to re-establish consensus after the protracted and bloody conflicts of the 17 th and 18 th centuries. The triumph of western democracies in the Second World War and the Cold War reasserted the position of this consensus. In contrast, internal divisions in Muslim societies are about the foundations upon which nations and their stability rest: the nature and powers of the state, the sphere of religion in public life, the referential 29 Nafi, The Rise and Decline of the Arab-Islamic Reform Movement , 44-5. 30 Leila Tarazi Fawaz, An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 31 Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 76-111.

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