الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

P ATHWAYS TO AN O PEN W ORLD

Kenneth White

‘On the earth and in the skies, as in the diversity of languages and colours, there are signs for all creatures.’ (Koran, Sourat XXX, Verse 21)

The world at the moment is divided (though there can be weird collusions) between, on the one hand, a bureaucratically organized globalism whose bottom line is the profit motive, with no sense (ethical, aesthetical) of quality of life, and, on the other, a conglomerate of oppositions to this system comprising various types of often blinkered, sometimes blind localism, identity ideology tinted with more or less narrow nationalism and religious reaction often fanatical. Given such a context, what chance is there of a world that enhances individual life, develops the human mind, and promotes something even remotely like harmonious social living ? Given that governments are, on the national scale, more or less exclusively devoted to the year-to-year management of a great concentrated mass of citizenry large sections of which are subject to increasing pathology, and, on the international scale, more or less impotent in face of the bulldozer tactics of the military and economic superpowers (now one Super-Power) ; given that education is being reduced more and more to immediate utility ; given that the media, with exceptions very few and far between, deal only in the dramatic and the nitwitted, anything like an easy optimism is impossible. Not only is there nothing like a real answer in the air, but, while situational commentaries abound, the fundamental question is rarely raised.

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