الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

Islam and the West… for a better world @

working now in the open World Ocean, we can come back specifically to Atlanticism. In his book The Destiny of Civilisations, Leo Frobenius lays out an interesting perspective of cultural development, with geographical locations. He sees civilisation and culture as based, first, on mythology – in the West, in south-East Asia, and the Pacific. Thereafter, mythology moves over into religion (Western Asia and the Near East). In South-Eastern Europe, particularly Greece, it’s philosophy that comes to the fore. Then comes the techno-economico-industrial Atlantic world, expressed by French rationalism, British realism, and North-American materialism. Frobenius’s thesis is that it’s on the Atlantic shore, in the latter phase of the Atlantic World, that the sharpest criticism of this world might arise, and that a new theory-practice might emerge. Frobenius himself gets little further than a kind of oecumenical orchestration of all the cultures of the world (with a German conductor). I had sympathy with that, seeing in it something like what Goethe had envisaged with his ‘world literature’ ( Weltliteratur ). But at the same time I felt the need for something more coherent and more cogent. If I was out for gathering in elements from all the cultures of the world, I felt they had to be concentrated in a new field. This is the point where, in my mind, culture- history and cultural geography turned into culture-analysis. If you look into the configurations and foundations of cultures all round the world, you soon see that at their centre there is a focal point of interest and attention around which conscience revolves and evolves into thought. What I asked myself at the stage of this culture-analysis was this : could there be, was there (latently, potentially), back of all the differences in religion, ideology, metaphysics, mythology, morality, some focal point about which there could be a consensus all round the world ? The answer that emerged from this question was : the very Earth itself, on which we try to live. This may seem of too great a generality to be operational in,

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