الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

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The Clash of Civilization: A Critique

The early Muslims realized this right away, as manifested in Muhammad's (s) letter campaign in the year 628 in which he invited all potentates around al-Madinah to accept Islam. 14 With that letter campaign, the internationalization of Islam began. The Muslims did not subdivide the word into geographic regions. Rather in the true spirit of universalism they divided the entire world into two sectors only: The world of Islam (dar ai-Islam) and the not yet Islamized world (dar al-harb). Conceptually that meant that the Muslims from early on saw their faith as a religion with global aspirations and the absence of Islam in the rest of the world as merely a temporary situation. In as much as the Muslims are convinced that their Prophet was the last and final one - a conviction upheld by 1420 lunar years of wor1d history - they may not believe, like Francis Fukuyama, in the end of history as such but certainly in the end of religious history 15 - a view that may alarm many Westerners, not only Samuel Huntington. 2. No doubt, Huntington took this feature of Islam into account - not only as theoretical risk of a clash of Islam with other religions but as a concrete risk, a clear and present danger, given the extraordinary speed with which Islam is spreading around the world once more. Islam, a universal religion in design, was never able to rule more than a limited part of the world, stretching east from Spain and Morocco to India, Indonesia and Central Asia. And even within this area, the Muslim during the age of colonialist imperialism became mere objects of history, neither subjects nor actors. 16

Given the dark ages through which the Muslim wor1d lived for several

14 For details see Ishaq, The life of Mohammad, trans. A. Guillaume, Oxford 1955, pp. 652- 659. 15 This valid point is made by Ali Mazrui (1993), p. 513. 16 A. Mazrui (1993). p. 527,

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