STORM CLOUDS OF GLOBALIZATION AND THE MUSLIM WORLD

Throughout the ages religion has occupied a central place in life, and the normative codes or precepts governing human action to which religions give rise, tend to claim universal validity. Perhaps the very practice of constructing ‘religion’ as a sociological category is part of a long‐term process leading to globalization. In this article, we explore the challenges faced by the Muslim world, and inherent capabilities of Islam to stand against these challenges. Despite the fact that Muslims are highly diversified in their cultural, social and linguistic features, they are united in the universality of the Islamic faith, as according to the Qur’an, Islam is already a global religion. Islamic worldview contains Divine guidelines that cannot be subject to change or modification and includes universal principles such as the meaning of God, the Prophet and man, which cannot draw on others to reconstruct the social organization of Muslim societies. Historically, pilgrimage to the Hijaz (Hajj), constructed a dense network of Muslim trading and pilgrimage communities, across the continents, which institutionalized a distinct tradition of Muslim global ‘cosmopolitanism’ and encouragement of geographical mobility prior to the era of globalization. So globalization has been presenting the Islamic world with more possibilities than problems. Ijtihad is the most important legal principle in Islam, and one of the pillars of the Islamization of Knowledge. With this kind of invaluable tools, Islam has the ability to stand against the storm clouds of globalization, and is now presenting itself globally to a wide range of audiences.

Keywords:

globalization , Islamic world , modernization , universal religion , Ijtihad