islam , the west, and the idea of reform

The idea of static and stuck in the past cultures, is at the heart of the "Western" idea of Progress. Linear Progress - from Primitive to Modern. No culture or people is ever static and stuck . The flow of  Time and natural Growth in societies make sure of that .

Read this interview  and think of how colonialism and neocolonialism need and push  people to live  in the past just to justify ' 'Modernising ' them. Civilizing'  and controlling them.

ZS:  Trust between Islam and the West has indeed been broken; and has to be re-built.

The rising tide of Islamophobia and notions such as the Clash of Civilizations do not help. But despite the hurdles, we have to work to create mutual trust and respect.

We need to realize that colonialism did much more than simply damage Muslim nations and cultures. It played a major part in the suppression and eventual disappearance of knowledge and learning, thought and creativity, from Muslim cultures. Colonial encounter began by appropriating the knowledge and learning of Islam, which became the basis of the ‘European Renaissance’ and ‘the Enlightenment’ and ended by eradicating this knowledge and learning from both from Muslim societies and from history itself. It did that both by physical elimination – destroying and closing down institutions of learning, banning certain types of indigenous knowledge, killing off local thinkers and scholars – and by rewriting History as the history of western civilization into which all minor histories of other civilization are subsumed.

As a consequence, Muslim cultures were delinked from their own history with many serious consequences. For example, the colonial suppression of Islamic science led to the displacement of scientific culture from Muslim society. It did this by introducing new systems of administration, law, education and economy all of which were designed to impart dependence, compliance and subservience to the colonial powers. The decline of Islamic science and learning is one aspect of the general economic and political decay and deterioration of Muslim societies. Islam has thus been transformed from a dynamic culture and a holistic way of life to mere rhetoric. Islamic education has became a cul de sac, a one way ticket to marginality. It also led to the conceptual reduction of Muslim civilization. By which I mean concepts that shaped and gave direction to Muslim societies became divorced from the actual daily lives of Muslims – leading to the kind of intellectual impasse that we find in Muslim societies today.  Western neo-colonialism perpetuates that system.

But colonialism also damaged the imperial powers. It dehumanised the west: notions of supremacy and exclusive rationality, and ideas that attribute modernity solely to the west are, in my opinion, symptoms of dehumanisation. A worldview that assumes it is the yardstick for measuring all other cultures, and insists that all other cultures must be judged by its norms and values, and must conform to its dictates lacks humanity by definition. Such a perspective on humanity cannot conceive that there can be other, different, ways of being human. I believe that there are numerous ways of being human; and western way of being human is only one amongst many. Because the western civilisation is the dominant civilization we automatically assume that this dominant way is the only way and the right way to be human. By suppressing other ways of being human, the West does not allow other, different ideas, notions, concepts, to come to the fore. Imperialism has given the West a fractured perception of its own superiority and a truncated notion of what it means to be human.

So the trust building exercise that we are undertaking has two components. First, it aims to recover lost tradition of intellectual thought and inquiry in Muslim cultures, and provide Muslims with confidence to engage with the modern world of the twenty-first century. Second, it aims to humanize the West by showing that western culture is only one culture amongst many on this planet. The history of the world is not the history of the West: the histories of other cultures are not just tributaries that flow into the Universal History of western civilization. Rather, all cultures, including Islam and the West, are human cultures with equal strengths and weaknesses. We need to come together on the basis of mutual equality and move forward jointly on the basis of trust to build a more equitable and just world.

AV:  For years, decades, even centuries, the European and later North American imperialism had been forging cooperation with radical fractions of Islam. Entire progressive governments and countries had been destroyed by such ‘unholy alliance”, from Iran and Egypt to Afghanistan and Indonesia. Could you talk about the mechanism of such alliances and how could progressive, even mainstream Islam prevent forging them in the future?

ZS:  I would argue that western imperialism has not so much forge alliance with radical factions as created them. The ‘war on terror’ and invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the drone bombing of Pakistan, have all increased radicalization amongst young Muslims. The very idea that freedom and democracy can be imposed is a gift to radical preachers. Imposing a pro-American regime in Baghdad does not amount to giving the Iraqis freedom either. This is exactly the kind of imposition that insists that one size fits all irrespective of condition and circumstance that the Muslim world hates. Muslims want to seek ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, as the American Declaration of Independence terms its central values, on their own terms – as we see in the ‘Arab Spring’. They want the right to define and determine the content and form of these values according to their own history and culture, and finds that western powers are often a practical obstacle to attain them in their own terms in their own countries

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/12/does-islam-need-reform/