Globalization or Recolonization?: The Muslim World in the 21st Century
The title is a book by Ali Mohammadi and Muhammad Ahsan, London: Ta-Ha Publishers Ltd, 2002. 196 pages. The following is an excerpt from its book review published in “The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences” 20:3 & 4.[1]
Globalization in the last 2 decades
Globalization has been a burning topic of interest for social scientists and the general public for the last 2 decades. However, a Muslim discourse on globalization has not been sufficiently developed.
Objective of the book
The current book seeks not only to present a dramatic picture of the Ummah within the globalized network of mainly economic relations, but also offers policy solutions to get out of this crisis and create the Islamic Ummah as an active actor in global economic and political affairs.
Globalization in this book
As the title suggests, in this book globalization does not have the pos¬itive connotations that it has in liberal western scholarship. In fact, it is seen more as a recolonization of the Third World, and, in particular, of the Islamic world.
Contents of the book
The first chapter lays the theoretical ground, the last one concludes the argument and gives a strategic plan to counter recolonization, while the other six chapters concentrate on different aspects of globaliza¬tion. What comes out of the comparative analyses between the developed and the developing non-Muslim and Muslim worlds is the striking fact that Muslims score the lowest in almost all areas. Besides calling the Muslims' attention to this disconcerting plethora of problems, the authors master¬fully document how the myth of interdependence fades away, notwith¬standing evidence of the unequal treatment by the "global" economic and for the Ummah's current state, they do not specify how these factors cause the result. In addition, in a context where postmodernist and postcolonial currents have gained currency, it is unusual that the book takes develop¬mental ism for granted. More importantly, it can be argued that overall, this book is economi¬cally biased. Although the study of contemporary globalization is generally situated in the international political economy field, since its motivator has been market deregulation, culture is increasingly gaining significance. However, the book generally grants, at most, a corollary status to cultural factors. Added to this is the authors' silence on the everyday debates about Islam's role in this underdevelopment. What is the Muslims' response to these accounts that hold Islam responsible? Except for one place, Islam is not deemed an exogenous variable to the analysis. This implies that Islam's prevailing formulations are taken for granted, and thereby relegates the Ummah's civilizational crisis to just an economic crisis. As for the policy suggestions, the key role is again attributed to eco¬nomic reform; only the last page touches upon political reform. It is as if the Ummah's economic integration, which the book advocates, could be achieved with the current leadership, whose conflicting interests are mostly contrary to the public interest. Political variables are at work in the book only as they refer to international politics.
General view of the Ummah
Overall, this book presents an incredibly demoralizing picture of the Ummah and offers a solution. But a more extensive analysis on the intellectual, cultural, and micro-meso level forces would certainly grasp a lot more about the Ummah's various crises. Muslims should not count on their current leaders to create the Ummah, when their simple efforts on the grass¬roots level could carry the seeds of our dreams.