By Sohail Inayatullah

“Five Futures for Muslims,” http://www. futurebrief. com/Sohail. asp. August 11, 2004. Refereed Web Journal.

Abstract  

Five alternative futures for Muslims are explored in this essay. In the first, the Islamic world attempts to return to its historical memory of grandeur. As this return is not a contextual return but a reiteration of the conditions of the 7th century, a medieval feudal Islam gains supremacy. For most Muslims, this is decline. In the second possible future, divisions within the Islamic world heighten. War with the West, among Islamic nations, and among sects in Islam is primary. This is a slow, but potentially dramatic decline. In the third, Islam follows a linear trajectory, becoming part of the modern secular world. In the fourth, Islam and the West undergo pendulum shifts, as one declines and the other rises. The final future is a “virtuous spiral” that imagines not only an alternative modernity for the Islamic world, but an alternative global future. Pluralism within Islam and within the world system is fundamental. As a result, Islam becomes part of a planetary ethic of ecology, gender partnership and global governance – the solution to the global crisis of meaning, sovereignty, and politics.

The Perfection of the Past

When the future of Muslims is discussed,² whether by mullah, political leader, or believer, most tend to resort to the historical memory of the time of the rightly guided caliphs, when the Prophet’s principles of moral leadership and shura (deep consultation with the believers) were practiced.

It is this past – a living prophet with a geographically bounded state – that remains the vision of the future for many Muslims. In this sense, one can paradoxically argue that Christians were more fortunate that Jesus did not succeed (during his time) in creating a Christian state.³ The fact that a utopian Christian state never existed allowed room for ideas of future state systems, a notion of progress, and a movement toward a better future. Of course, the religious dimension of this has become the search for the savior – the return of Christ. But by and large, it has been capital coupled with technology in the context of freedom of the individual that has been the driving force in the West.

For Muslims, the past attainment of a perfect or near perfect Islamic state and society may not have been the blessing it is often assumed to have been. Social and political “progress” has focused on returning to the ideal-perfect era. As well, social and technological innovations have become limited as many Muslims have tended to make the fundamental error of “misplaced concretism.” That is, the details of the earlier epoch are re-engineered – the strong warrior male leader, the hijab for women, the battle of good and evil, tribal politics, and other particulars of 7th century life. This period is taken out of history and decontextualized. Instead of focusing on a productive future, concrete dimensions of the past are re-imagined. They are brought back and used as tools for social control, particularly against the most vulnerable. Traditionally this memory of an idealized past was used for nation-building, but now it is used as part of the larger quest to create a modern Khalifate – an integrated empire.⁴

Divided Islam, Divided World

While the first future is driven by the desire to return to tradition, the next plausible future is based on the playing out of various contradictions – these include civilization and nation, and civilizations⁵ in conflict.

The first tension is between Islam as a civilization and Islam within the nation-state; that is, one cannot have, by definition, an Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Islam must be free of all national shackles. It is this contradiction that worries leaders throughout the Islamic world – in a true Islamic Khalifate they would no longer have power. This is the same fear that American leaders have of the United Nations. Super-ordinate power is a threat to local power, even if it is more appropriate for economies of scale, policy implementation, the environmental challenges facing the planet, and for global peace keeping.

Can a “Pan-Islam” be created, or will the tensions between civilization and nation-state always exist? Or is it possible that there is a way out of this dichotomy? The last scenario at the conclusion of this essay, that of the virtuous spiral, explores a way out.

The second tension is between Islam as a civilization in conflict (and for many historical periods in harmony) with the Judea-Christian world. By most measures, the Islamic world falls short on most economic and social indicators.⁶ Yet, Muslims and Westerners offer very different explanations for these shortfalls. From the Western perspective, the Islamic world has failed to modernize, secularize, and innovate. Nations are like individuals, and Muslims have not followed the dictates of Adam Smith et al. The Islamic response, however, is focused less on internal issues and more on external ones – principally, how the West has intervened in the Islamic world’s natural development. From this perspective, colonialism has created an economic and social straitjacket, reducing the pathways possible, often with violent results. Thus, the grand and often polemical calls for justice from the Islamic world. But the shadow dimension of this broad definition of justice (the righting of endless historical structural wrongs) is conspiracy. In the minds of some, there are always malevolent actors from evil civilizations at play. For many, this is what explains the decline of Muslims. Not just amoral economic patterns but actors actively plotting the decline of Islam (since it represents the fundamental threat to the Western world, similar to communism in the 20th century). And there are collaborators within as well – the overly westernized Muslims, women and corrupt leaders (and the less than true believers).

The future of Islam cannot be divorced from that of the rest of the world. If the world remains unfair in Islamic eyes – war on Iraq but not on other violators of human rights, on other despots in Russia or China as examples – then the sense of injustice and powerlessness remain. Moreover, as C. Inayatullah of the Council of Social Sciences in Pakistan argues, this injustice serves as a vehicle to unite Muslims.

With the assumption that the current world order based on culture of conflict, violence and war persist, Muslims will act within it and respond to its violent aspects with greater violence. [In this future], Muslims will become more fundamentalist and develop greater unity among them to face the rest of the world and fight their battle under the banner of orthodox Islam [the past-based future].⁷

In this violent future, the Islamic world will certainly lose in the short term. Any violence committed against the USA and European nations will be met with further violence, not with calls for dialogue. Mediation between Bin Laden and Bush and their respective successors simply is not in the cards. Violence will lead to more violence, and the hard side of Islam (an eye for an eye, the world divided clearly into good and evil with violence justified) will be dramatically defeated, given the asymmetry of wealth, technology and aspirations (the desire of those in the Islamic world for a predictable and safe middle class existence).

After the defeat (and even perhaps simultaneously), the medium term – 50-100 years – will see the rise of the softer syncretic Sufi side. However, deeper issues will still not be resolved since it was violence instead of productive peace building (internal and external) that drove the changes within Islam. As a result, the cycles of poverty, alienation, and despair will continue within the Muslim World.

Thus, in the long term, future generations will remember their defeat and the calls for justice will spring up again. Just as the Crusades remain ever alive for Muslims, 9/11 will be lived out every few hundred years – with even more violence.

For the West, the short term victory will only make matters worse (once the virtual ticker tape parades are over). This is because it is partly in conflict with its own self-image and the cost of victory will be the rejection of its softer multicultural self. Victory will create a security-surveillance state that will limit its capacity to innovate.⁸ Its claim for moral legitimacy will be challenged. Just as the Abu Ghraib prison crisis is explained by those in the Islamic world, not as managerial errors – a few bad eggs – but as a combination of Empire (expansion of power), Orientalism (Iraqis are genetically and culturally inferior) and the Prison discourse (prisoners should not have rights – the world is dangerous). Attempts to create far more effective and efficient prisons will not solve the problem (nor will attempts to reduce access to digital cameras) as the solution to cultural crisis is rarely technocracy.

This second alternative future does not bode well for Muslims or the rest of the world. It too ends up focusing on the past – idealized perfection and historical injustices on one side, and blindness to cultural hegemony on the other.

So far we have explored two futures: The first attempts to return to the imagined past, wherein medieval feudal Islam gains supremacy. However, as this future swims against the modernist and dominant Western stream, conflicts worsen with the West. The second possible future entails continued war with the West, and within Islam as well (the inner pluralist soft and extremist hard), leading to decline and degeneration. In effect, the outcome of these two futures is the same: conflict and decline.

The Linear Ascent

The third potential course for Islam is the linear trajectory. Islam, with fits and convolutions, and minor reversals, will follow the Western trajectory. After all, Muslims like Christians and Jews are the children of Abraham. Islam’s temporal future is predictable. Muslims will emerge from the medieval era and enter a modernist one. At the level of the nation-state, Turkey or Malaysia serve as models of the likely future. Of course, there will be Iranian-style backslides, but eventually the power of the ayatollahs will diminish. This is the American vision – that Jeffersonian democracy along with its invisible hand will triumph, individual human rights will be recognized as universal, and all cultures will eventually discover what is authentically good for them. The European version is similar, but based more on enforceable global institutional regulatory regimes.

The Islamic world will thus leave its medieval paradigm behind and join the European enlightenment (or create its own similar version). Just as the West went from

from ancient to classical to feudal to modern and now is entering a period of unlimited choice and the boundary-lessness of postmodernism (challenging stable notions of truth, nature, reality and self through robotics, genetics, space travel, feminism, multiculturalism), the Islamic world will also leave the feudal and enter the modern. The current crises, seen from a long term macroview, are minor reactions to this predestined trajectory.⁹

However, seen with far less of a grand vision, the march into a linear shared global future continues to have major setbacks. First is despotism within the Islamic world, even in Malaysia with the arrest and torture of Anwar Ibrahim, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia . Second are the events of 9/11. Third has been the continued violence in Palestine/Israel.¹⁰ Fourth, are the divisions of class and gender, and the urban patterns of poverty, alienation and disempowerment found in the Islamic world.

Outside of the Islamic world, equally relevant are the following factors: First is uneven globalization, with few immediate and mid-term benefits to poorer nations. Second is the continued perceived hypocrisy among the Western powers. When they are not walking the walk, as with the Abu Ghraib crisis (where hypocrisy was hidden behind managerialism instead of the apology of honor, so fundamental in feudal and indigenous cultures). Third is Orientalism, the cultural construction of the non-West as inferior – that is, direct, structural and epistemological violence. And, fourth is hyper-technological advancement via robotics, genetics (from gene therapy to germ line intervention), and nanotechnology that make catch-up practically impossible.¹¹

In this vision, the Islamic world’s future is contoured by the Rise of the West, from colonial empire to developmentalism and now to globalization (with hints of Empire next). The Islamic world’s trajectory is defined and limited by the West’s technological, economic, political and definitional dominance,

Along with restricted parameters, there is temporal contagion within this trajectory and thus we see Bin Laden and his cohorts simultaneously as feudal warriors – a clear leader, clan, relationships, honor – and as globalists and even “netizens.” As well, these forces live in conflict with modernist leaders and bureaucrats focused on a secular rational institutionalized industrial state formations who are in tension with citizens living in multiple worlds – the scientific, the feudal, the secular, the modernism and indeed the postmodernist. New technologies exacerbate the possibility of enhanced multiplicities – CDROM, the web – all remove the power of interpretation from mullah to individual, allowing for far more individualized religiousity.¹² This possibility of more individualism is unsympathetically understood by Bin Laden type traditionalists (even while they use the tools of global technocratism) and national bureaucrats, who paint all attempts of individualistic and syncretic Islam as unpatriotic. He who owns the means of knowledge, the right to define, is at the heart of the battle within Islam, and indeed, the world. And it remains the West, particularly the USA, that is the defining agent.

Thus, the linear trajectory is far more difficult when there can be only one “king of the hill.”

A fourth future is the replacement of the King of the Hill. Instead of linearity, the shape of the future may be swing of the pendulum.

A Pendulum Shift

A pendulum swing is the fourth possible future for Islam. If the West enters into decline, caused partly by aging (witness the demographic destiny with Caucasians moving from 50% of the world’s population in the 1850s to less than 5% by 2150), Islam will be on the rise (especially if it can move away from conspiracy to innovation). In this formulation, both West and Islam are in the same field, facing each other with antagonism and fear, but still part of the same unitary relationship. If the West declines (perhaps due to imperial over-reach, global warming, failed genetic experiments, or an inward looking security state), it may be Islam that rises to fill the world vacuum, as macrohistorian Johan Galtung has argued.¹³ While China, and possibly India, are the most likely candidates for world hegemony, Muslims could use the current crisis to move away from extremism and recover the spirit of tradition without its negative details. Thus, they could step into a vacuum and provide the ethical anchor to the relativism of postmodernism.

A Virtuous Spiral?

This recovery of the past in the context of future-oriented progress – the virtuous spiral – becomes the final scenario. This future is the most hopeful for Islam and the rest of the world. In this alternative trajectory, after a brief foray into postmodernism – endless consumer choices but no ground of reality – a new global ethics may emerge. This is a soft, multicultural Islam engaged in dialogue with the West and East Asia, confident of its dignity, creating an alternative science like that imagined by leaders such as Anwar Ibrahim.¹⁴ Many of Islam’s ideas – environmental protection, concern for poverty, Islamic economics, Islamic science (far less cruel to animals, focused on research on the issues of poor and the needy, not just on the issues of the rich) will become part of the global agenda.

Islam’s spiritual history, far less challenged by modernity – coming after the West’s entry into it – will be far less problematic (secularism will no longer be the benchmark of the good society) and will help in the creation of a post-postmodern era, a post-scarcity, spiritually balanced society with deep sustainability.¹⁵ This is progress with history, an alternative modernity that offers multiple trajectories leading to sustainable development. To create this future a creative minority is needed. The current hijacking of Islam is the shadow response to the paucity of a creative minority. The creative minority offers a new image of the future and practices it. Groups in the USA (Progressive Muslims) and in the UK are working on this and, hopefully, this can become part of a reformed Islam. Indeed, this was a desired image of the future at an international meeting of Muslim scholars¹⁶.

Five points were fundamental:¹⁷

1. An alternative economics to world capitalism
2. Cooperation between the genders based on dignity and fairness
3. Self-reliant ecological communities
4. Use of advanced technologies to link these communities
5. A world governance system that is fair, just, representational and guided by wise leadership

This virtuous spiral model, using aspects of the past to invent an alternative future, is something to be aspired to. The pivotal here, as Zia Sardar argues, is that a reformed Islam can not only transform Muslim society and Islamic thought, it can also provide a genuine alternative to the dominant mode of doing things globally.¹⁸

A Dream?

Can Muslims create a new future? Do they have a choice? Can a creative minority envision it? If not, I fear a civilizational, national and local bloodbath which will only create calls for more justice, Israel-Palestine writ large on the world. While many Muslims hope that demography is destiny (and some in the West fear this) ¹⁹– Muslim birthrates continue upwards, with some forecasters even predicting that a majority of US Marines will be Muslim by the end of this century²⁰– numbers without qualitative change only lead to even grander decline.

I dream of the virtuous spiral vision of the future. Transformed Muslims and a transformed West, beyond the uni- and the multi- to a transcultural. This future is certainly not probable, but it is still possible.²¹ And while it is a dream for now, is there really any choice?

Notes

1. I would like to thank Bob Adams, Lewis Grow and Ivana Milojevic for extensive comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
2. Here seeing the world within the lens of Islam, that is, Islam is eternal and thus not open to discussion on its future, but Muslims, their faith, their behavior, can be analysed, openly discussed.
3. See Abdelwahab El-Affendi, Who Needs an Islamic State?. London , Grey Seal Books, 1991, 37.
4. In this, both neo-conservatives and the majority of Muslims focus on Empire. The former imagines a USA empire, while Muslims imagine an Islamic empire.
5. This piece is fraught with the problems of essentialism: civilizations, nations, and even terms such as Muslims and Christians can be problematic. Identity is not merely given but made in context: whether an archetypal “civilizational” context, or a local identity context (one gains an identity through interaction with another). However, civilizations too can challenge post-structural constructivism, asserting that identity is given and notions of choice privilege certain epistemological perspectives. Finally civilizations are lived; defining them freezes them.
6. UNDP Human Development Indicators (created by the Pakistani muslim Mahbub al Haq) is the best report on this.
7. Email, April 5, 2004. Dr. C. Inayatullah.
8. Not to mention challenge the “melting pot” story.
9. For more on this, see “Islamic Responses to Emerging Scientific, Technological and Epistemological Transformations,” Social Epistemologies (Vol. 10, No. 3/4, 1996), 331-349; and earlier in Islamic Thought and Scientific Creativity (Vol. 6, No. 2, 1995), 47-68. Also: “Global Transformations,” Development (Vol. 40, No. 2, 1997), 31-37.
10. Justified or not justified (Kashmir, Chechnya)
11. In 1993 just 10 countries accounted for 84 percent of global research and development expenditures and controlled 95 percent of the US patents of the past two decades. The die is cast, technocracy will further create a divided world, with the right to the Net and the right to genetic therapy and modification becoming the battle cry of coming decades.
12. Sohail Inayatullah and Gail Boxwell, eds., Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures., 89-106.
13. Johan Galtung, “On the Last 2,500 years in Western History, and some remarks on the Coming 500,” in The New Cambridge Modern History, Companion Volume, ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). See as well: Johan Galtung and Sohail Inayatullah, Macrohistory and Macrohistorians. Wesport,Ct, Praeger, 1997.
14. See special issue of Futures. Anwar Ibrahim, “The Ummah and Tomorrow’s World,” Futures (Vol. 23, No. 3, April 1991), 302-310. Also see: Anwar Ibrahim, The Asian Renaissance. Singapore, Time Books, 1996.
15. See www.islamicconcern.com/fatwas.asp for a site on Islam and vegetarianism.
16. Organization of Islamic Conference.
17. Sohail Inayatullah, “Leaders envision the future of the Islamic Ummah,” World Futures Studies Federation Bulletin (July 1996), Coverpage.. See, Sohail Inayatullah, “Futures Visions of Southeast Asia: Some Early Warning Signals,” Futures (Vol. 27, No. 6, July/August, 1995), 681-688;
18. Email . April 2, 2004 . Ziauddin Sardar.
19. Recent headlines of Welsh actor, John Rhys-Davies, fearing that the demographic rise of Muslims will lead to a catastrophe for Western civilization, are indicators of much more to come. However, a voice of sanity has prevailed in this discussion. In response to Rhy-Davies comments of Muslim growth in Holland, were the comments Chief executive of the All Wales Ethnic Minority Association (Awema) Naz Malik. He said: “I do not know why he has said these things. If 50 per cent of people in Holland under 18 are Muslims in 16 years time, so what? In Britain the fastest growing race is mixed race, people of dual heritage. It is a cause for great celebration that our cultures are mixed. We live in a global society – we celebrate what is good in cultures and challenge what is bad in civilisations.” But this appears to be a lone voice. For a site taking a strong anti-multiculturalism view.
20. Ayeda Husain Naqvi writes in “The Rise of the Muslim Marine” (NewsLine, July 1996, 75-77) that while hate crimes against Muslims rise all over the world, surprisingly the US military is one of the safest places to be a Muslim. Indeed, Qasem Ali Uda forecasts that in 20 years, 25% of all US marines will be Muslim. Given the incredible influence that former military personnel have on US policies (i.e., a look at Who’s Who in America shows that military background and law school education are the two common denominators on the resumes of America ‘s most influential people), inclusion is the wisest policy. The data is far from certain though. Todd Johnson, in his article, “Religious Projections for the next 200 Years” along with scenarios titled “non-religious growth” and Asians opt for secularization while certainly having one scenario as “Muslim revival.” Indeed, with postmodernism on the rise, individuals could choose alternative identities, being far less focused on the traditional, like father, like son. i.e., religion becomes one choice among many. (http://www.wnrf.org/cms/print_next200.shtml)
21. For an excellent articulation of this, see Johan Galtung, Globalization for Peace and Development. www.transcend.org. August 2004.

Sohail Inayatullah

Abstract:

Islam can be seen as a counter discourse to globalization, to the expansion of economic space and the fulfillment of the dreams of the social darwinists. However, even as Islam attempts to create new possibilities for globalism, national politics doom it to a politics of reaction, of reducing diversity and innovation. This is especially perilous as the next phase of globalisation promises to end historical notions of reality, truth, nature and sovereignty. In this dramatically changed world, Islam can join with other counter discourses to create a moral vision of a planetary society, an alternative vision and reality of globalization.

Countering Globalization:

At one level, Islam can be seen as a counter-globalisation[1] in that globalisation – at least in its dominant face – is essentially about expanding the economic circle in our lives at the expense of the social, the spiritual and the cultural. It is the expansion of the world capitalist economy into every sphere of our lives. It is also the continuation of social darwinism, that the fittest – the most entrepreneurial – should lead the world. Finally, globalism continues the ideal of progress, of creating the perfect society, the positivist/scientific world, of forever removing religion and irrationality from human history. The latest technology that promises to deliver this future is germ-line engineering, creating a world of flawless human beings. But in whose image of perfection will these individuals be created in? Certainly not Islamic notions of the good, rather, they will continue in technocratic and western definitions of health, beauty and intelligence.

In this move to hyper-globalization, the Islamic world stands both as an imagined past – feudal, low-tech – but also as a civilization based on an alternative distinction between the public and the private, between individual space and collective space and between the secular and the religious.

However, globalization – if we ask not what is globalization but which globalization – along with the globalization of economy and the globalization of technology (its acceleration) also consists of: (1) the globalization of awareness of the human condition (of hope and fear); (2) the globalization of responses to market and state domination (the emergent global civil society of transnational organizations); (3) the globalization of governance (both below and above); (4) and, finally globalization is both the expansion of time (creating a discourse of the long term future) and its elimination (creating the immediacy of space).

In this more exhaustive definition of globalization, where stands Islam? Islam in these globalized worlds, defined more eclectically, is first about an alternative to the Western project, that is, a promise of a more spiritual society based on a the unity of thought, of an alternative epistemology, an alternative notion of science and political economy.

Islamic Paradigm:

Generally this alternative paradigm as articulated by various Muslim writers consists of the following:[2]

There are ten such concepts, four standing alone and three opposing pairs. Tawheed (unity), Khalifah (trusteeship), ibadah (worship), ilm (knowledge), halal (praiseworthy) and haram (blameworthy), adl (social justice) and zulm (tyranny) and istislah (public interest) and dhiya (waste).

Tawheed articulates the larger Islamic unity of thought, action and value across humanity, persons, nature and God. Khalifah asserts that it is God who has ownership of the Earth. Humans function in a stewardship, trustee capacity, taking care of the Earth, not damaging it. The goal of the Islamic worldview is adl, social justice, and it is based on the larger needs of the people, istislah. To reach these goals, ibadah, worship or contemplation is a beginning and necessary step. From deep reflection, inner and outer observation, ilm or knowledge of self, other and nature will result. One’s action then are halal, praiseworthy and not haram, blameworthy. Moreover with this framework, dhiya (waste) of individual and collective potentials is avoided as is zulm, tyranny, the power of a few, or one, over many, or the power of a narrow ideology over the unity within plurality that the Islamic paradigm advocates. The science that emerges from it is not reducationist objective but synthethic and values based, focused on an emotional commitment to understanding Allah’s world.

While the above presents an alternative paradigm of Islam, it is the vision of an ummah, a global community of believers and non-believers that defines this alternative globalism. At heart, Islam desires to reintegrate the individual as part of the natural order. While Western civilization has come to life in long drawn out battles against the tyranny of royality (from the Magna Carta to the Glorious English Revolution) for muslims it has been the most recent battles againt colonialism and imperialism that has unleashed a humanistic spirit. The vision of the ummah, writes jailed muslim leader, Anwar Ibrahim, “must be able to transcend cultural specificity [and] inhabit the realm of universal ideas.”[3]

This means that the vision of the Ummah must draw on the cultural resources from Islamic history using them to engage with other civilizations through inclusive dialogue. However, the universal must be stated within evolutionary terms, as part of the human unfolding drama.

But behind this idealism lies the current reality of an Islam, that while dramatically increasing in numbers, is decreasing in conceptual unity,[4] decreasing in its viability to create a new politics and economics, indeed, culture, that is, while muslims trust in Allah, they are not doing enough to tie their camel – to become culturally and technologically innovative.

Writes muslim scholar, Munawar Anees: [5]

Perpetuation of despotic rulers, such as Mahathir in Malaysia, is achieved through a systematic corruption of the civil, judicial and the police departments. The invertebrate state-controlled media serve the self-fulfilling prophecy while anti-Semitic slander with sham retractions is not uncommon for sleazy political gains. Greedy multinationals and the Western corridors of power are clearly reprehensible for propping up these client regimes as their economic and political mercenaries.

Given the intellectual bondage and political and economic subservience of the Muslim world to the West, prospects for the future, either programmed or desired, remain gloomy. There seems to be an inexplicable fatalism that continues to envelope the Ummah – the global Muslim community. It has ceased moving from opinion to knowledge. And employing knowledge for social evolution. In the footsteps of the Prophetic Tradition – beside trust in the Divine mercy – are not Muslims required to tie up their camel?

Can muslims, asks Zia Sardar, recover the dynamic principle of ijtihad – sustained and reasoned struggle for innovation and adjusting to change – that has been neglected and forgotten for centuries? [6] Can Islamic civilization avoid the future being programmed by globalization and create an alternative modernity, that is, not destroy tradition but adopt it critically, challenging feudalism and patriarchy and authoritarian knowledge politics, and creating a world, modern, but different from the West?

The possibilities are mixed. With the ascension of the West, muslims have internally adopted the Orientalist codes, seeing themselves not through their own historical eyes – gaze – but through the lenses of Western categories. What results then are imitations of the West, instead of multiculturalism or anti-West rhetoric for local power politics. The strength of globalization in terms of shaping the world economy as well as world culture – the politics of idea production, how Hollywood movies shape world notions of self – do not bode well for other cultures (except in exoticized or museumized forms).[7]

Technology transforming modernity:

But as we venture into the future, globalization is not just about expanding economy and technology as well as the dialectical responses of civil society and reflexive awareness but also about dramatic changes in the nature of reality (through virtualization) in truth (through challenges from postmodernism and multiculturalism) in the nature of nature (from genetics particularly germline engineering as well as from feminist/poststructural thought) as well as sovereignty (making the self and the nation-state far more porous than the legacies industrialism has given us). Within these frames can we still imagine not just a vital Islam but any Islam? Or is Islam likely to be left behind by .com fever and the new economy (virtualization), by genomics (the end of the natural), by the relativization of newtonian stability and globalized economics (and international organizations and corporations spearheading the end of ideology)?

Virtualization will challenge all religions as it contests historical definitions of reality. Computer games are already a larger revenue industry than films and the trends are that this will keep on increasing. But there are significant problems ahead. First, virtualization leads to social isolation, which leads to depression, which already in 1990 accounts for five of the ten leading causes of disability. Psychiatric conditions are expected to play an even greater role in the global burden of disease in the future, becoming in 2020 the leading cause of the loss of life years. [8] Virtualization is likely to further fragment the western self, creating the desolation of postmodern anomie.[9] The lack of access to the Net may prove not as disastrous as it appears now – communication, and not merely solitary information transfer – will remain important in the Islamic world. This relates to the second problem. Virtualization further weakens social ties, community (even as new net communities are created). Again, for the Islamic world, with less net access, this may prove a boon. However, as the Islamic world opens up to the net, we should expect individualization. The personal computer revolution may also create spaces for software that reduces the interpretive authority of mulllahs. For example, by placing the Quran on cdrom, direct access to interpretation will be possible. This expansion of knowledge democracy could be one factor in challenging the dominating feudal structures in the Islamic world. It could also help create an alternative cyberculture, modern, but differently so from the hegemonic West. This alternative culture would be one that allows group experience of virtuality, thus creating new realities, innovation without the loss of the family orientation of Islamic culture.

For the Islamic world, the challenge will be to – as with the adoption of all non-indigenous technologies – to appropriate and use ICTS and their future developments (web-bots, the always-on, wearable computers) without being used by them, that is, to use the net to unleash local innovation without succumbing to the dark side of cyber futures.[10]

But a greater challenge than virtuality will be the end of the natural through developments in genetics. Cloning, gene therapy and germline engineering all contest evolutionary views of what is natural – that is, humans preselecting genetic dispositions, characteristics. The slippery slope from genetic prevention (reducing the probability of developing certain diseases) to genetic enhancement (height, “intelligence”) to new species creation will be quick and almost unstoppable within current globalized and technocratic science. While this will challenge all religions, religions of the book, derived from stories of Adam and Eve will be especially made problematic. Buddhist and other Indian perspectives with far more liminal views of self, will find negotiating an artificial world far easier. The works of Indian philosopher P.R. Sarkar are especially instructive in developing a spiritual perspective of new technologies.[11]

The muslim view of gene therapy is generally best described by Munawar Anees and Abdulaziz Sachedina: Anees writes:[12] gene therapy (not to mention cloning) transgresses everything that Islam is about, about what is natural and what is wrong.

Adds Sachedina: [13]

In Islamic discussions in eugenics, there is almost a consensus among Muslim scholars that it “having better rather than worse genes” does not play a part in the recognition of the good qualities of human beings; it is something that is designed by God, and therefore, it should be left to God, so there is no incentive for the improvement of the genetic composition of individuals to increase the value of that individual. Rather, the value of the individual depends on faith. …

… There is no encouragement of any kind to improve genetic composition through any kind of surgical or any kind of medical or choices to the marriage decisions; rather, the will of God is regarded as the one that really creates human beings the way there are, and there are potential improvements within that if faith is maintained, if moral and spiritual awareness are maintained within the life.

These new technologies pose the most dramatic problems for those who consider the natural as fixed instead of as constantly changing and in the process of recreation. Strict traditionalists (those who do not take a dynamic view of knowledge, wherein ijtihad (reasoned judgement) gives way to taqlid (blind imitation), in particular, will find the next twenty or thirty years the best and worst times. The best because the forces of tradition will flock to them; worst because the technological imperative and humanity’s struggle to constantly recreate itself and thus nature will not be easily forced back. For the Islamic world to survive, it will not only need to debate these technological developments but articulate an alternative science.

For religions in general, there are three possibilities.[14] First is the return to an imagined past with strong feudal and male structures, identity defined by in-group exclusive bonding. Second is to adapt to the future by seeing the past as metaphor, as a story to ethically guide oneself. The latter may become far too fluid for most leaders, however, over time, a new layered religious framework may develop, that is, integration at a different level. For individuals, too, a similar choice remains: return to an integrated but exclusivist self or create a liminal constantly changing self. This postmodern self, the salad bar theory of pluralism, may lead to total fragmentation or alternatively may, as Sarkar argues, create a layered, neo-humanistic self that moves beyond ego (my way is the only way), family (concern for only my future generations), geo-sentiment (my land, territory), socio-sentiment (my religion or race) as well as humanistic sentiment (humans above all), that is, a dynamic, layered inclusive self with incorporates other humans as well as plants and animals. A neo-humanistic self thus moves through the traumas of ego, territorial nationalism, exclusivist religion, racism as well as speciesism entering the universalistic transcendental.

Sovereignty:

Combined with virtualization and geneticization is breakdown of sovereignty. While the passport office remains threatening, capital is now free to roam, as is pollution. Governance too has moved to world levels with the institutionalization of world organizations around activities of health, climate, economy, refugees, to name a few. However, while capital and state have expanded, the peoples sector has challenged its domination. Non-governmental organizations have been quick to pick up the slack when transnationals refuse to observe triple bottom line accounting measures (profit plus social responsibility plus environment). The internet too has challenged national sovereignty with cyberlobbying quickly becoming a new form of local/globalist politics, forcing states to be far more transparent than they would like to be. Governments that have resisted this have found themselves losing propaganda wars. Still, the revolution from the past – of feudalism, of control and command structures, as practiced by many nations claiming themselves to be Islamic – have not disappeared. Indeed, while individuals may have transcended geo- and socio-traumas, nations use these traumas to shore up identity.

SCENARIOS

What then of the future. What futures will these transformations lead to? Four scenarios are probable.

Artificial Society:

The first is the artificial society where the victory of liberal ideology, the science and technology revolution make states far less potent. Islam as currently constituted would not play a role in this future, nor would most nations. It would remain a fast growing religion but only in terms of population and not in terms of defining the agenda for the next century. The population of believers would be poor and angry, searching for someone to blame. Local leaders would be quite willing to play the extremist card convincing believers that by returning to the past, they would be safe from globalization. The losers would be the most vulnerable – women and minorities as well as modernist muslims.

However, there will be plenty of the poor to draw on to challenge the system.

Writes Lydia Krueger:[15]

While the income gap between the fifth of the world’s people living in the richest countries and the fifth in the poorest was 60 to 1 in 1990, up from 30 to 1 in 1960, it has risen to 74 to 1 in 1997. The same development of global polarization can be described looking at wealth and poverty in a different way: While there are still 840 million people malnourished and 2.6 billion people have no access to basic sanitation, the world’s 200 richest people more than doubled their net worth in the four years to 1998, to more than $1 trillion – with the assets of the top three billionaires alone surpassing the combined GNP of all Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and their 600 million people.

Is this likely to change?

In 1993 just 10 countries accounted for 84 percent of global research and development expenditures and controlled 95 percent of the US patents of the past two decades. The dye is set, technocracy will further create a divided world, with the right to the net and the right to genetic therapy and modification becoming the battle cry of the next decades.

Setting up walls against technology will be the easiest path for Islamic nations. Far more useful would be to develop technologies based on Islamic science – that is science and technology focused on problems in poorer areas as well as science and technology that was nature-based, what has been called nature-oriented technologies.

Dialogue of Civilizations:

But instead of the artificial society, there are moves for a pluralistic dialogue of civilizations. Not a clash (as this merely transposes realistic politics on civilizational theory) but a deep dialogue of ways of knowing, of understanding that we can longer export our problems to other, be they weaker nations or the environment. This holistic view of the world challenges realist notions of power and examines the future from the margins, from new models of organizational cooperation (as with Net companies that are far less patriarchal and hierarchical). An enlightened Islam that instead of projecting its own defeats on the West and instead finding compassion for all human suffering can provide a model of this alternative future.

What this means is the creation of a world community around shared ideals. In postmodernity’s decentring of the world, space has been created for civilizations to articulate their own self-images. Of course, the framework remains Western and secular but the multicultural ethos now even challenges postmodernism .

For the Islamic world, what in detail would such a future look like, mean?

Ummah as an Interpretive Community – a preferred future

First, Ummah as an operating framework for the future challenges the three world thinking of first, second and third worlds.[16] As a concept it means three things: (1) The Ummah is a dynamic concept, reinterpreting the past, meeting new challenges and (2) the Ummah must meet global problems such as the environmental problem. “The Ummah as a community is required to acknowledge moral and practical responsibility for the Earth as a Trust and its members are trustees answerable for the condition of the Earth. This makes ecological concerns a vital element in our thinking and action, a prime arena where we must actively engage in changing things.” [17] (3) The Ummah should be seen a critical tool, as a process of reasoning itself

To create a future based on the Ummah equity and justice are prerequisites. This means a commitment to eradicating poverty. It means going beyond the development debate since development theory merely frames the issue in apolitical, acritical language.

This means rethinking trade, developing south-south trade as well as “new instruments of financial accounting and transacting … and the financing of new routes and transportation infrastructure.”[18] But perhaps most significant is a commitment to literacy for all. As Ibrahim writes: “Only with access to appropriate education can Ummah consciousness take room and make possible the Ummah of tomorrow as a personification of the pristine morality of Islamic endowed with creative, constructive, critical thought.”[19]

Thus what is called for is not modernism but a critical and open traditionalism that uses the historic past to create a bright future – a post-asian and postwestern dream. But Ummah should not become an imperialistic concept rather it requires that Muslims work with other civilizations in dialogue to find agreed upon principles. We need to recover that historically the Ummah meant models of multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-religious, and pluralist societies. A true Ummah respects the rights of non-Muslims as with the original Medina state.

However, as possible is a future without any name, a future of Islam but no muslims, that is, a future with continued struggles between factions in the Islamic world and between sects with the West continuing its millennium struggle against its projected other. A bright future is possible but not certain.

What will the West do?

While the idealist vision of an alternative more pluralistic softer Islam remain, one that is future-oriented, ecological, community-based, gender equal and electronically-linked, we are struck with not an attempt to imagine a new politics for the Islamic world but to offer imagined histories. Moreover, attempts to create alternatives remain mired in strategic politics as with the Iranian revolution – in fighting for survival space – or with creating a fortress to stop globalism as with the Taliban.

But dramatic changes in the nature of reality, truth, nature and sovereignty bode not well for the West as well. Indeed, if we add the dramatically ageing population to this mix, the future of the rich nations is in peril. With an entire age-cohort of youth workers not available – with the median age moving from 20 to 40 and the ratio of worker to retiree slipping from 3-1 to 1.5, what will the West do?[20] It can dramatically enhance productivity thus eliminating the need for labour and immigration or it can create new species of humans, or at least through eugenics ensure its own genetic stock through eugenics. The seeds of eugenics are not outside of Western history but squarely with Darwin. “We civilised men to our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and sick; we institute poor laws; an our medical men exert their utmost skills to save the life of http://aic.org.uk/viagra-generic/ everyone to the last moment. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No-one … will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man,” wrote Darwin. [21] The relaxation of natural selection was leading to genetic deterioration, to a large number of children of the “scum.”[22]

Alternatively it can allow the other into its shores and create multicultural societies. But authentic multiculturalism challenges the sovereignty of the nation-state at its roots, as does globalization. Once in, there is no way back. Globalization thus sows its seeds for a planetary society, or a return to brutal tribalism.

At heart then the issue is not merely the future of the Islamic world but the future of the entire world. Can we move to a gaia of civilization, an interpenetrating dialogue of traditions where the damage of five hundred years of the victory of the West is undone and the ways of knowing suppressed to achieve hypermodernity are tamed?

Can we create a postwestern view of the future? At the very least to do so, we will need to imagine a future that integrate ideational and sensate civilizations; integrates linear notions of progress with cyclical notions of time; integrates economic growth with distribution; imagines identity not only in the postmodern sense of fluid selves but in a layered neo-humanistic sense where identity moves from the most concrete to the most expansive and subtle.

Does humanity have the wherewithall to do so? The signs are mixed. Just as the expansion of human rights continue, the battle of local and national leaders to hold on to privilege strengthens. Nationalism becomes a method of reducing some of the excesses of globalization but it does so at an incredible cost, creating a politics of identity that is generally culturally violent.

The dream of a good society, a postnational world, has not gone away, however. Globalism pushes back moral space but it does not vanquish it. The hope of Islam –in dialogue with other civilizations – its offering to the future, is essentially about that, asking what is the right future for us, how can we make sure to include the ethical in all our decisions, in our magical ride to the stars, to cloning, to creating a global governance structure. In this sense the hope of Islam is the creation of a global ecumene that transcends any particular religious framework, that opens up the possibility of a more just society.

From a realist view, this is impossible, the interests of the powerful will always overwhelm those of the weak. Battles within religions, between strong and soft, are far more important than a dialogue of civilizations.[23] Even if a new world system develops, it is likely to be Western-based, technocratic, and based on notions that only will only appear sensible to the West. The rich will take flight in their genetically created fool proof bodies, the rest will die tortuous deaths on a planet in environmental crisis.

Still, without a vision of the future, we decline – we do not battle slavery, we acquiesce to injustice. The vision pulls us forward, ennobles and enables us. It calls out the best of us. Muslims have had glorious periods in human history, these can be recovered and used to move onward.

In a workshop with leading Islamic scholars, activists and technocrats, muslims called for a vision of the future with five key attributes.[24]

· self-reliant ecological communities

· electronically linked khalifa, politically linked

· gender partnership – full participation of females

· an alternative non-capitalist economics that takes into account the environment and the poor

· the ummah as world community as guiding principle based on tolerance

· leadership that embodies both technical and moral knowledge

These points may or may not come about. The structures of oppression, the weight of history pulls us away from our desired futures. But our desires gives us agency. The future can be door into an alternative world. If we take this door, then the policy and implementation question comes back but framed as: how can we make the moral the rational, the easier path?

If we don’t, we should take heed from this warning:

Isn’t it here that you take a half step wrong and wake up a thousand miles astray.[25]

References

By Sohail Inayatullah

(The Communication Centre, Queensland University of Technology. From: 1998, “Beyond the Postmodern: Any Futures Possible?” Periodica Islamica (Vol. 5, No. 1, 1995), 2-3.)

Postmodernity is primarily characterised as standing in opposition to the traditional and moral worldview.  Reality once considered stable is now virtual; truth once considered eternal and universal is now fleeting and local; the natural once defined by evolution and nature is now socially and technologically constructed; sovereignty once contoured by civilization and culture is now porous with global capitalism ubiquitous.  Finally, the self, once certain of its mission in life, is now merely a collage of impressions, created and recreated by the desire for hypertime and hyperspace.

This world comes to us in many forms and figures. Perhaps most prominent are the new global archetypes. They are Michael Jackson, the totally artificial person, created, designed by surgeons who well understood the call in the Movie, The Graduate, that plastics is the future.  They are Michael Jordan, the basketball player, whose coming out of retirement sent the world markets millions of dollars higher. Jordan can jump and never land, defying the moral utterance of “when one rises too far, one falls.” They are Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Disneyland, the friendly fascism of the future, where all sites and smells, entrances and exits are contrived, where one can but smile for one is in a different land, where nothing matters.  “It is a small world after all,” one leaves singing, as the billboard of American Express passes the gaze of one’s illuminated eyes.

But this is not the illumination the Prophet spoke of.  We are not seeing the veils of ignorance torn aside and a new world given to us. This is not even the existentialist veil, as presented in Sartre’s Nausea where man realises that his life is utterly meaningless.  Rather our eyes themselves are torn apart and our selves manufactured otherwise.

However, even as postmodernity continues the values of modernity–the empirical, the West, militarism–it contests them creating new forms of self and culture that are far more liminal, far more interactive and potentially participatory, two way, if not multiway, methods of dialogue.  As Asian VTV Bangra rap enters our television screens, attempts to recreate a fixed traditional culture become impossible.  But it is not cultural melange nor a “multi-identitied” self that we should fear, indeed, this promises a renaissance in the third world, possibly through the appropriation of the West within the categories of Asian culture; rather, it is the grander assault on the possibility of an alternative future different than the linearity of Western materialism that is our problematic.

While religious authorities and humanists have decried that science runs at a faster rate than culture, science now  is not only making culture obsolete but redesigning evolution itself.  Imagine a hand, wearing a glove, writing with a pen. The hand represents evolution, our body; the glove culture, our elegance, our protection; and the pen, technology. The pen has now turned back on the hand and redesigned it,[i] making culture obsolete, merely technique.

There is thus much to be feared.

While the Islamic world debates, developments in genetic engineering soon promise to transform the private space of our individual genes to public space, where they can be bought and sold:[ii] not only will plants and other resources be patented by the technologically advanced so will our very selves.

In recent news, California doctors have successfully corrected genetically inherited defects at birth, setting the stage for genetic control of the 3000 congenital disorders found in children worldwide.  Doctors have also perfected a growth hormone which can now add five to seven centimetres to the final adult height of short children. The worldwide market for this drug is expected to be in the billions.[iii] Simultaneously a recent critique of Western developmentalism argues that it is not just that the West uses all the world’s resources because of their consumerist lifestyle, but because they are taller.[iv] Shortness is better since shorter people consume less and use less space. Should we then engineer shorter people? But this latter argument will unlikely win out as parents, in their obvious self-interest, flock to genetic disease prevention and genetic enhancement of who we can be.

While the first step will be genetic prevention, it will be a quick and slippery slope to genetic advancement. The State will certainly monitor our genetic blueprints, controlling where and when we can travel.  However, genetic prevention will reduce diseases, but under the mantle of an objective, universal, theory of everything science, a mantle which claims perfect knowledge.  Perfection will be defined by conventional materialistic, fetish (Milan, Paris and Harvard) definitions. We will terminate life based on the possibility of future diseases with the State eventually stepping in to ensure equally access to genetic intervention.  Why should it stop there? It won’t!  Birthing will be done in hospitals.  But rest assured, we can watch the baby grow in one’s very own family birth cubicle, a womb of sorts. Instead of a thin layer of skin separating the foetus from “parents” it will be even a thinner more sensitive layer of organic plastic.

Developments in genetics when linked with virtual reality and artificial intelligence will make it to enter hospital turned design factories and visualise our baby’s future extrapolated through holography. We will be able to watch him, her, or it go through various life stages seeing crucial lifepoints where certain diseases might develop. But it will be a particular model of the life-cycle that will be given to us.

For Muslims, the postmodern world will not be familiar, making the estrangement of the modern world minor by comparison. For Statist Islam, there will be no easy West to use as a ruse against its own population as in modernity, postmodernity will not exist in such easy dualities. While power might be in the hands of a world government, most likely it will be more difficult to encircle, with large information-genetic corporations giving out passports for travel in their owned worlds.

As Muslims, and as individuals of different faiths, committed to the possibility of a global ethics, there is little to rejoice, except that these transformations might in themselves lead to new technologies that destroy modernity. However, most likely we will live in perpetual modernity–postmodernity always becoming modern–the idea of alternative futures (the future as a real space, a call for transformation) merely becoming part of an atemporal world, where all is allowed and thus nothing is possible.  Certainly not a global ethics based on values other than profit or the short term needs of the few.

However, we should not be seduced by humanism either and outright reject new technologies, otherwise we will be further silenced.  Humanists look at this artificial world in creation and recoil in horror. They long for a simpler, gentler world, when cricket lasted five days, when gentlemen were gentlemen, when time was slow—and–when the Other provided material comforts.  But the classical world many humanists long for existed because it could exploit the colonies, take away labor and ideas, and impose slavery and civilization. It was violently hierarchical.  Colonisation, of course, has moved away from such amateurish efforts. More sophisticated is the appropriation of cultural diversity, the appropriation of difference for the continuation of liberal capitalism.

In the movie Alladin, we learn how the servant of God is appropriated by Californian culture. By the last scene, he asks to be called just “Al.” This is the trivialisation of the Other, at one level, and at a deeper level, the secularisation of the holistic Islamic worldview, its appropriation, not for the synthetic and creative task of envisioning a new planetary culture, but the use of history for the rationality of Hollywood.

But if we dispense from the humanist reaction to postmodernity, where then is the reality check, the reality principle?  As trillions of dollars search the planet every second for a home to maximise their own profit, to fulfil their ontological needs for interest, work becomes increasingly passe’.  Virtual reality, genetics, telecommunications, and the world’s financial speculative markets have all created a world in which the real is no longer real. In fact, it may be that Disneyland exists as fantasy to shore up the actual unreality–that of the neorealist model of national identity, as Baudrillard and others argue. Disneyland is constructed as fantasy so we evade the conclusion that current models of governance, of nationalism, of wealth generation are in fact grand fantasies, existing only as real because we have official fantasies in which they can exist in contrast to.

Sovereignty too becomes passe’. Nations can no longer control pollution, national culture, capital, or the import/export of nuclear weapons. For nations which have had the chance to develop and prosper, the new globalism promises further cultural expansion; but for third world nations, who  search for a sovereignty impossible in an unequal global division of labor, the porousness of the nation-state is a further tragedy, especially as old dynastic dispute prevent the creation of an Islamic community, the creation of a moral, even virtual, community.  Instead, instrumental rationality prods us all into directions we choose not to go.

The message of the Quran while signalling the need for another space, where critical consciousness and submission to the Divine gives direction, but in a world where direction has been made meaningless, where we live in heterotopias–many contradictory spaces at the same time–direction is both evasive and a matter of life and death.  The loss of space as a refuge, as direction, destroys culture–sacredness is lost. For the modern, all space must be commodified and for the postmodern all space must be relativised, as one discourse among many.

But we can gain some strength in remembering that postmodernity in itself is merely the logic of late capitalism, a stage of chaos, merely an end game.   As Ibn Khaldun reminded us many years ago:

At the end of a dynasty, there often also appears some (show of) power that gives the impression that the senility of the dynasty has been made to disappear.  It lights up brilliantly just before it is extinguished, like a burning wick the flame of which leaps up brilliantly a moment before it goes out, giving the impression it is just starting to burn, when in fact it is going out.[v]

It might be then that the postmodern even as it extends the modern signals its end. As reality becomes uncomfortably decentred, an ethical worldview can provide a centre, a point of reflection, in which decisions can be made outside of instrumental rationality.  This becomes the reality principle.

We thus should not powerlessly accept the instrumental rational of the science and technology revolution, believing that it is just one more in the latest revolution that will change who we are, since, after all, that is what history is about.  Evolution is changing us, let us go for the ride, it can be to easily argued.

We can in defence of our identity investigate the cultural basis of that revolution, asking what are the values that inform it, that drive it, that govern its knowledge base? We can ask who participates, who does not?  Based on these questions we can begin to create an alternative voice in science that looks at how knowledge subjugates, that understands how the categories we use to see the world are borrowed, are not authentic to our histories.

But this then should not be an excuse to not deconstruct our own history, it is not an excuse for imperial power within our own culture, but an opening up of Islam and culture.  We thus need to deconstruct our own history, to see what has been romanticised, what used for dynastic or personal glorification. This will allow for the creation of futures more familiar to the needs of Muslims. An authentic culture must be open to transformation even as it commits to basic principles of what it is.

Thus as we recognise that the future is being created by Centre, Western culture at the expense of the Other, we argue for a guided evolution that brings in the values of other cultures in dialogue with technology, biology and civilisations. This vision reimagines the future based on the possibility of eradicating powerlessness, on the need for a larger unifying global project–that is, a science based on our physical, mental and spiritual potentials–of which science and technology can play a role in.

This is, however, not an argument for a new “story of stories” an ahistorical blend of various grand narratives.  We must remember that stories come into being because they represent long battles, deep histories, heroic sacrifices, and primal myths.  A story of stories, while potentially rewarding, if created in condition of an authentic meetings of cultures, is likely in the contemporary framework to merely be a victory for liberalism, for reductionist science.  While the story tellers weave, the geneticists and cybernauts will have already created the New Story.

Will Muslims, indigenous peoples, and others committed to an alternative spiritual (integrated) ethical worldview be part of this story, perhaps, but most likely, as caricature, like Alladin, ready to become just Al.

I hope however for a different story, what I have elsewhere called a post-Asian dream.[vi]  It is a vision of unity and of global dialogue, of multi-epistemological world–of angels, virtual worlds but still grounded in the fundamentals: dignity, basic needs, and the direction which a spiritual oriented worldview gives.  It does not reject genetics and virtual worlds in total but does call for the application of the reality principle, of human suffering and human transcendence. In my vision it is Alladin–the servant of Allah–who will frame the possibility and choice of Al, and not, not, the other way around. For when all is said and done, it is the Divine that is our strength, that can guide technique, nourish the heart and create a more just society.

Dr. Sohail Inayatullah[1]

This paper examines the futures of the Islamic Ummah. It does this by reviewing approaches to thinking about the future as well as various global forecasting models. It argues that even as they claim they are value-neutral, in fact, particular value positions are put forth. What is required is for the Islamic world to develop its own long range simulation model using Islamic concepts.  Such a project would help qualitatively envision and quantitatively forecast the future ahead. The paper concludes with three scenarios for the futures of the Islamic Ummah: (1) the Ummah as an Interpretive Community, (2) The Future Without a Name, and (3) Islam as the difference in creating the next century.

This paper is both a critique of ways of approaching the future as well as a presentation of scenarios of the Islamic world a generation ahead.  The critique covers various global models, including The Club of Rome’s classic Limits to Growth (LTG)[2], Mankind at the Turning Point (MTP)[3], as well as World 2000[4] and other approaches to the understanding the future.  Drawing from poststructural theory, we ask: what is missing, who does the analysis privilege, and what epistemological frames or ways of knowing are accentuated, are made primary, by the models used. We also ask what can the Islamic world learn from these models? We attempt to go a step further than merely asking the Marxist-class question who financially benefits. For us, the issue is deeper. We are concerned with what knowledge frames, and more appropriately, from an Islamic perspective, what civilizational frames are privileged, are considered more important.

However, global models are only one way of understanding the future. There are other ways of approaching the study of the future from which can be derived specific statements about issues, trends and scenarios as to what the future will look and can look like.  We also inquire into the utility of these models for better understanding the future of the Islamic Ummah. We conclude with visions of the future of the Ummah a generation ahead and beyond.

VISIONING IMAGINATION AND IMAGINING VISION

However, the purpose of this discussion is not a summary of global modelling[5] or futures studies[6], this has been done elsewhere in much more detail. Rather our purpose is to use such a discussion to discuss alternative futures for the Ummah, to help create an interpretive community focused on the futures of the Islamic Ummah.  We are concerned with vision, asking not only what might the futures ahead look like given historical trends and events but also what we want the future to look like.  The challenge becomes how to imagine futures that are different than the present; that take us into the unknown, that force us out of the categories and patterns of the present. A vision then is a break with the present, it is a rupture, and thus, not accessible to modelling. A vision is more than who we are.  In this sense, a vision cannot be rationally planned for. A vision about the future is fundamentally about myth, about the deeper meaning structures that makes people who they are.[7]  Myth is essentially about suffering and transcendence, of a community created through shared journey.

Does this mean that efforts to imagine the future of the Ummah are a waste of time?  Not at all. But it means that our visioning efforts should not be confined to intellectual analysis. Other ways of knowing and being are equally important; whether poetry, art, architecture, ritual, or community action, all are equally important.  What intellectuals can do is create the contexts for dreams and visions. They can do this by giving them legitimacy, by making visions more real to those who exist in bottom-line economistic worlds.  But more than different ways of knowing, visioning is a process that must be embarked upon by both leadership and mass, dialectically and interactively.[8]  Conferences then become part of the myth creating journey, part of the caravan that creates the desired future.

Visioning as related to myth does not mean fantasy, however. While fantasy is important in breaking out of current frames of reference it does not touch upon the historical worldview that constitutes Islam. In this sense, the Islamic paradigm as articulated by various Muslims writers[9] is crucial in being a springboard for visioning:

There are ten such concepts, four standing alone and three opposing pairs. Tawheed (unity), Khalifah (trusteeship), ibadah (worship), ilm (knowledge), halal (praiseworthy) and haram (blameworthy), adl (social justice) and zulm (tyranny) and istislah (public interest) and dhiya (waste).

Tawheed articulates the larger Islamic unity of thought, action and value across humanity, persons, nature and God. Khalifah asserts that it is God who has ownership of the Earth. Humans function in a stewardship, trustee capacity, taking care of the Earth, not damaging it. The goal of the Islamic worldview is adl, social justice, based on the larger needs of the people, istislah.  To reach these goals, ibadha, worship or contemplation is a beginning and necessary step. From deep reflection, inner and outer observation, ilm or knowledge of self, other and nature will result.  One’s action then are halal, praiseworthy and not haram, blameworthy. Moreover with this framework, dhiya (waste) of individual and collective potentials is avoided as is tyranny, the power of a few, or one over many or the power of a narrow ideology over the unity within plurality that the Islamic paradigm advocates.

The paradigm becomes the context for the vision, for framing the image of the future within general ideals. It thus contours the vision not so much within specific historical events–revenge against a person, nation or civilization–but within the larger meaning system of the civilization in question, in this case, the Islamic Ummah (meaning more then a geographical community but an interpretive community).  A vision within this context is powerful because it touches upon the core of the Muslim experience and, insofar as it is future-oriented, aids in transcending the categories of the present, particularly the nation-state framework of modernity Muslims are ensconced under.

While visions are often framed in personal language or considered to be the realm of the superconscious or unconscious, we use it in the larger collective sense, of a group vision, a group myth of the future.  But a vision is also about action.  Futurist/activist Robert Jungk talks about attending a visioning the year 2000 workshop where a participant said “Let’s do something about now and not worry so much about the year 2000.”[10] After a sleepless night thinking about this intervention, Jungk responded that he would rather turn around the sentence and say, “Because we worry about the year 2000, let us do something now.”[11] The future becomes a force for motivation.  It is because we care for future generations, we must ensure that we do not destroy our environmental and cultural heritage.[12]

This becomes the key. Humans must think about the future so as to transform the present and past.  Without thinking about the future, history remains dominant and the present remains oppressive.  The future becomes a place that allows for transformation. To do so requires imagination. But not all imagination is imagination. Robert Jungk posits three types. The first is logical imagination.  This is extrapolation of current trends to show their absurdity, thus allowing new ideas to emerge.  For examples, if the growth rate of GNP of China continues at the current rate, it will be at an unbelievable amount in 2050 (that is exponential growth versus linear trends).

The second is critical imagination. Critical examinations asks us to probe deeper, searching for structural weaknesses in existing state of affairs and thus creating alternative futures.  This is deeper then traditional critique which only shows what is wrong. Critical imagination shows what is wrong and points to desirable futures. The third approach is creative imagination.

Creative imagination is not content with extending, combining or negating already existing trends. It attempts, by breaking out of the existing systems or countersystems, to strike out on a completely new cause, breaking radically with prevalent concepts. Creative imagination gives birth to a new era whenever and wherever it emerges. And very often it locates a new state of mind beyond the controversies which are characteristic of and apparently an inextricable part of the times it left behind.[13]

Creative imagination is a jump of consciousness, almost a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. The challenge for the imagination of the future, for the vision of Ummah in generations ahead, is thus not only to create such a jump but find ways to communicate this possible future, this desirable future to others. This is problematic for many reasons. First, within contemporary economistic thinking imagination is considered amathematical and astrategic.  Irrespective of one’s religious beliefs, most of us live in segmented, fragmented, and isolated intellectuals spaces. Imagination is fine for children and for religion but not for adults. The real action is either accumulating capital or power. Vision is for daydreamers, it is often argued.

Second, related to economistic thinking is zero-sum international relations thinking. In this model, reality is about hidden motives, about security, about the enemy. Indeed, the self and nation are not defined by race, language, or territory but by not being the enemy. We are who we hate. Strategic thinking borrows from neo-classical economics and argues that we are but self-interested egoistic individuals. Methodological individualism becomes the guiding sociology.  Following Hobbes, Nations are seen as individuals, living in anarchy. Within this view, visions or imaginations of say an Islamic world community which gives passports, defining a  post national identity that does away with the sovereignty of capital and labor, seems unthinkable. Or, when thought, they are placed in the historical context of empire, of strong vertical relations between a dynastic centre and a colonized periphery. An alternative global Ummah that is horizontally related through trading, direct mutual investment, cultural and genetic interchange, tourism, and a context of deep dialogue appears as fantasy. It is fantasy not because it is impossible but because the modern world view undoes, does not give legitimacy to alternative explorations of identity.[14] Nations are real. Nations give passports, regulate labor, and until recently regulated capital, pollution and identity (of course, all three with globalism have made the nation-state if not an endangered species, certainly, a problematic species). The guiding model then is conflict and dominance.

Islam placed such, leads to enormous tensions between the State and the individual (with individuals who opt for non-statist versions of Islam seen as threatening) and between States (with each State claiming the mantle of Islam as defined by power, and to some extent fidelity to the Islamic paradigm). The result is a nationalistic, non-universal Islam that is defensive towards the West, that is fragmented and offensive towards its own people.  The deepest cost, of course, is the category of global community, of Ummah, itself as well as the category of future. The imagination of a universal Islam not bounded by nation, leader or strengthened by enemy, by the fear of the other, is the first causality.  The task for visioning the Islamic Ummah is about reversing this process, creating a vision that pulls a civilization forward not draws a people into the glue of greed and fear. As Fred Polak has argued in his The Image of the Future[15] civilizations that have a compelling image of the future (that is essentially optimistic about the nature of humans and positive about what can be created) rise. Those that have no image (who are essentially pessimistic about the nature of humans and negative about the possibility of change over time decline. If we add the vision of the future with the Khaldunian concept of power, we have a rich macrohistory and macrofuture.[16]

For Khaldun, those outside of power have a more difficult life.  Through struggle they gain unity. They have a vision of community and a desire for power. But once achieved, over four generations the vision disappears, unity is lost and as power declines, new forces with a stronger vision/unity take the mantle of leadership.

We are thus faced with a historic but not an easy task.  Imaging Ummah decades ahead is problematic because of the predominance of (1) economistic thinking, (2) international relations neo-realist paradigm of self and nation, (3) our rigid training in history and conventional disciplines, and (4) our fear of being ridiculous or controversial.

But it is possible!  To do so we need to meet the following criteria.[17] A vision (1) must have legitimacy amongst its interpretive community, that is a vision cannot be merely one individual’s fantasy, it must have agreement from its members. (2) A vision must touch upon the physical layer of reality (the material world of goods and services). (3) It must have some bearing on conventional views of rationality, even as it contests them. (4) A vision inspire and ennoble a people. (5)  To be realizable, a vision must be neither too far into the future (and thus appear utopian, unreachable) nor too near term (and thus be fraught with emotional ego-politics, with cynicism towards transformative change). Finally, (6) a vision must redefine the role of leadership, the vanguard, and it must be mythical. As mentioned earlier, it must touch some deep unconscious often metaphorical level of what it means to be human and our role as humans–and Muslims–in history and future. Ultimately to succeed, a vision must enable each on of us to transform self and society.  Computer models can aid visionary thinking in being more rigourous, in exploring unanticipated consequences, and in testing assumptions. Efforts to imagine the futures of the Ummah should include strategic planning dimensions as well as longer visionary futures orientations. Quantitative (inviting rigour) and qualitative (inviting vision) methods must be used.

Fortunately, the framework for Islamic futures studies, visioning, is already in place. As we have learned from Zia Sardar (and others such as Munawar Anees and Syd Hossein Nasr) in his numerous books on Islamic Futures, Islam is a future-oriented worldview. It is so partly because we know from the Prophet’s life that a vision, a calling, became a series of strategic plans to realize this vision.  The human capacity to reason, to learn from the past, and to rationally search for alternatives and choose a best course of action was illustrated perfectly by the Prophet’s life.  It is also future-oriented in that properly understood it offers and alternative to state-oriented socialism and greed-climaxing capitalism.  While some might argue that Islam is not future-oriented in a temporal sense since the primary relationship of a Muslim is one of submission to Allah (as many say, why be concerned about the future, just trust in Allah), however, Islam should be understood not merely as a religion explicating the relationship between self and God, but Islam also advises how to treat each other, nature, as well as how we should deal with issues of polity and economy, that is, issues of societal design, of the good.

However, Islam’s commitment to an alternative future, a vision of a good society, does not discount history. Indeed, the ideal Medina polity and other Muslim historical successes can be built upon, can be recovered from the overarching paradigm of modernism. History can be used to create the future; history should be seen as part of interpretive space, indeed, as future space. We should thus not commit to particular linear images of the future, specifically, that the future of the non-West will follow that of the West.  There can be alternatives ways out of feudalism, monarchy, and closed-door traditionalism. Indeed, many argue that as the West is in its final fatigue, in a deep crisis of vision, alternatives can only come from those outside the imperium, those who are not beholden to the images and myths of centralized power and technocracy.[18]

At the same time, history, while often a resource, can be a curse.[19]  Futures studies can help remove the desperate politics of revenge and “blaming the Other” to a hope-generating discourse of the possible.

WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT THE FUTURE

What then are ways  of thinking of the future. While human have always had a historical interest in the future (as per astrology) it is only recently that futures studies has become more precise and palatable. Forecasting has become the technique par excellence of planners, economists and social scientists.   Since the 1950s futures studies has grown rapidly in the USA and Europe, primarily as a tool to gain strategic military advantage.  This has ranged from Herman Kahn’s Thinking the Unthinkable[20] (post-nuclear war scenarios) to Harold Linstone’s efforts to predict who will attack first (deterrence scenarios).[21]  Futures studies then quickly became common place in governmental agencies as well as corporations.  In the former the hidden goal was to appear modern, to rationalize decisionmaking, to increase budgets. In the latter, strategic business advantage was of concern.

This type of futures studies gained global fame during the 1970’s era of global models, such as LTG, where the range of trends creating the future (population, arable land, industrial output, pollution) were interactively related to each other. The solution as you might expect from a politics of fear was that civilization as “we” know it, meaning the West, would collapse unless dramatic changes were made. But the goal was not strategic advantage but system change or so it seemed. Critics argue however the deeper politics of the system, its class, civilizational, gender, imperialistic history were not touched upon.  Fundamentally this was technocratic predictive oriented futures studies, quite different from the imagination based futures studies called for by Jungk.

THREE TYPES OF FUTURES STUDIES

In my model of futures studies, I divide epistemological approaches of the future into three areas. The first is predictive, the second is cultural/interpretive and the third critical.[22]  We will use this framework to further explore various world models.

In the predictive, language is assumed to be neutral, that is, it does not participate in constituting the real. Language merely describes reality serving as an invisible link between theory and data.  Prediction assumes that the universe is deterministic, that is, the future can be known.  By and large this view privileges experts (planners, policy analysts and futurists), economists and astrologers.  The future becomes a site of expertise and a place to colonise.  Linear forecasting is the technique used most.  Scenarios are used more as minor deviations from the norm instead of alternative worldviews. Most global models, whether Limits to Growth, Mankind at the Turning Point or other models use this approach.  They take a Western civilizational view of reality even as these models argue that they are universal.  They are civilizational poor not asking what are the categories other civilizations use to construct their futures. Indeed, population is always seen as a fundamental negative. To Muslims and others this is absurd, more important are children, humans as a resource.  Overpopulation is a symptom of deeper inefficiencies and inequities at world, regional and national levels.

However, what can be useful in predictive models is that a long-range time horizon is often used, a hundred years for LTG and MTP. Most current models, in the 1990’s have shied away from the future (out of fear of critique and also having understood that the future is open not a closed space).  Still LTG and other models served an important purpose by expanding our time horizon, by making time long.  In this sense for the Muslim world computer simulation models which can stretch time would be welcome. The would force Muslim technocrats out of the present and into projected futures.  However, these, as mentioned earlier, should be articulated with categories that come from the Muslim paradigm and framed as such.

As one might imagine, the strict predictive approach is lacking. It is technocratic, civilizationally impoverished, and avoids issues of values. From an Islamic worldview where holism, an integration of values in science are paramount, it is entirely inappropriate.

There are other approaches to futures studies though. In the cultural, the goal is not prediction but insight.  Truth is considered relative with language and culture both intimately involved in creating the real.  Through comparison, through examining different national or gender or ethnic images of the future, we gain insight into the human condition.  This type of futures studies is less technical with mythology as important as mathematics.  Learning from each model–in the context of the search for universal narratives that can ensure basic human values–is the central mission for this epistemological approach.

In the critical, futures studies aims not at prediction or at comparison but seeks to make the units of analysis problematic, to undefine the future.  We are concerned not with population forecasts but with how the category of population has become valorised in discourse, for example, why population instead of community or people, we might ask?  How would Islamic notions of community fit in? Why are growth rates more important then the level of asibya or unity to reconjure Ibn Khaldun? The role of the State and other forms of power in creating authoritative discourses is central to understanding how a particular future has become hegemonic.

Critical future studies asserts that the present is fragile, merely the victory of one particular discourse, way of knowing, over the other.  The goal of critical research is to disturb present power relations through making problematic our categories and evoking other places, scenarios of the future.  Through this distance, the present becomes less rigid, indeed, remarkable.  The spaces of reality loosen making the new possible.

Central to cultural and critical is the notion of civilizational futures research. Civilizational research makes problematic current categories since they are often based on the dominant civilization (the West in this case) and it informs us that behind the level of empirical reality is cultural reality and behind that is worldview. Global models to be of use to more than elite think tanks must be able to bridge these civilizational barriers. They often do not because they construct science as value free, as neutral, seeing it as a universal product not a civilizational one. In this the Islamization of knowledge project is crucial in rescuing knowledge from one particular worldview.  Science, and models in particular, can thus be civilizationally diverse.

Indeed, the Latin American Bariloche model was that. Far more concerned with social justice, with equality, than with issues of growth, the model showed that satisfying basic needs was the key to development. It was however rejected by the Club of Rome.

Ideally, one should try and interactively use all three types of futures studies.  If one makes a population forecast, for example, one should then ask how different civilisations approach the issue of population. Finally one should deconstruct the idea of population itself, defining it, for example, not only as an ecological problem in the third world but relating it to first world consumption patterns as well.  Empirical research then must be contextualized within the civilisation’s science from which it emerges and then historically deconstructed to show what a particular approach is missing and silencing.

Global models are a particular type of futures studies based on systems analysis. They emerged during a particular time: during the rise of the environmental movement, the beginnings of globalism, the concern for growth, for the negative impacts of technology. They should also as be seen as part of technocracy. The solutions posited by modellers are often those that are State and government focused. Civil society is rarely seen as an independent variable worthy of creating futures.[23] It is the silent variable.  They are also largely Western oriented with only Latin America creating a non-Western based model.

We will now briefly review various models and then move on to various scenarios of the future.

A REVIEW OF THE MODELS

Clearly the most significant model in recent history is the Limits to Growth model of the Club of Rome.  LTG was a crude aggregate systems model of world population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion.  It uniqueness was that these variables were quantitative, something quite novel then.  Also unique was the critique of growth. It was the call to limits that both inspired environmentalists, and others who felt modernity had gone too far, and caused fear to industrialists. However the model did not disaggregate regions. The overly global nature of LTG was resolved by the much more sensitive Mankind at the Turning Point, where regional models and over 100,000 equations were used to model the human condition, or the global problematique. The main conclusions were that current trends will lead a sudden and uncontrollable decline in population and industrial capacity, most likely after 2015. However, these declines will not impact the entire globe at the same time, they will hit region by region.

While at the level of systems the LTG model was dynamic at the level of assumptions it was static.  The LTG study “assumes no major change in the physical, economic and social relationship that have historically governed the world system.”[24] What this means is that historical situations of inequity are reinscribed–the rise of Islam, the women’s movement, and new technologies are factored out.

Moreover, their alternative scenarios are equally committed to the same variables. For example, in another run, world resources are doubled but this just leads to more industrial output and thus more pollution, leading to a decline in food production, and the eventual decline in resources, and thus to megadeath. Even if population is controlled this just forestalls food production by a decade or two. The result is the same. However, one runs the model, the results are always the same.  Thus, instead of choosing alternative scenarios based on different modelled assumptions, the same politics are re-represented throughout. Industrialism unabated will lead to a global collapse is the conclusion.

The recent Beyond the Limits uses the same computer model and concludes with the same results: “The world has already overshot some of its limits and, if present trends continue, we face the virtually certain prospect of a global collapse, perhaps within the lifetimes of children today.”[25]

This is in contrast to current models such as Scanning the Future (STF) which believe that prosperity will continue into the next generation.[26]  Like 1970’s Herman Kahn and his The Next Two Hundred Years recent reports believe that growth will and can continue.  It is only minor institutional and organizational arrangements that must be dealt with to allow growth. It is a loss of confidence that is the problem, for Kahn and others, not any systems relationship between population, pollution and industrial capacity.

Kahn calls the current crisis merely part of the great transition began two hundred years ago with the oncome of the industrial revolution.  He believes that the plausible future is that by 2126 the gross world per capital will be 20,000 US$ in 1975 dollars, that the population will be 15 billion people, thus making the gross world product 300 trillion.[27] Of course there will be setbacks but by and large the trend is up. Population should be solved by creating wealth not be family planning and other measures. New technologies will find new sources of energy.  By leaving behind their corrupt and traditional ways and by adopting the East Asian growth miracle, poor Third World nations will join the onward march of capitalism. The future is bright.

But for LTG and MTP the future can be bright but only if population pressures are reduced, if pollution is reduced, if recycling is increased, and if there is more global equity. MTP, however, as a more holistic edge and in addition offers these following conclusions: (1) a world consciousness must be developed through which every individual realizes his role as a member of the world community, (2) a new ethic of material resources is needed to deal with the oncoming age of scarcity, (3) an attitude of harmony toward nature must be developed, and (4) humans must develop a sense of identification with future generations.[28]

For LTG the alternative is a condition of steadystate economics, of ecological and economic stability.  However, the solutions posited often merely reinforce technocracy (such as developing more anti-pollution technologies). This partly explains why LTG sold so well: its solution and critique was what liberal policy makers could handle. After all, the problem is too much population (a third world problem); pollution (again ship it south), bad industrial growth (develop a post-industrial technocratic growth society), and diminishing resources (find new resources). Issues of equity and justice were not part of the problem. Moreover, that study and many others have done well because they are fundamentally compatible with Christian cosmology.[29] From Puritanism, we get the idea of moral restraint; the sinners are the producers of population, pollution and depletion. The sinner can be converted if he repents and is converted (have less children, don’t pollute and avoid non-renewable resources). And of course, “each converted sinner saves the system from a much deeper conversion.”[30] Finally is the idea of the apocalypse, that a catastrophe is ahead. And the catastrophe is near but too near where it can be empirically tested and far but not too far where it would not mattered.[31]

From a Third World Muslim perspective, issues of imperialism, colonialism, unequal distribution of resources (within and between nations) were utterly ignored. Instead of worrying about crisis a hundred years from now, the catastrophe the authors describe already exists in many cities. The fear expressed by LTG is that this crisis might now become a middle class First world problematique.  Ultimately, LTG as well Kahn’s model and STF are apolitical models that assume a “conflict free world in a world beset by conflict and turmoil.”[32]

One way to deal with this within the doxa of futures studies is to capture deep differences through a range of scenarios. There could be a growth scenario like Kahn’s, then a collapse scenarios like LTG, an achievable steadystate scenario like MTP or the Global 2000 project submitted to President Carter by Gerald Barney. And finally, and this is critical, a range of transformative scenarios, where the entire system changes.  This in fact is the real contribution of the more visionary futures studies led by Galtung, Dator, Harmon, Junkg, Boulding and many others.  The assumption behind transformation is that either for (1) technological, (2) civilizational (3) spiritual or other through collective rational means there is a chaotic jump wherein bifurcation results and thus problems are solved. One cannot solve a problem within the framework it is posited. The assumption is that while change is often difficult in most periods of history, during dramatic, plastic times, change is possible, even easy.  The fault with various models is that although they claim globalism, complexity, and interrelatedness, they are unable to understand how transformation from the periphery is possible, how civilizations such as Islam can renew themselves and become, instead of recipients of global trends, creators of global forces.

Finally, and this becomes the point of entry into our next section, the trends examined are often the most obvious trends, not only are they entirely apolitical but all too common. Hidden trends or emerging issues, that are provocative, indeed ridiculous[33], are not explored.  Issues such as the end of capitalism, the establishment of a world government (with interlocking houses of nations, movements, corporations and individuals, for example), robotics, and space travel all context linear extrapolation, conventional future scenarios.  As dramatic drivers of new futures they allow us to explore alternative scenarios.

SCENARIOS

Scenarios are used for many purposes. For some they help predict the future. For others, the clarify alternatives. For us, scenarios are useful in that they give us distance from the present, allowing the present to become peculiar. By opening up the present, they allow the creation of alternative futures as well as alternative histories.  The present, especially in the Islamic case, is believed to be difficult to change: Muslims are either too fixated on the West or have chosen particular histories which they believe are eternal. Islamic metaphysics often takes a Platonic position where the real is considered universal and frozen instead of historically and socially constructed.  Scenarios thus should not only create alternative futures but different histories, to show histories that did not come about, that could have come about if a certain factor had been altered.

Scenarios also have an important visionary task, allowing us to gain insight into what people want the future to be like–the desired future. These are important in that instead of merely forecasting the future, individuals become eligible to create the future.

Unfortunately, most develop models of the future with very little difference between each run. For example, in the recent European Scanning the Future model, Global shift has a 3.4% growth rate; Global Crisis 2.4% and European Renaissance 2.9%.[34]

A more useful way is to design scenarios is to change the assumptions by which they are built. For example, we can create scenarios of world politics based on alternative structures of power. The first would be a unipolar world, a continuation of the present.  The second would be a collapse of the inter-state system, leading to anarchy within states and between states. The third would be the creation of a multi-polar system, with numerous hegemons, such as the United States, the European Community, Japan, China, India, and Turkey for the Islamic region, each with their own spheres of influence.  A corollary would be a return to a bio-polar world but with different actors.  A fourth would be a world government structure.  Policies would be created at the global level while implementation would be local.  A fifth possibility would be a fragmented Western civilization in positive interaction with an Islamic Ummah. That is a situation with regional civilizational blocks: an Islamic Ummah, a Buddhist-Confucian Southeast Asia, a Vedic/Tantric India, etc.  Finally, while constructing scenarios it is important to remember that one is not designing perfect places but good places: contradictions within scenarios should not be left out.

MODELS AND CIVILIZATIONAL DIALOGUES

While we have found fault with earlier models for being unaware of their own politics and for not including the possibility of systems transformation, there are models that in fact do allow for debate for transformation. One is World 2000.  This model seeks to define the emerging global system and shape its future. But its framework is an international planning dialogue from a diversity of views. They posit the following supertrends:.[35] (1) a stable population of 10-14 billion people by the 21st century; (2) industrial output increasing by a factor of 5-10 over the next few decades (throughput will increase far less as more efficient means of production are found); (3) a globe linked by telecommunications and other emerging technologies, however, there will remain information rich and poor; (4) a high tech revolution of genetics, robotics and green technologies; (5) global integration in the form of a shared international culture and some form of world governance; (6) more diversity and complexity (in the from of layers of identity and governance); (7) limited crime, terrorism and war; (8) transcendent values; and (9) a universal standard of freedom and human rights.

What is important here is that the increasing population is accepted, the need for more wealth in poverty areas is also accepted, as is the process of globalism.

Moreover, they identify critical issues blocking this leap: (1) lack of sustainable development that values future generations; (2) the North-South gap, and (3) managing complexity.  The strategies are all idealistic focusing on green technologies, systems of collaboration, decentralizing institutions, and a focus on human centred enterprises.  This is a model that is in fact a dialogue that attempts to bring in other civilizational perspectives. However, clearly it fails asking for dialogue but remaining within a technocratic model.  Still it is an important beginning and at least a commitment to dialogue that notices albeit not uses non-Western perspectives.

But the deeper problem and this is central to the issue of imagining alternative futures is that the work is still present based.  As mentioned earlier, we need to discern emerging issues.

Futurist James Dator[36] believes that we are in a historic transition that will make us all strangers in a strange land. He identifies five tsunamis or tidal waves that promise to change the world.  While the trends are such that they cannot be changed, one can surf the tsunamis. For Dator these trends include changes in world population with Caucasians eventually becoming 5% of the world population by 2050;  the move to outer space, and dramatic new molecular and electronic technologies.

Certainly these issues will dramatically confront the Islamic world. How will the Islamic Ummah deal with having such a great share of the world’s population? Will Islam still be under threat then? Will Islam play a role in globalization beyond merely exporting workers and oil? Will Islamic models of environmental ethics become widespread? Will Muslims create new technologies or will they continue to be recipient of these dramatic new technologies? Will Islamic models of governance remain authoritarian or will they become democratic or will some models be found such as the Singapore Paternal “father knows best” model? How can faith in the univocal ideal of Islam be reconciled with the eclecticism that are Muslims today?

But perhaps these are even more significant emerging issues. Genetics, robotics, the rise of the feminist movement, postmodern relativism all contest conventional ideas of what is natural, truth, and real. Emerging gene therapy, for example, contests a view that only God can create humans.

Globalism creates a world culture and economy and at the same time it creates conditions for its own porousness. New information technologies such as the www and cd-rom create possibilities for new words and worlds.  Sovereignty is becoming problematic not only at the economic level but also at the level of self (we are becoming many peoples with many selves) and at the level of text (text cease to belong to one author but are more epistemic in their ownership). Protecting culture, self and history will become increasingly difficult but necessary to ensure a world of pluralism.  But part of a decentred world is that Islamic science, the Islamic Ummah, can finally find space for itself, since ideological hegemony will decrease, the world becoming more of a true marketplace. The space of sovereignty will thus continue its historical decline from God as sovereign, to king as sovereign, to the people as sovereign, and now even to the idea that the self is sovereign. The challenge for a future oriented Islamic Ummah  is to bring legitimacy to a nested model of God, community, family and self in postmodern conditions where even the primacy of the egoist self will be contested.

These emerging issues and trends certainly threaten any idea of philosophical fundamentalism since reality, the nature, sovereignty, and truth are made porous. They create a postmodern world. While postmodernity destroys the basis for the real, it also opens up the world for new real.  A reconstructed Islam worthy of its original intent can provide that new paradigm.  It would be an Islamic Ummah that allows open discussion, freedom from reprisal, a search for multiple levels of the real; and an understanding of the subjective nature of the objective. We would finally live in a world of civilisations with many ways of knowing, many forms of knowledge, and constantly new arenas of what is known (new epistemologies will create new discoveries).  It might be a world that is dramatically new but, unlike the present, it will not be an unfamiliar world.

ALTERNATIVE ISLAMIC FUTURES

But can we say anything about this unfamiliar world.  While there has been a great deal of thinking in the Western world, save for the work of Zia Sardar and others writing in journals of futures studies and similar places, there is very little in the Islamic world.  Based on the available literature, we examine three scenarios of the future.

Ummah as Interpretive Community

This plausible future is derived from an outstanding essay by Anwar Ibrahim[37] in a special issue of Futures on Islam and the Future. Ibrahim argues that we need to go beyond the three world thinking of first, second and third worlds and begin to think of the future in terms of an Islamic Ummah.  He spells out what this means. (1) The Ummah is a dynamic concept, reinterpreting the past, meeting new challenges and (2) the Ummah must meet global problems such as the environmental problem. “The Ummah as a community is required to acknowledge moral and practical responsibility for the Earth as a Trust and its members are trustees answerable for the condition of the Earth. This makes ecological concerns a vital element in our thinking and action, a prime arena where we must actively engage in changing things.” [38] (3) The Ummah should be seen a critical tool, as a process of reasoning itself and (4) Equity and justice are prerequisites and imperatives of the Ummah. This means a commitment to eradicating poverty. It means going beyond the development debate since that merely framed the issue in apolitical, amoral, acritical language. To begin this means rethinking trade, developing south-south trade  as well as “new instruments of financial accounting and transacting …and the financing of new routes and transportation infrastructure.”[39] (6) But perhaps most significant is a commitment to literacy for all.  As Ibrahim writes: “Only with access to appropriate education can Ummah consciousness take room and make possible the Ummah of tomorrow as a personification of the pristine morality of Islam endowed with creative, constructive, critical thought.” [40]

Thus what is called for is not modernism but a critical and open traditionalism that uses the historic past to create a bright future. But Ummah should not becomes an imperialistic concept rather it requires that Muslims work with other civilizations in dialogue to find agreed upon principles (and be ready to collectively defend those principles as did not occur in Bosnia). We need to recover that historically the Ummah meant models of multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-religious, and pluralist societies.  A true Ummah respects the rights of non-Muslims as with the original Medina state.

The Future Without a Name

In the same special issue, Gulzar Haider takes us to an Islamic future with no name.[41] In his effort to imagine such an Ummah, he cannot. He says after falling asleep and waking in 2020. “I have seen a landscape of Muslim Futures and it looks fragmented, bounded, a controlled city of discrete tends. There are some who are alive and awake but are cast out of the city. They continue their search for the Madinah, and till then they keep reading, writing and speaking without fear except of their God and His Prophet. But none of them has a name.” [42].

Thus, given current geo-political trends, unfortunately, a possible future is the cannibalisation of Islam internally and externally. Internally largely due to external pressures but still nonetheless from sectarian infighting, from deep Sunni/Shia divisions and from irreconcilable models of what it means to be Muslim. Many of these battles are issues of revenge and history instead of the imagination of desired futures.  External forces are such that changes in technology, globalism, and world politics question whether Muslims can meet the challenges faced by a world undergoing dramatic transformation.  Islam, of course, will continue but will there be worthy Muslims?

Islam as the Difference

Conversely, through human action, Islam could become the difference in world science and politics. In this scenario, Zia Sardar writes that while we are uncertain about the nature of the next century, we know that Islam cannot be ignored. “Wether it is seen as a force for liberation or as an authoritarian step back to the middle ages, Islam cannot be ignored.”[43] For Sardar Islam is the difference, the force of order and disorder, the attractors that will create the next century. Galtung, for example, has argued that Islam and the West are in a expansion/contraction relationship with each other, as one contracts, the other expands.[44] As the West loses its ability to maintain hyper expansion, exploitation of nature and other, Islam will come in and either continue the project as the Japanese have done, or transform the project. As Sardar writes: “At the beginning the 20th century, Islam–colonized, defeated, stagnant–could have easily been written off from history and the future. At the dawn of the 21st century, Islam–resurgent, confident, ‘militant’, ‘fundamentalist’, is very much alive.”[45]

But which Islam will it be? This then becomes the task of activists and intellectuals engaged in Islamic science, in Islamic futures, to imagine and create an Islam that creates the future; that is not burdened by advances in genetics, information technologies, and globalism. Such an Islam must engage in the global science and technology revolution but within the values and terms of Islamic science.

In these times of civilization transformation when chaos is ever present, there is one thing that leads to something else: a sense of direction, of inner purpose, of deep morality. If Islam can provide that, the Ummah of the future will be alive and vibrant.

[45].      Sardar, “Islam and the Future,” 223

By Sohail Inayatullah

Aladdin perhaps is among the most culturally violent movies recently made.

Lulled by brilliant animation, classic images of good and evil and internal battles of egoist self-image and truth, one forgets the cultural rape of the Islamic people.  Taking a classical Muslim and Arabic myth, the story is transformed into a Hollywood cartoon.

Simply put, in the beginning he is Aladdin, the servant of God but by the end of the story having now realized truth and beauty, he says, “just call me Al.”

Unfortunately it is the comic genius of Robin Williams who does the most damage. Instead of trying to find humor within the Islamic tradition, within the terms of the story, we are barraged with imitations of mockeries of Jack Nicholson, William Buckley, Arsenio Hall and others.  Mythology is taken over by current humor.  The only thing that finally separates Aladdin from a normal midwestern caucasian boy is his the slight brown coloring. Aladdin could have easily grown up in an American city or 19^th century British city.  From muslim children, this movie however will complete the colonization of the mind. Islamic categories of thought will seem meaningless in the onslaught of Disney.

The examples of Orientalism are numerous and obvious. The good guys are all clean shaven, the bad guys have facial hair typically associated with Easterners and other evil characters. The streets are lined with bartering arabs and hindu fakirs. Araby is the land of the exotic. Women are portrayed as erotic, swaying about, wearing the briefest of harem costumes.  The only interesting and developed character is the genie, largely because of Williams but also because the genie is full of cultural richness, This is unfortunate since even though the genie was trapped in the Arab world, he only knows Western culture.

But we should not be surprised at the Orientalist nature of the movie, we know this from the beginning. The story teller begins with the secular Salaam (peace) not the appropriate asalaam alakum (may god be with you). The story is secularized and westernized with Allah thrown out and Al thrown in.  While cultures appropriating each others myths can enrich the world and help create a new culture, in this case cultural sharing leads to cultural cannibalism.  A bit of history reading, a few attempts to understand Arabian mythology in its terms not in the terms of 1990’s America could have created a universal fable, authentic to history but innovative in its ability to speak to the West and East, to create a cultural dialog.  Instead we are given vicious pornography.

Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses comes out as pious literature compared to Disney’s Aladdin.  Movies rarely depress me as this has.  I remember Aladdin from my childhood.

Hoping to be taken back to dreams and fantasies of a time gone, instead I was transported to the future–I future I know I will have no part of since I do not have a Western name nor am willing to have “sohail” transformed to “Sam” or some other derivation.

What Bush could not do to the Islamic and Arab world, Disney with the help of the genius Robin Williams certainly has.  By all means see it.