Globalization (2005)

Religious Resurgence in an Era of Globalization: Islam's Quest for Global Participation

Mahmood Ahmad

Research Assistant

Futuristic Forum: a policy research organization

Pakistan

[email protected]

Introduction

It has been commonly assumed that religion would retrench its role as globalization continued. For
instance, Harvey Cox’s 1965 book, The Secular City, announced the collapse of religion to the extent that
most of humanity within decades would be atheist or agnostic, as societies slowly democratized,
pluralized, and modernized.1 However, this supposition has faced tremendous contestation in the form
of a religious revival in all parts of the world within the last half-century. Indeed, the “global religious
resurgence has challenged the expectations of modernization theory, the progressive secularization and
Westernization of developing societies. Religion has become a major ideological, social and political
force.”2

The reassertion of Muslims as conscious, rhetorically skilled political actors across the Muslim world, and
even in non-Muslim countries like Russia and now much of Western Europe, is one facet of a broader
reality—namely, that the global religious resurgence signifies a deep desire by considerable portions of
the world population to establish meaning and order in a rapidly changing, fluid environment. All such
religious movements, including the Islamic types, “share in common a return to the foundations or
cornerstones of faith. They reemphasize the primacy of divine sovereignty and the divine-human
covenant, the centrality of faith, human stewardship, and the equality of all within the community of
believers.”3 . From the new impulses of the Orthodox Church to the powerful religious right in America,
an apparent “desecularization,” or at least a “resacralization,” has occurred across the world. These new
religious movements attempt to address the grievances of the temporal by appealing to the powers of
the spiritual; “religious revivalisms often represent the voices of those who, amidst the failures of their
societies, claim both to ameliorate the problems and to offer a more authentic, religious-based
society.”4 Thus, religion functions as a vertical point of reference across the continuum of political
order. All of these descriptions decode the Islamic experience as much as they do other religions. What
remains to be observed, however, is how and why the religious revival within Islam, of which radical
Islam is only one small part, arose. It requires an examination of secularism and its relation to religion, as
well as the connection between globalization and secularism.

Secularism a Governing Entity on the Political Stage

The secular character of the state was a European invention that entered Western political imagination
during the 17 th century. Rooted “in the desirability of grounding knowledge and the governance of
society on nonreligious foundations of scientific rationality,” secularism closely relates to the founding of
modern states, the division of humanity into discrete, organized territories that denied the primacy of
transcendent religious loyalties.5 This represents a genuine paradigm shift from the medieval era,
because the secular state required the loyalty and obedience of citizens within finite, bounded spaces.
While convoluted and complex, the secular trend revolves around some major events and
developments: the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia marks the starting point of the international system of
states, and therefore also the rise of the secular state; the Enlightenment, with its views on rationality
and reason as derivative of the human mind, cemented secular philosophy as a dominant discourse that
ordered, signified, and produced structures and domains of human knowledge; and finally, the rise of
the nation-state as the defining mode of existence — that is, the organization of peoples into “imagined
communities” in both the mind as well as on the map6 — operationalized secularism through the
separations of church and state throughout the Christian world, and then the rest of the world via
colonization and conquest. The experience of the Third World holds special significance. Non-Western
countries deliberately emphasized their secularism during and after the decolonization, as such a
tradition “is not indigenous to such countries and as an artificial implant is not nearly as deeply rooted in
the cultural life of such societies.”7 As Falk discovers in his studies of Turkey, Pahlavi Iran, and China, the
rhetoric of secularism ironically acquired an almost religious overtone in terms of its language,
functions, and symbols in governments’ attempts to desperately disentangle any political institution
from religion.

Secularism, thus, represents a “posture toward reality”, a perspective on human relations with
epistemological and geopolitical components.8 It played a profound role in the transition between the
medieval and the modern; it contributed “an ethos of tolerance that greatly pacified the struggle within
Christianity between Protestant and Catholic rulers… that opened the way for the rapid growth of
science and industry.”9 It also colonized and authenticated itself within the structures of states, whose
collective constitution of the international system further replicated secularism through colonialism. It
excluded consideration of religious identity as a viable expression of statehood, and attempted to
enclose religion within the private sphere. As a result, in so-called modern societies, religion “commonly
is regulated by government, and forbidden from particular expression in certain areas of public life, such
as schools and government. Religion simply is not as institutionally prominent in modern societies as in
traditional ones.”10
However, secularism did not spontaneously arise, nor did it hierarchically trickle down from the political
dictates of the state. As with any regime of power and knowledge, it works “not through the commands
of a supreme sovereign but through the disciplinary practices that each individual imposes on his or her
own behavior on the basis of the dictates of reason.”11

Globalization: A Contender to Secularism

From its discursive birth, secularism fused itself with a technocratic, scientific rationality, which
denounced religion as irrational, traditional, and therefore anti-modern. It became embodied and
personified in the constitutional arrangements, institutions, and structures of the state. Whereas God
formed the center of the Christian worldview, secularism held as its deity the notion of reason, the idea
that statements could be verified by reference to ordinary human experience or by reasoning from
objective, empirical premises. Secularism became known as a humanizing and liberating tradition due to
its conscious dislocation from the tyrannical, non-reasonable dictates of religious faith. The secular
ethos, a worldview that championed reason and science, prevailed. Much Western political theory has
since labored under a secularist bias.12 As a result of the secular bias and its encoding into the fabric of
reason and thought, the “religious dimension of human experience has been generally excluded from
the serious study and practice of governance.”13

Religion Relations to Globalization

Globalization problematizes and destabilizes secularism through the realization that “the boundaries of
the state are no longer very relevant.”14 Secularism attempts to privatize religion, but as religious
identities have strengthened, so too have their believers in perpetuating and sharing their narrative
visions of the past, present, and future. “Thus, in a globalizing world the relevance of secularism seems
limited… There are special concerns about the way in which a religious state handles a range of worldly
matters, but whether the secular logic of strict separation is a useful approach seems very much in
doubt.”15 The return of religion, therefore, implicates the dimensions of autonomy, identity, and belief;
it represents a new metric of identity. It indicates “undeniable evidence of a deep malaise in society that
can no longer be interpreted in terms of our traditional categories of thought,”16 a comment especially
true in the case of Islam.

Moreover, that the religious resurgence has occurred precisely during the decades when globalization
has intensified wields two strong implications. First, the religious revival reacts against the appeal of
cultural and political cosmopolitanism. Much as post-colonial peoples have asserted traditional practices
and institutions from the belief that such traditions were different and therefore held more value than
modern, artificial constructions (regardless of their actual efficacy and utility), various portions of the
global population, from the Catholic liberation theologies of Latin America to the Muslim “jamats”
(brotherhoods) of the Middle East, have realigned religion as their source of identity that lies necessarily
separated from the rest of the planet. This claim rests upon “a right to locality” and “the primary rights
of place, culture, and community” that must be asserted amidst the twin vessels of what they perceive
as the global juggernaut, “ideological hegemony of neo-liberalism and the legal dismantlement of
national sovereignty.”17 It indicates a vital quest for identity, authenticity, and community within and
against swiftly changing conditions that globalization has wrought.18 In totality, regardless of whether
the threats it interprets are constructed or real, religion embodies, in Foucault’s words, “a plurality of
resistances,”19 a strategic assertion of identity that also connects to a performative view of the world
and a plan to improve it in this life or the next. Second, the religious revival actually owes its strength to
worldwide pathways of information exchange that only globalization has instituted. It harnesses modern
technologies and communications to spread its sociopolitical message; stark proof comes in the form of
the videotapes featuring Osama bin Laden which surfaced in Afghanistan in late October 2001, copies of
which had been distributed via Internet and global air mail to thousands of seminaries and schools
across Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, even Europe. Ironically, then, however much it attempts
to contest it, religious resurgence needs globalization for its strength.

Islamic Resurgence and The Challenges of Globalization

If secularism has so thoroughly dominated as a discourse that governed politics, laws, and norms and
that replicates itself in both the minds of men and the structural apparatus of states, then why has
religion, particularly Islam, experienced a revival? Chatterjee provides the answer: “[N]o matter how
adroitly the fabric of reason might cloak the reality of power, the desire of autonomy continues to range
itself against power; power is resisted… Hence one cannot be for or against modernity; one can only
devise strategies for coping with it.”20 Echoing Foucault, where there is power, there is also resistance.
Yet this does not simply mean that religion views itself as the antithesis to globalization; it signifies that
across the world, various individuals have consciously chosen to evince religious identities in their
personal, micro-political struggles in order to make sense of what has occurred in and around their lives.
This perspective helps explain the meaning of the Islamic revival and the place of radical Islam within it.

The Re-assertion of Islamic Identity

Radical Islam constitutes one small part of a wider religio-political project on the part of millions of
Muslims over the last several decades. This project is the Islamic revival, the renaissance of Islam and its
ethos in all sectors of Muslim societies, from culture and political life to private beliefs and civic
networks of faith. The movement emerged most conspicuously with the 1979 Iranian Revolution, but
the revival had actually began decades earlier. A general “heightening of Islamic consciousness among
the masses” had occurred since the post-World War II period.21 It became manifest in more frequent
and conspicuous displays of Islamic identity, such as dress and prayer; an increasing appreciation of
Islam’s impact in the political, social, and economic arenas; an intellectual flowering of scholarship
centering upon all aspects of Islam, such as its holy texts, its mystical content, and the life of the
Prophet; a greater willingness of all Muslims to invoke either Islam or God into their daily discussions;
and finally, of highest visibility, the formation and spread of radical networks of Muslim fundamentalists
that have often resorted to violence in order to implement their narrow vision of Islam’s destiny.22
What ties these individuals and groups together is the derivation of their ideas from the original texts
and scriptures of Islam, and the belief that their faith and investment in certain Islamic ideas creates a
vital, reforming energy that can eventually better human society. What does not tie them together is the
resort to violence that only a handful of militant Muslims have shown, who in fact represent only the
smallest minority of the religious revival. To demarcate further, conceptual divisions transpire on two
levels: first, between the general religious resurgence and one of its elements, the Islamic revival; and
second, between the Islamic revival and one of its own components, radical Islam.

Muslim societies faced a profound crisis, one that touched cultural, political, social, economic,
psychological, and spiritual dimensions; when by the late 1960s secular ideologies and models of
development failed to produce prosperous societies that could match the sheer strength of the West,
Islamic revivalist movements surged into the public sphere, promising a return to Islamic greatness and
dispelling the “hopelessness and pessimism” that pervaded Muslim societies. The raison d’être of
Muslim revivalists can be succinctly articulated as the fact that “the very integrity of the Islamic culture
and way of life is threatened by non-Islamic forces of secularism and modernity, encouraged by Muslim
governments.23 Significantly, their struggles not only focus upon external actors, such as the West or
globalization, but also upon their own governments, which have failed to solve the problems inherent in
their societies.

In this context, globalization is viewed as an aggrandizing influence that heralds patently non-Islamic
ideas and practices, such as secularism, liberal democracy, consumerism, et cetera—essentially, the
products of the West.

Against the Secularist prejudices: Islam's Quest for Global Participation

Globalization has transformed not only the structural environment of the world, but also the social
relations that envelop different religious followings: “By global, we mean not just transformed
conceptions of time and space but the new social meaning that this has involved… we understand this as
the development of a common consciousness of human society on a world scale.”24 This description
provides the contextual backdrop against which Islam may be judged. Indeed, the “position of Islamic
societies must be viewed within a global framework of experiences if its special resources and liabilities
are to be understood.”25 For instance, as Esposito and Voll observe, “even the world of radical
extremists committed to distinctive and parochial causes is cosmopolitan in its connections and
interactions,” a fact verified tragically on 9/11, when terrorist events were the end result of a well-
funded, worldwide network of operatives and specialists whose brutal efficiency depended upon the
openness and interactions that globalization heralded.26 Thus, Islam does not exist in a vacuum: it
evolves, reinforces, and replicates itself through globalization.

Globalization is a narrative that posits an awareness of the totality of human social relations. However,
because religious experiences are excluded from consideration as either viable modes of relations or
legitimate products from the world of knowledge, secularism has essentially colonized and directed the
ideational structure of globalization using non-religious terms. Thus, the argument that Islam will
contest globalization is based on the deeply rooted secular-religious dichotomy. Any religious system
sets forth three basic components: “a worldview, a way of life, and an account of the character of the
social entity that realizes the way of life and explains that way of life through the specified
worldview.”27 The silence of these elements within the global framework signifies the dominance of
secularism, which does not so much attempt to refute these aspects of religion as it hides them by
denying their ontological and epistemological subsistence. Islamic revivalists, however, refuse to be
silenced; “the transformation of human experience on a global scale is accompanied by greater
demands for participation and for recognition of special identities.”28

Thus, despite its political catalysts and social causes, the Islamic revival must not be seen as an
unsophisticated, revolution-minded force that seeks to violently institute a new sociopolitical order in
simple opposition to globalization, for it rests within a much broader historical and comparative frame.
Secularization manifests itself as the reification of particular conceptions of reason and rationality, but
even the radical, violent Islamic movements are not predicated purely upon a destruction of the secular
and upon the universal sovereignty of God. Rather, the fundamentalist Islam they espouse forms a
referential system that requires the existence of secularism in order to establish its difference and
distance from it, just as much as secularism needs the existence of a religious Other to legitimate its
practices. In this paradoxical consanguinity, “tradition must not only deny or suppress the historical and
philosophical grounds of its foundational interdependence with the other, but must also constantly
recreate the ‘difference’ between itself and the other by defining the other’s mere existence as a threat
to the universality of the practices, traditions, order of the self.”29 In this dichotomy, secularism
represents reason and modernity, and religion the irrational and anti-modern. Secularism, represented
by globalization, and religion—represented by Islam—are given fixed meanings that do not change over
time and space. This binary view, however, is false; it is precisely the fiction that girds global chaos
theories of Islam and its impending battle with globalization. Each representation is not a uniformly
stable set of meanings, divided from the Other by insurmountable differences, but rather a kind of
“moral enclavism” that defines its traditions and goals in terms of what the other is not. Hence, each
mode of thought constitutes the other; they transform one another in a mutually dependent
relationship.
Secularism has not been as rigidly pervasive in the West as commonly thought. “The reality is that for
centuries the separation between Caesar and God in Christianity was less clear-cut as is often believed
while the separation between the two in Islam has been more pronounced than is usually assumed.”30
From the empire of Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire to the Pope and the kings of Great Britain,
Western political history is rife with examples with heads of state who also claim sovereignty over the
realm of faith, and vice-versa. Moreover, in his anthropological studies of religion, Asad observes that
while “European societies are presumed to be built upon a profound separation of state and religious
institutions,” this popularization of secularism actually ignores the variety of contemporary cases in
Europe, Latin America, and North America in which religion deeply connects to conceptions of national
identity while also giving de facto state power to informal institutions that have as much, if not more,
persuasive capacities to move citizens into action than the formal, secular state.31 In fact, the history of
religion and the state in the West since Westphalia has been “fraught with ambiguity and cross-
pollination; the line between sacred and secular authority has remained equivocal, porous, and
fluctuating.”32 Not until the monotheistic Protestant establishment emerged as an articulate political
actor in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries in America did secularism as a distinct worldview
coalesce and enter into public discourse in Western countries.33 Even since then, the rumblings of
religion are still manifest in various court cases, political parties, and social movements that attempt to
merge state power with religious intent in almost all Western countries, not to mention the Third World.
Secularism never fully completed its vision for a comprehensive ordering of political and social relations,
and so the assumption that it a finished political project flies in the face of historical and sociological
evidence.

The “Modernization” of Islam

Globalization actually engages Islam rather than denying its relevance. Within the new public spaces
created by globalization, religious identities interact with modern ideas and technologies. For instance,
the advent of the printing press, which arrived in the Islamic world centuries after it impacted Europe,
tremendously changed the structure of Islamic education, the ways by which holy texts were read, and
the conceptualization of the Muslim world.34 As globalization continues, new technologies have
continued to change relations of authority and knowledge, “reconfiguring notions of self and society”
while lending a certain consciousness to previously marginalized, subaltern voices within the religion.35
For instance, the telecommunications revolution and the Internet have generated new intellectual
possibilities for Muslim scholars wishing to both reflect upon as well as criticize Islamic notions of the
right and the good; ironically, it has also allowed lay scholars and ordinary citizens in Muslim states,
from Egypt to Indonesia, to contest the intellectual productions of Muslim scholars and teachers and
offer new, radical interpretations of Islam to a mass audience, which consequently has helped form the
basis of the new Islamic movements. In these cases, transformations within Islam have only occurred by
the constant imposition of modern values and capacities, products of secular thought and alleged
opponents of religion, into the discourses of religion. Meanwhile, that Islam has grown more rapidly
than any other major religion rests upon the strength of globalization; it would be difficult, for example,
for the faith to spread if the free movements of peoples and ideas that globalization encourages did not
exist. Ironically then, globalization, predicated and articulated through a secularist bias, strengthens
Islam by furthering its range and extensive influence. This paradox constitutes simply one example of
how the secular-religious divide actually breaks down into interdependence rather than xenophobic
distance, and how similarly the globalization-Islam opposition collapses upon itself on further scrutiny.

Conclusion: Islam’s quest for the Global Participation World

Expressions of Islam function as “means of disciplining ambiguity, creating boundaries and constituting,
producing and maintaining political identities.”36 This also applies to expressions against Islam,
especially for global chaos theorists and the intellectual borders they have drawn around globalization
that necessarily exclude Islam. However, as this investigation demonstrated, global chaos views on Islam
were inaccurate for their reliance upon simplified concepts and ideas that were hastily extracted from
Islamic texts. Their blurring of the boundaries between Islam and radical fundamentalism hides the real
distinctions that separate these two traditions. In turn, radical Islam finds itself as one small element of
the Islamic revivalist trend, itself part of the global religious resurgence, which must be seen within the
broader secular-religious divide. At every level of this conceptual chain, the relations with globalization
constitute interdependence and mutual reinforcement rather than categorical denial and opposition.

Debates about Islam and its role within the world as it globalizes confront the question of secular
modernity and how it interacts with religion and Islam in particular. Radical Islam, of course,
conceptualizes itself in opposition to modernity. But most of the Islamic revivalists do not agree with
them. The deeper critique here is that Islam, in all of its emergences and expressions, cannot merely be
characterized as a “self-contained collective agent,”37 one that seems to have a life of its own. It must
be understood as a performative, discursive tradition, understood as an organized, socially significant
historical narrative that interacts with globalization; it functions as one powerful voice among the choir
of political and moral options. Islam does not operate as some nebulous, abstract variable; rather, actors
that perform behaviors under its mantle reconstitute, redirect, and reify it through adherence to their
own peculiar geographic, strategic, political, and economic needs, ultimately contributing to their
syncretic identities. Ultimately, Islam does have a place in globalization, as much as globalization has a
place within Islam. Islam will not mindlessly contest globalization; it derives meaning from it, which
some Muslims—such as the radical Islamists—might interpret as threatening, while others derive more
peaceful visions. Regardless of this diversity, Islam will certainly not recede from globalization’s
horizons. It is very much a part of its heritage and future, and therefore a crucial strand in the universe
of possibilities that awaits the globalizing world.

References

1.Harvey Cox, The Secular City (New York: Macmillan, 1965).

3.Ibid., 21.

4.Ibid., 21.

5.Richard Falk, Religion and Humane Global Governance ( New York: Palgrave, 2001), Manuscript, 50-1.

6.Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983).

7.Falk, 61.

8.Ibid, 58.

9.Ibid., 76.

10.Danny Jorgensen, “Religion and Modernization: Secularization or Sacralization,” in Religion and the
Political Order, ed. Jacob Neusner (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996), 22.

11.Partha Chatterjee, “Our Modernity,” Lecture Delivered at SEPHIS and CODESRIA 1996 Forum,
<www.iisg.nl/~sephis/> ( 4 May 2002), 18-9.

12.See, for instance, Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. G.H. Taylor (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986); Edmund Byrne, “Mission in Modern Life: A Public Role for Religious Beliefs,”
Padeia WCP Project, <www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Poli/PoliByrn.html> (5 May 2002); and Frederick
Gedicks, “The Religious, the Secular, and the Antithetical”, Capital University Law Review Vol. 20: No. 1
(1991).
13.Falk 17.

14.Ibid, 70.

15.Ibid., 73.

16.Gilles Kepel, The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism in the Modern
World (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State Press, 1994), 24.

17.Amory Starr, “Beyond Panic: Religious Nationalism, Political Economy, and the Blockage Against
Globalization,” Paper Presented at Colorado State University at Lamar
<http://lamar.colostate.edu/~america/panic.html> ( 28 April 2002).

18.Paul Marshall, “Disregarding Religion,” SAIS Review Vol. 18: No. 2 (1998), 13-18.

19.Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Vintage Books, 1990), 96.

20. Chatterjee, 19.

21.R. Hrair Dekmejian, “Islamic Revival: Catalysts, Categories, and Consequences,” in The Politics of
Islamic Revivalism, ed. Shireen Hunter (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 4.

22.Abdulaziz Sachedina, “Islamic Religion and Political Order,” SAIS Review Vol. 18: No. 2 (1998), 59-64.

23.Dekmejan, 10.
24.Martin Shaw, Theory of the Global State: Globality as Unfinished Revolution ( Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 26, emphasis his.

25.John Esposito and John Voll, Islam and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 16.

26.Ibid., 12.

27.Jacob Neusner, “Why and How Religion Speaks Through Politics: the Case of Classical Judaism,” in
Religion and the Political Order, ed. Jacob Neusner (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996), 61.

28.Esposito and Voll, 12.

29.Elizabeth Hurd, “Toward a Comparative Analysis of Two Theo-political Orders: Secularism and
Political Islam in Historical Context,” Paper Presented at APSA Annual Meeting (30 Aug.— 2 Sept. 2001),
21.

30.Hunter 1998, 34.

31.Talal Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” Center for Contemporary Arab Studies Occasional
Paper Series (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University, 1996), 5.

32.Ibid., 13.

33.Gedicks, 115-22.

34.Francis Robinson, “Technology and Religious Change: Islam and the Impact of Print,” Modern Asian
Studies Vol. 27 (1993), 229-51.
35.Dale Eickelman, “Mass Higher Education and the Religious Imagination in Contemporary Arab
Societies,” American Ethnologist Vol. 19: No. 4 (1992), 643-55.

36.Hurd, 29.

37.Hurd, 3.

Copyright remains exclusively with the author.