Islam and the New World Order

Like a phoenix the Muslim societies of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia are emerging from the ashes of colonialism to reclaim their historic positions of importance, carving out economic, political, and ideological space for themselves in the global world of today. This process was given impulse by the collapse of Western colonialism following World War II when dozens and dozens of new Muslim countries were carved out of former colonies. The Western countries were so focused on the Cold War that they gave little attention to the developments across the Muslim world, as emerging countries were creating national infrastructures and ideologies. In the early 1990’s, the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a new round of creation of Muslim nations in Central Asia. As Muslim nations across the world are maturing economically and politically, the struggle for their ideological future is being debated and fought. The re-emergence of this historic civilization has begun changing global culture and economy.
The canvas of cultural complexity in the Muslim world is so vast that only the broadest strokes can be drawn in the analysis of this civilization. Each region of the Muslim world has its own distinctive religious history that has shaped its contemporary culture, and each region represents widely different solutions to the challenge of creating complex societies. Each has been an experiment, and the differences range from participatory societies to totalitarian ones, from societies with a spiritual focus to secular ones, from societies based on negotiation to those based on conquest. Capitalism has been confronted in slightly different ways in each of region of the Muslim world, according to the local cultural traditions. These differences explain many of the current events as Muslim fundamentalists struggle with moderates, each trying to shape the ideology of their new nation-states.
The 1.5 billion Muslims are 23 percent of all people on earth, and they occupy the middle regions of the world from Africa across the Middle East and Asia to the Philippines on the East. Islam has been able to reach out to a diversity of peoples in widely different cultures, and Muslims emphasize the brotherhood of humanity (Asians, Africans, Middle Easterners, and Europeans) within their religion. Muslims point out that European Christianity arrived to Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the context of political and economic colonialism, and Christianity carries the identity of being a Western religion. Today, Islam provides an ideological rallying point for some people who resist the material and economic model of Western civilization.
Life as a Muslim means different things to many different people. In Indonesia, it is an island world of water, boats, and refined arts, but in Saudi Arabia it is a world of deserts, sand, and religious austerity. In Sub-Saharan Africa, Islam has been adopted by people where women play strong roles in the society, while the Muslim women of Afghanistan, Pakistan and India tend to be subordinated and secluded within their homes. Although most Muslim countries are relatively tranquil as they work out their institutional solutions to nationhood, some are locked in the throes of ideological, and sometimes violent, conflicts between the fundamentalists and the moderates. The resolution of these struggles will determine the face of the Muslim world in the coming century. The Muslim peoples of the world are taking their place alongside the other power brokers in the global society with China and Japan dominating East Asia, India dominating South Asia, Islam dominating parts of Africa and Asia, and the United States dominating the Americas. Islam maybe looked upon as the linchpin between the Western and Eastern worlds, and has a powerful role in shaping the society and economy of the twenty-first century.

The World of Islam

The Muslim world is much larger than just the Middle East. It extends from the western most tip of Africa on the Atlantic Ocean across much of Africa through the Middle East into Central Asia and China and down across South Asia through India to Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines in the Pacific Ocean. It covers a broad cross-section of the world's peoples from Africans to Arabs, Chinese, and Malays. The cultural differences are enormous across the Muslim world, and many people find the austere rules of Arab Islam as foreign, including rules on women's dress, drinking alcoholic beverages, and the application of religious laws. Although Islam permits polygyny, most Muslim families are monogamous. Traditional practice in the Arab world favored the seclusion of women within the home to concentrate on the care of the children and the family, but the actual practice in Islam varies greatly, and in many countries women are quite active in the public arena. Muslims are business people, scholars, students, athletes, religious leaders, and family people. The Muslim world from Africa to Asia is a mosaic of peoples and cultural traditions, but even in the Middle East where Islam began cultural heterogeneity is the norm.
Although Muslims are heirs to the oldest traditions of civilization in the world (Iraq, Egypt, Iran), most of the individual nation states are less than one century old. Most countries are still in the throes of defining themselves nationally and developing political institutions. From the 600's when Muhammad launched Islam to the early 1900's the Muslim world was controlled by large empires or by colonial powers. It was only after World War I in the 1920's that Muslim nation states began to appear out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt were the first, and other nations gained their independence after World War II when the European powers lost their colonial holdings, such as Algeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. The Central Asia countries (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and others) gained their independence only after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990. The Muslim world is fighting to establish and define itself as nation-states within the global community. The most intense international conflicts are those of Muslim groups trying to establish their independence from non-Muslim nations (Bosnia and Kosovo from Serbia, Palestine and Israel, Chechnya and Russia, Kashmir and India). The division of Islam into dozens of competing nation-states means that there is no centralized representation of Muslim interests in the world today.
Within these new Muslim nation states, there are intense conflicts over the cultural definition of the new countries. The more secular people are open to the Western capitalistic models of liberal democracies, but they are opposed by religious conservatives, who want to create the new national cultures around Islam. They argue that the new nations should be theocracies with Islamic law being the national law. The government of the ayatollahs in Iran and the Taliban government in Afghanistan are two examples of theocracies. The radical fringe of the conservative movement is against all Western cultural, political, and economic influences, and the United States is seen as the epitome of Western influence. Also, this group is usually opposed to the existence of Israel, so attacks on these two countries are common. The struggle with the Serbs, Russians, and Indians are secondary to the jihad against the West. The resolution of these internal conflicts between the Muslim fundamentalists and the moderate liberal factions will determine the face of Islam in the decades to come.

An Overview of the Interaction between Islam and Christendom
During the colonial expansion of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Western countries gained control over most of the Muslim world, Africa, and South Asia, giving the West an economic advantage. Along with the colonial expansion came the simultaneous decline of the Ottoman Empire, creating a unique imbalance of power. Discussing this history, Samuel P. Huntington has pointed out how dramatic was the control of the Western powers.

Europeans or former European colonies (in the Americas) controlled 35 percent of the earth's land surface in 1800, 67 percent in 1878, and 84 percent in 1914...In 1800 the British Empire consisted of 1.5 million square miles and 20 million people. By 1900 the Victorian empire upon which the sun never set included 11 million square miles and 390 million people...The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence [i.e. war]. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

All major world civilizations were affected by this European expansion. For a century of more, Muslim, African, and Asian countries gradually lost political control and saw their economic riches drained away. However, after these countries gained independence at the end of the colonial period, their power has been slowly growing.
The West has had a long history of confrontation with the Muslim world. Christendom and Islam are the two great expansionist monotheistic religions, and each teaches the exclusivity of its beliefs. Finding the middle ground of peaceful co-existence has frequently eluded these two religious giants, even though both teach tolerance toward the other. Since these two cultural and religious blocs border each other geographically, that proximity has given rise to repeated conflicts over the last 1,300 years. In the early centuries, Muslims had the initiative and occupied significant areas of Europe, starting with the invasion of Spain in 711 C.E. which led to almost eight hundred years of Muslim presence in that country. When the Muslims were on the retreat in Spain, the Ottoman Turks were expanding into Europe on the East, taking Constantinople in 1453 and going on to occupy all of Eastern Europe for the next four hundred years.
When the Christian Church turned to militancy in the eleventh century, Pope Urban II called for a Crusade to drive the Muslims out of the Holy Land. That led to the Crusaders invasion of the Middle East, another stage in the conflict between the two civilizations. The power of the Ottoman Empire kept the Christians on the defensive for centuries, but when it began to decline in the nineteenth century, the Western powers returned to occupy much of the Middle East during the period of European colonialism. Today the Muslim world is politically independent, but many Muslim countries do not have economic dignity. Some groups within the Muslim world also feel that their religious integrity is compromised by the overarching presence of Western culture.
As the balance of power shifts between civilizations, the West is declining in relative influence, and the Muslim world is expanding in strength. In this realignment of world power, countries are grouping themselves into civilization blocks with one or more states leading each block. The Muslim world is fragmented into forty-six different nation-states, and many of those countries are fragmented internally over different models of national purpose. Turkey is a secular and democratic republic, Iran is an Islamist theocracy, and Egypt has tried to create a middle path. Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Pakistan have monarchies or strong secular leaders whose power rests on the military. The Islamist movement is growing in many states and increasing the pressure to establish policies more oriented toward traditional religious values. Since fundamental social, political, and religious values are being defined in each of these nations, intervention by Western powers is not welcomed and engenders intense hostility.

The End of Colonialism and the Rise of Nation-States

      In the last fifty years, the ideological foundations of European political and economic hegemony have been challenged by non-European people and their ideologies. The disappearance of traditional colonialism and the emergence of new nation-states has given the Muslim world the power of the collective. The colonial ideologies and power arrangements established over the last five hundred years have become unglued. By the end of World War II, the British, French, Dutch, Italians, and Belgians had lost their empires, which resulted in dozens and dozens of new nation-states, each struggling to make their place in the world. Today, most of the nations in the world are only a few decades old. Nationalism is still being fought in some corners of the globe as local ethnic groups try to build their identity into a national one. As ethnicity and national pretensions have come to the fore, this has led to a fragmentation of the world into mini-states which sometimes lack the resources to maintain a viable international presence.
                                                                   Table No. 1.1
                         Formation of Nation-States by World Region and Time Period

Time Period	Europe	America	Middle East	Asia	Africa	Ocean Nations	Totals
Post-1945	15	12	28	12	38	24	129
1900-1944	5	2	8	2	1	1	19
1850-1899	4	1	0	0	0	0	5
1800-1849	1	17	0	0	1	0	19
1750-1799	0	1	0	0	0	0	1
1700-1749	1	0	0	0	0	0	1
Earlier	19	0	3	4	1	0	27
Totals	45	33	39	18	41	25	201

World War II marked the end of colonialism as a global system and unleashed the most active period of nation building in the history of the world. Of the 201 territories that are recognized today as sovereign nations, 129 have been created since 1945. That is almost two-thirds (64.1 percent) of the nations of the world, including most dramatically the Muslim world from Asia through the Middle East to Africa. All the countries of the Muslim world have come into existence in the last century as colonialism ended. This nation-state model has led to the fragmentation of the Muslim world into dozens of countries. From the time of Muhammad to the end of the Ottoman Empire, Muslims world-wide had usually been led by a strong centralized empire that gave a more or less unified voice to Muslim interests. The fragmentation of the Muslim power into many small nation-states has reduced its influence precisely at this time of greater integration of the global economy.
As the twentieth century was marked by the age of Muslim nationalism, the start of the twenty-first century has been marked by the struggle for control of the ideological foundations of new nation-states. This has been a time of defining new operative national identities, and the resulting ideological conflicts can be seen throughout the Muslim world. The success of democratic capitalism and material well-being has created a challenge for religious based cultures around the world, including Islam. The conflicts between secular capitalism and traditional Islam are being fought as people decide how to synthesize the new economic forces with their religious ideologies and traditional cultural systems.

The Fragmentation of the Muslim World

The Muslim world of the twenty-first century is fragmented into forty-eight countries dominated by Islam with another dozen or so countries with important Muslim minorities. These countries range from the population giants such as Indonesia (235 million), Pakistan (150), Bangladesh (140), and Nigeria (134) to micro-nations under one million people (Qatar, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, and Maldives). The wealth differences are pronounced, ranging from the oil rich Persian Gulf states (Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain), ranked among the wealthiest nations in the world to the poor African and Asian countries where people literally live on the edge of survival (Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Yemen, Somalia, Sierra Leone). Literacy levels also vary greatly from the highly educated former Soviet republics (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Krygzstan, Turkmenistan) with percentages over 99 percent to the stark illiteracy of the Muslim states of the Saharan region (Burkino Faso, Mali, Niger) and conflict torn states (Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan) where literacy rates can drop as low as the single digits. This vast array of wealth, literacy, and population size demonstrates the complex mosaic that is the modern Muslim world.

Table No. 1.2
Large Muslim Countries

This group of large Muslim nations dominates their regions of the world politically and economically. The varying degrees of wealth and infrastructure of these nations indicates that some have the potential to shape global events while others do not. Indonesia has high literacy rates which indicate well educated populations that could work in a much more complex economy than the GDP figures indicate although its island world lacks the natural resources of continental areas. The size of these nations means that they are important regional leaders, but the unresolved problems may dominate them over the projected future. Pakistan is deeply divided by internal tribal and religious conflicts. Bangladesh is an agricultural society with one of the densest populations in the world which means small farming plots and poverty. The majority of the people of Nigeria and Ethiopia live a subsistence economy of small scale farming, and these countries have great challenges in creating economies that can provide for their people. Iran and Turkey have broadly based economies that are moderately developed, and they have the possibility of achieving significant socio-economic gains for their people.
The per capita economic measures and literacy rates are important indicators of the development of a society, and they tend to correlate. Literacy rates grow as wealth does, and literacy is a crucial ingredient of the cultural, political, and economic development of a country. Countries that are more successful in providing well-being for their citizens begin with a sound program of basic education for both men and women. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, and Ethiopia have such low literacy rates, especially for women, as to suggest serious problems for development.

Table No. 1.3
Medium and Small Muslim Countries

These medium to small Muslim nations represent a broad cross-section of social and economic conditions. Saudi Arabia and Malyasia are the elite in this group with strong economies and a literate population. Saudi Arabia is the spiritual leader of the Muslim world, and Malaysia has emerged as one of the economic leaders of Southeast Asia. The former Soviet republics (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Takikistan) have some of the highest literacy ratings in the world, reflecting the strength of the Soviet educational system, but they vary widely in wealth and political stability. Kazakhstan is included here although Muslims do not constitute an absolute majority because they do dominate politics and society. The North African countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) have relatively strong literacy and wealth levels in contrast to the poverty and illiteracy of the Saharan and Sub-Saharan countries (Sudan, Burkino Faso, Mali, Niger, Senegal Chad, Guinea, Somalia) which along with Afghanistan and Yemen have the least hopeful prospects burdened by both poverty and illiteracy. The low levels of literacy in Iraq also suggest the problems that country faces for the future.

Table No. 1.4
Micro Muslim Nations

These Micro nations of the Muslim world are divided into the haves and the have-nots with the states that have oil fueled economies (Libya, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain) ranking among the wealthiest in the world and with strong levels of literacy. In contrast the small African and island nations (Sierra Leone, Mauritania, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Comoros, and Djibouti) face poverty and illiteracy with little hope for development. These divisions reflect the fragmentation of the Muslim world between ethnicities and languages as well as economic and educational contrasts.

Table 1.5
Islam by World Region

World Region	Population in Millions	Percentage of Total Population in Region
Africa	400	45
Middle East	250	91.8
Central Asia	76	82
East Asia	40	2.5
South Asia	416	28.9
Southeast Asia	240	41.9
Europe	45	6
North America	5	1.2
Others	4	NA
Total	1,476	23

Most Muslims in the world live in Asia and Africa, and we might call them the silent majority because we hear little from them. The Middle East, which is the spiritual center of Islam, dominates world news. Although the term Muslim world sounds like a unity, it is not so, not even in religious terms. Islam is deeply divided by its national interests, much as Christendom is. Although Muslims generally support each other, they do also fight with each other on occasion, a mosaic of behaviors, much as can be found in the Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist worlds.
As the twenty-first century started, the world’s population became predominantly urban for the first time in human history, and the Muslim world includes some of the most important urban concentrations in the world. The United Nations projects that the largest cities in the world over the next decade will be in the non-Western world, including Muslim cities such as Jakarta (21.2 million) and Karachi (20.6). Dhaka (19), Cairo (18), and Istanbul (12) are mega-cities with some of the world’s largest populations. As Muslim farmers increasingly leave their provincial country homes and crowd into the more cosmopolitan cities will they be able to have an acceptable lifestyle, health, and education?
The Muslim world will affect the shape the world takes in the twenty-first century. The extent to which their citizens are incorporated into the global economy will determine whether they embrace it or reject it. The long standing conflicts and the inequities of power and economics in the current world order have the potential to generate further conflicts. Will confrontation or co-existence dominate over the next century?

Conclusions

Muslim nations are growing stronger and claiming their places in the world. Most of these countries are only a few decades old. With the fall of European colonialism after World War II, the world has been reorganized, and these former colonies are now defining national identities based on their cultural heritages and religious ideologies. What is the cultural and ethnic mosaic of peoples that make up Muslim civilization? What are the religious and ideological roots? How has history created their particular places in the world, and how has it shaped their current expectations? The cultural history, religious ideology, and ethnic mosaic of a society are the primary components shaping the culture and value system. These cultural factors are woven together creating a worldview, which in turn is linked with the environment, economics, and politics.