Content uploaded by Dale F. Eickelman
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Dale F. Eickelman on Mar 17, 2015
Content may be subject to copyright.
Middle East Review of International Affairs Vol. 3, No. 3 (September 1999) 78
The Coming Transformation of the Muslim World*
By Dale F. Eickelman
Like the printing press in sixteenth-
century Europe, the combination of mass
education and mass communications is
transforming the Muslim majority world, a
broad geographical crescent stretching from
North Africa through Central Asia, the
Indian subcontinent, and the Indonesian
archipelago. In unprecedentedly large
numbers, the faithful -- whether in the vast
cosmopolitan city of Istanbul, the suburbs of
Paris, or in the remote oases of Oman's
mountainous interior -- are examining and
debating the fundamentals of Muslim belief
and practice in ways that their less self-
conscious predecessors in the faith would
never have imagined.
Buzzwords such as
"fundamentalism," and catchy phrases such
as Samuel Huntington's "West versus Rest"
or Daniel Lerner's "Mecca or
mechanization," are of little use in
understanding this transformation. They
obscure or even distort the immense spiritual
and intellectual ferment that is taking place
today among the world's nearly one billion
Muslims, reducing it in most cases to a
fanatical rejection of everything modern,
liberal, or progressive. To be sure, such
fanaticism -- not exclusive to Muslim
majority societies -- plays a part in what is
happening, but it is far from the whole story.
A far more important element is the
unprecedented access that ordinary people
now have to sources of information and
knowledge about religion and other aspects
of their society. Quite simply, in country
after country, government officials,
traditional religious scholars, and officially
sanctioned preachers are finding it very hard
to monopolize the tools of literate culture.
The days have gone when governments and
religious authorities can control what their
people know, and what they think.
MASS HIGHER EDUCATION AND
COMMUNICATION
What distinguishes the present era
from prior ones is the large numbers of
believers engaged in the "reconstruction" of
religion, community, and society. In an
earlier era, political or religious leaders
would prescribe, and others were supposed
to follow. Today, the major impetus for
change in religious and political values
comes from below. In France, this has meant
an identity shift from being Muslim in
France to being French Muslim. In Turkey,
it means that an increasing number of Turks,
especially those of the younger generation,
see themselves as European and Muslim at
the same time. And some Iranians argue that
the major transformations of the Iranian
revolution occurred not in 1978-79 but with
the coming of age of a new generation of
Iranians who were not even born at the time
of the revolution. These transformations
include a greater sense of autonomy for both
women and men and the emergence of a
public sphere in which politics and religion
are subtly intertwined, and not always in
ways anticipated by Iran's formal religious
leaders.
If "modernity" is defined as the
emergence of new kinds of public space,
including new possible spaces not imagined
by preceding generations, then
developments in France, Turkey, Iran,
Indonesia, and elsewhere suggest that we are
living through an era of profound social
transformation for the Muslim majority
world.
The Coming Transformation of the Muslim World
Middle East Review of International Affairs Vol. 3, No. 3 (September 1999) 79
Distinctive to the modern era is that
discourse and debate about Muslim tradition
involves people on a mass scale. It also
necessarily involves an awareness of other
Muslim and non-Muslim traditions. Mass
education and mass communication in the
modern world facilitate an awareness of the
new and unconventional. In changing the
style and scale of possible discourse, they
reconfigure the nature of religious thought
and action, create new forms of public
space, and encourage debate over meaning.
Mass education and mass
communications are important in all
contemporary world religions. However, the
full effects of mass education, especially
higher education, only began to be felt in
much of the Muslim world since mid-
century and in many countries considerably
later. In country after country -- including
Morocco, Egypt, Turkey, and Indonesia --
educational opportunities have dramatically
expanded at all levels. Even where adult
illiteracy rates in the general populace
remains high, as in rural Egypt and
Morocco, there is now a critical mass of
educated people able to read, think for
themselves, and react to religious and
political authorities rather than just listen to
them. Women's access to education still lags
behind that of men, although the gap is
rapidly closing in many countries.
Both mass education and mass
communications, particularly the
proliferation of media and the means by
which people communicate, have had a
profound effect on how people think about
religion and politics throughout the Muslim
world. Multiple means of communication
make the unilateral control of information
and opinion much more difficult than it was
in prior eras and foster, albeit inadvertently,
a civil society of dissent. We are still in the
early stages of understanding how different
media -- including print, television, radio,
cassettes, and music -- influence groups and
individuals, encouraging unity in some
contexts and fragmentation in others, but a
few salient features may be sketched.
At the "high" end of this
transformation is the rise to significance of
books such as al-Kitab wa-l-Qur'an [The
Book and the Qur'an] (1992), written by the
Syrian civil engineer Muhammad Shahrur.
This book has sold tens of thousands of
copies throughout the Arab world in spite of
the fact that its circulation has been banned
or discouraged in many places. Its success
could not have been imagined before there
were large numbers of people able to read it
and understand its advocacy of the need to
reinterpret ideas of religious authority and
tradition and apply Islamic precepts to
contemporary society. On issues ranging
from the role of women in society to
rekindling a "creative interaction" with non-
Muslim philosophies, Shahrur argues that
Muslims should reinterpret sacred texts and
apply them to contemporary social and
moral issues.
Shahrur is not alone in attacking both
conventional religious wisdom and the
intolerant certainties of religious radicals
and in arguing instead for a constant and
open re-interpretation of how sacred texts
apply to social and political life. Another
Syrian thinker, the secularist Sadiq Jalal al-
'Azm, debated Shaykh Yusifal-Qaradawi, a
conservative religious intellectual, on
Qatar's al-Jazira Satellite TV in May 1997.
For the first time in the memory of many
viewers, the religious conservative came
across as the weaker, more defensive voice.
Al-Jazira is a new phenomenon in Arab
language broadcasting because its talk
shows, such as "The Opposite Direction,"
feature live discussions on such sensitive
issues as women's role in society,
Palestinian refugees, sanctions on Iraq, and
democracy and human rights in the Arab
world. Such discussions are unlikely to be
rebroadcast on state-controlled television in
most Arab nations, where programming on
religious and political themes is generally
cautious. Nevertheless, satellite technology
and videotape render traditional censorship
ineffective. Tapes of the al-Jazira broadcasts
circulate from hand to hand in Morocco,
Oman, Syria, Egypt, and elsewhere. Al-
Jazira shows that people across the Arab
world, just like their counterparts elsewhere
Dale F. Eickelman
Middle East Review of International Affairs Vol. 3, No. 3 (September 1999) 80
in the Muslim majority world, want open
discussion of the issues that affect their
lives, and that new communications
technologies make it impossible for
governments and established religious
authorities to stop them.
Other voices also advocate reform.
Fethullah Glen, Turkey's answer to media-
savvy American evangelist Billy Graham,
appeals to a mass audience. In televised chat
shows, interviews, and occasional sermons,
Glen speaks about Islam and science,
democracy, modernity, religious and
ideological tolerance, the importance of
education, and current events.
Religious movements such as
Turkey's Risale-i Nur appeal increasingly to
religious moderates, and in stressing the link
between Islam, reason, science, and
modernity, and the lack of inherent clash
between "East" and "West," promote
education at all levels, and appeal to a
growing numbers of educated Turks.
Iranian, Indonesian, and Malaysian
moderates make similar arguments
advocating religious and political toleration
and pluralism.
As a result of direct and broad access
to the printed, broadcast, and taped word,
more and more Muslims take it upon
themselves to interpret the textual sources-
classical or modern-of Islam. Much has been
made of the opening up of the economies of
many Muslim countries, allowing "market
forces" to reshape economies, no matter how
painful the consequences in the short run. In
a similar way, intellectual market forces
support some forms of religious innovation
and activity over others. In Bangladesh,
women's romance novels, once a popular
secular specialty, now have their Islamic
counterparts, making it difficult to
distinguish between "Muslim" romance
novels and "secular" ones.
The result is a collapse of earlier,
hierarchical notions of religious authority
based on claims to the mastery of fixed
bodies of religious texts. Even when there
are state-appointed religious authorities-as in
Oman, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Egypt-there
no longer is any guarantee that their word
will be heeded, or even that they themselves
will follow the lead of the regime. No one
group or type of leader in contemporary
Muslim societies possesses a monopoly on
the management of the sacred.
THE EMERGING PUBLIC SPHERE
Without fanfare, the notion that
Islam should be the subject of dialogue and
civil debate is gaining ground. This new
sense of public space is shaped by
increasingly open contests over the use of
the symbolic language of Islam.
Increasingly, discussions in newspapers, on
the Internet, on smuggled cassettes, and on
television cross-cut and overlap,
contributing to a common public space.
New and accessible modes of
communication have made these contests
increasingly global, so that even local issues
take on transnational dimensions. The
combination of new media and new
contributors to religious and political
debates fosters an awareness on the part of
all actors of the diverse ways in which Islam
and Islamic values can be created. It feeds
into new senses of a public space that is
discursive, performative, and participative,
and not confined to formal institutions
recognized by state authorities.
Two cautions are in order. The first
is that an expanding public sphere need not
necessarily indicate more favorable
prospects for democracy, any more than
civil society necessarily entails democracy.
Authoritarian regimes are compatible with
an expanding public sphere, although an
expanded public sphere offers wider
avenues for awareness of competing and
alternate forms of religious and political
authority. Nor does civil society necessarily
entail democracy, although it is a
precondition for democracy.
Publicly shared ideas of community,
identity, and leadership take new shapes in
such engagements, even as many
communities and authorities claim an
unchanged continuity with the past. Mass
education, so important in the development
of nationalism in an earlier era, and a
The Coming Transformation of the Muslim World
Middle East Review of International Affairs Vol. 3, No. 3 (September 1999) 81
proliferation of media and means of
communication have multiplied the
possibilities for creating communities and
networks among them, dissolving prior
barriers of space and distance and opening
new grounds for interaction and mutual
recognition.
*Reprinted from the Foreign Policy
Research Institute (FPRI) WIRE The 1999
Templeton Lecture on Religion and World
Affairs. Foreign Policy Research Institute,
1528 Walnut Street, Suite 610, Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania 19102-3684 For membership
information, contact Alan Luxenberg: (215)
732-3774, ext. 105.