0.6 The end of the west  (Page 18/19)

Systemic conditions have made some Muslims more susceptible to these messages. These differ from region to region, but many who identify with jihadist causes are alienated from their secular environments, experience a sense of hopelessness, and are attracted by the prospect of glory and salvation. Young, poorly educated Afghans, Palestinians in the occupied territories, Syrians and Iraqis have enjoyed few opportunities and their frustration can be channelled into utopian causes. Most European countries have failed to integrate millions of their Muslim immigrants socially or economically. Much of the Arab world, moreover, is in a distressing state: Rapid population growth and high dependency on oil revenues saw per capita incomes stagnate since 1975; levels of knowledge and innovation are poor and the macroeconomic environment, the quality of governance and public institutions, and the marginalization of the region from the global economy have discouraged entrepreneurship. Fifteen percent of the labour force – 30 percent of those between 16 and 24 years old – are unemployed.

How do we meet this challenge?

After WW II the West chose to assert the universality of the principles of the Enlightenment. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the General Assembly in 1948 and followed in the 1960s by covenants on Civil and Political Rights and Economic and Social Rights. Western governments have continued to assert the superiority of Western mores. But the principles which prioritise the individual as the bearer of rights and the sovereignty of the people as the foundation of the state do not have legitimacy in much of the Muslim world, or indeed many non-Western spheres. As the Islamic state must be founded on God’s rule, it cannot be secular. Individual rights against the Islamic state are thus impossible. Instead Muslims have obligations (fara’id) to the community (umma), as well as to God. This is no different to the Christian and Judaic injunctions to ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ and ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. It is mirrored in all organised belief systems. The obligations that underpin the Islamic orthopraxis are the essence of community.

Efforts to dismiss these approaches and impose Western models by asserting universal values are counterproductive. During centuries of European expansion, many non-Westerners encountered modernity as hegemony. The emergence of a globally integrated world dominated by the United States has sharpened that feeling. Opposing practices in traditional Islamic societies that Westerners find offensive by invoking universal human rights runs foul of the Islamic concept of asalalh, the notion that the normative values of each people arise from their culture. Culture, as Clifford Geertz notes, is the context for “. . . the social production of meaning.” Western pressure, in the absence of intercultural dialogue, has led to a dangerous conflict with Islamists over concepts of social and political order, power and norms.