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Islam and Muslims: Religion, History and Ethnicity
Ron Duncan Hart

Like a phoenix the Muslim countries 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 focused on the Cold War, and they gave little attention to the developments across the Muslim world, as emerging countries were creating national infrastructures and ideologies. The seeming defeat of Soviet forces by Muslims in Afghanistan fueled the Islamic jihad movement, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to the creation of a new group of Muslim nations in Central Asia. Simultaneously, Muslim nations across Asia and Africa were maturing economically and politically, and the struggle for their ideological future has intensified in debate and violent conflict. The re-emergence of these countries 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. 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 1.6 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.1
Life as a Muslim means different things to 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 some Sub-Sahara, African Muslim communities, 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 dominating East Asia, India dominating South Asia, and Islam dominating Southwest Asia and North Africa. 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 to be 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 until the end of World War I.
The twentieth century was marked by the age of Muslim nationalism, and 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 more secular people are open to Western capitalistic models of liberal democracy, 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 governments of the ayatollahs in Iran and the Taliban in Afghanistan have been examples of theocratic political movements.
Some in the conservative movement in Islam are against Western cultural, political, and economic influences with United States 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 struggles with the Russians and Indians are secondary to the one 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.

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