The Effect of the Global Economy on Communication and Perceptions Between Muslims and non-Muslims - Research Paper Example

? The Effect of the Global Economy on Communication and Perceptions between Muslims and non-Muslims in the 21st Century Your College/University Research Proposal A crucial aspect of understanding cultural diversity is studying a topic that has particular relevance to our current society and the challenges that society faces in adopting new identities from people all over the world. Islam, the world’s largest religion, is subjected to many different stigmas and misconceptions, leading to a kind of ethnic isolationism among non-Muslims. Despite Islam’s presence all over the world, the West still believes most Muslims hail from the Middle East, where they perceive violence and terrorism to be the chief exports. Despite this view, there is plenty of sociological, anthropological, and political evidence to support the theory that there are very large differences between populations of Muslims in places like India, Indonesia, Iran, and Europe (Croucher, Turner, Anarbaeva, Oommen, & Borton, 2008). In each location, the practices of the Islamic faith are different in very significant ways, which could create some potential for conversation between Muslims and non-Muslims in these countries. A potentially fruitful aspect to look at specifically in the study of Islam in today’s world is examining how Islam is contrasted in its properties from Christianity and Judaism, and whether communication between these two sets of people is possible. It seems very likely that a healthy dialogue is very much possible, especially given the flattening of the world’s power structure and the coalescence around the global economy, as contrasted to economies centered on the religions of nations. Branching out from this topic, the hypothesis is offered stating that the development of the global economy will make communication a much more likely prospect and that is Muslims decide to reach out in terms of communication, the economic and political underdevelopment seen in primarily Muslim countries may be corrected. Thus, this is not only an exercise in cultural understanding and the factors that make this possible, but also a prescription for correcting some of the social ills in countries that reject communication with other faiths. The Effect of the Global Economy on Communication and Perceptions between Muslims and non-Muslims in the 21st Century Countries in the modern world may be underdeveloped for any number of reasons. These could include a lack of resources, natural disasters, or a manmade disaster such as a devastating war. Most of the time, however, countries are underdeveloped because of the philosophical stance they take toward other countries. In many cases, this philosophical stance is the result of a religious exceptionalism measured above its neighbors. This religious view informs the political, and thus drives the country toward isolation. Iran, like many other countries in the Middle East, treats itself as superior because of its high level of integration of politics and religion. North Korea, even though it lacks an official religion, regardless treats the state itself as worthy of worship; thus, the country seeks isolation from the other nations of the world. This kind of isolation inevitably results in underdevelopment that creates an environment for both a lack of understanding of cultural differences and economic underdevelopment. The United States, which is relatively open to other cultures, has a high rate of economic development because the culture values the process of doing business more than the identities of those doing business. It seems that communication between different religions, particularly between Muslims and non-Muslims, is a crucial aspect of the cultural understanding that is necessary for the Middle East and other predominantly Muslim countries to escape from under the weight of their underdevelopment. This requires a better cultural understanding of Muslims from the perspective of the non-Muslim, and an understanding of non-Muslims from the perspective of Muslims. This is a testament to the importance of not only cross-cultural communication but also education, which provides the basis and justification for this communication. Overcoming these challenges to respect between cultures could prove to be a significant step toward global cooperation. There are a number of misconceptions about Islam among Christians, Jews, and other primary religious groups that perhaps slow down, or completely obstruct, communication between the different religions. The first among these misperceptions is that Islam is confined to the Middle East. Many people in the West believe this is true probably because of the political tension. However, religion is separable from politics in most circumstances. Knowing that there are approximately 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, it is important to remember that most Muslims live east of Pakistan (Ahmad, 2007). Only about 6 million Muslims reside in the United States, as contrasted to a country such as Indonesia, which has a population of about 210 million Muslims. For this reason, Indonesia seems to be the world’s largest Muslim country (Rudnyckyj, 2009). In addition to these political geographic misconceptions, many non-Muslim outsiders perceive the religion itself to be antithetical to the doctrines of other monotheistic faiths like Christianity, to be espousing violence against people of other faiths, and to be oppressive of women, none of which is true (Ahmad, 2007). The diversity of the ways in which Islam is practiced all over the world provides proof that there are very few underlying principles of how every Muslim in the world relates to Allah. Islam in India, for instance, shares very little resemblance to Islam in continental Europe. In India, where approximately 138 people are Muslim, there is an integration of religion and politics, where for instance the government subsidizes Hajj pilgrimage (Ghosh, 2008). This kind of subsidization would be unthinkable in Western countries, although it is relatively common in the Middle East. Although Islam comes into contract with the Indian culture, the religion adds to the rich diversity in the country. Many Muslims have had prominent roles, giving Islam a face in the country that otherwise respects traditional religious practices. These differences between the two groups have caused great changes in Indian Islam ever since the 12th century. In Iran, a country that is typically at the top of Americans’ minds in terms of countries that represent Islam, the practices of Muslims is quite different from those in India. Iran is actually quite different in the religious identification of its Muslim citizens from other countries in the Middle East. Between four and eight percent of Iranians are Sunnis, as compared to 90 percent Shi’a. In other Middle Eastern countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq, these numbers tend to be reversed, with large Sunni majorities. As a result, Iran is again a special case, with many kinds of distinct practices from the rest of the Muslim world. Westerners do not recognize the difference between Sunni and Shi’a Islam, and how the practices of those two divisions have developed over the course of centuries. Therefore, even though Iran is a commonly recognized Middle East country, it neither represents the Arab world, nor a “traditional” definition of what constitutes a Muslim country, just like India and Indonesia. In Indonesia, another country not typically associated with the Islamic faith, the practice of the religion is undergoing a modern transition. According to Rudnyckyi (2009), capitalist ethics and managerial principles are being fused with input from the Qur’an and other Islamic teachings. In this way, Muslims in Indonesia are becoming increasingly moderate in the face of a changing world dynamic in which capitalism and the global economy is taking on a role of central importance. This represents a kind of compromise between traditional religious values and the modern leaning toward global capitalism that has not yet been seen in Middle Eastern, Arab countries (Rudnyckyj, 2009). As a result, Indonesia may emerge from the state of being underdeveloped within the next few decades, if it continues to participate in global trade. Indonesian Islam, as such, reflects a composite of many different religious practices and thus may indeed be unrecognizable to a Muslim visitor from Europe, the Middle East, or even India insofar as those places were not influenced by the previous spiritual culture of the country. In Great Britain and France, the story is once again quite different. However, unlike in Iran and Indonesia, the Islamic faith is a much smaller minority and subject to greater misperception from the overriding society. In France, for instance, the total Muslim population has been estimated at between 5 and 10 percent, representing nearly two-thirds of all new immigrants to the country (Croucher, Turner, Anarbaeva, Oommen, & Borton, 2008). France recently attracted much attention for its ban on the burqa, the traditional Islamic headscarf worn by women (CNN, 2010). As a result, some Muslim practices have been forced to change as a result of political pressures. This kind of phenomenon (where religion and its practices are changed because of a hostile political climate) is not unusual and certainly not new to Muslims, who occupy every country on earth and are a minority in most of them. It is a fair assessment that Muslims in France are interested in seeking the same sorts of goods that French Christians are: a productive job, a prosperous home life, and the freedom to accomplish those ends. These kinds of interests are different from Muslims in Afghanistan, for instance, because prosperity and productivity are exceedingly rare in underdeveloped countries. However, Muslims in France face constant discrimination, particularly in the job market (AP, 2010). Members of other religious groups in countries where Islam is a minority do not see this concern as a pressing issue because of the economic development and success of the country and because misconceptions about Muslims are common in Western countries. Many Westerners contrast Islam from Christianity in terms of the economic success of countries where those religions respectively are the majority systems of faith. However, this kind of contemporary shift to evaluating religions based on their financial viability represents a corrupt and fundamentally erroneous normative evaluation of religious faiths. Muslims from underdeveloped nations are less inclined to look at religion as a contributing factor for economic success (Rudnyckyj, 2009). Kuran (2004) identifies many of the reasons why Islamic countries, particularly those in the Middle East, lost ground to Western nations in the building of their commercial economies. Much of these institutions have to do with Islamic legal backgrounds not shared in Western countries. One of these legal contexts is the Islamic law of inheritance, which held back capital accumulation. Another weakness of Islamic countries in adapting to the 20th century business environment was a lack of the concept of a corporation: a business entity that many different individuals enter into, contribute to, and take no liability from. These factors, along with the waqf, which represents the holding aside of resources for the purposes of charity, contributed to the overall lagging behind of Islamic countries firmly committed to the ideals of its state religion. Although many of these obstacles were overcome in the 19th century, Muslim majorities in the Arab World, Iran, and Indonesia still suffer from economic backwardness. Kuran (2004) takes the next logical step in claiming that the Middle East’s private economic sectors and human capital deficiency stand among the lasting consequences of traditional Islamic law (p. 71). Some countries like Indonesia have taken a long-term approach to dealing with the issue of adapting to global capitalism by integrating Muslim teachings with Western concepts (Rudnyckyj, 2009). This is the kind of approach that Kuran and others would believe is necessary for not only economic development, but also productive dialogue between the different religions. Because religions are often implicitly (or even explicitly) tied to the political nature of certain countries, communication between a Christian country (like the United States) and a Muslim country (like Iran) is often incredibly difficult. However, if both countries coalesced around global capitalism as a unifying principle, it seems likely that each party would put aside their religious differences for the purpose of doing business. From this stage of being business partners, a fruitful discussion of cultural differences would be much more likely. Van Boven (1991) highlights another important aspect of religious communication and cooperation across borders: respect for persons and human dignity (p. 438). In his comments, the author remarks that differences in religious ideologies causes not only tensions between members of the same country (in the case of Christian and Muslim Egyptians, for instance), but also a destabilizing force in the international system. Increased religious fervor removes the kind of productive economic relationships that countries can form through long periods of time, ruining the legitimate progress that has taken decades literally overnight. For this reason, “it is clear that the prevention and resolutions of conflicts, irrespective of their national or international characters, are major and primary responsibilities of governments and intergovernmental organizations, notably the United Nations” (van Boven, 1991, p. 442). Thus, we see the role of governments in increasing cooperation between different religions as they are represented in different countries. While governments cannot solve the problems of communication in this modern sphere, they certainly can have a large influence in whether the different Islamic countries help or hate each other, and whether Western countries can appreciate the cultural differences, particularly those of predominantly Islamic nations. Understanding the status of Islam in the modern world is crucial not only because of the global population of Muslims, but also because cooperation between different groups is crucial in the era of global capitalism. It seems that both capitalism (as a system of voluntary relationships) and governments can have positive roles in ensuring cultural differences are overcome. The diversity of Islam in different parts of the world is largely due to the political climate in which those religious practices, even when under the same umbrella, are carried on. To avoid the kinds of conflicts that have plagued the world over the past few centuries, we should look to overcome borders and intolerance to establish a global system of mutual aid. Works Cited Ahmad, H. (2007). Top Ten Misconceptions about Islam. Retrieved 2011, from Jannah: http://www.jannah.org/articles/misc.html AP. (2010, March 26). Study shows French Muslims hit by religious bias. Retrieved March 10, 2011, from Otago Daily Times: http://www.odt.co.nz/news/world/99211/study-shows-french-muslims-hit-religious-bias CNN. (2010, October 7). French burqa ban clears last legal obstacle. Retrieved March 10, 2011, from CNN World: http://articles.cnn.com/2010-10-07/world/france.burqa.ban_1_french-burqa-ban-ban-last-year-full-face-veil Croucher, S., Turner, J., Anarbaeva, S., Oommen, D., & Borton, I. (2008). Ethnic Identification and Religiosity: An Analysis of Muslims and Non-Muslims in France and Britain. Montreal, Quebec: International Communication Association. Ghosh, S. (2008, September 13). Haj subsidy has Air India fuming. Retrieved March 10, 2011, from The Financial Express: http://www.financialexpress.com/printer/news/360651/ Kuran, T. (2004). Why the Middle East is economically underdeveloped: Historical mechanisms of institutional stagnation. The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 18, 71-90. Rudnyckyj, D. (2009). Market Islam in Indonesia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15, S183–S201. van Boven, T. (1991). Advances and obstacles in building understanding and respect between people of diverse religions and beliefs. 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