The Effect of Globalization on Muslim Youth - Essay Example

________________ Grade __________________ d: 2008-12-19 The Effect of Globalization on Muslim Youth There is no doubt in the notion that globalization has effected the Muslims by taking on new meanings in the wake of global processes. On one hand where it has provided unlimited opportunities in the name of 'outsourcing' and 'liberalism', on the other end we cannot ignore the distance it has broadened across time and place. Therefore globalization has provided important insights by reshaping economics and by highlighting the power of multinational corporations and global networks of capital to produce and reproduce inequalities in communities that are far removed from their business headquarters. This way it has only awakened the growth of risk, uncertainty and insecurity particularly for the Muslims of future generations. From physical assaults and racial profiling to an array of new cultural processes, globalization has created a multicultural environment for our Muslim youth which has opened the doors for our Muslim youth to enter 'war on terrorism'. Such an environment has only developed a richer understanding of race and ethnicity in young lives to see how these relations configure around work, leisure and consumption practices. Global processes so far has supported Muslim youth by escorting them to new technologies which has helped them in finding an easier way to be called 'terrorists'. Muslim youth has also suffered through the current age of migration which has spawned a diverse range of global movement and settlement (Nayak: 4). Moreover, such transformations have changed what we use to call once our 'local rituals' into 'global' ones and has taken the form of 'modernization'. Many theorists have declared that globalization is now being challenged on two fronts, first by its own internal weaknesses, contradictions, and inequities, and secondly by the response of the Muslim world. There are reasons to it, since Muslim world possess culturally different world-views which are different from what Muslim youth perceives, therefore the real challenge lies not in diversity but in establishing an open society with a genuine plurality of systems and options, and which offers a diversity with unlimited scope for co-operation in the pursuit of shared values and common interests (Dunning: 189). Young activists or what globalization has highlighted in the context of youth as inadequately formed adults, are the most effected ones as far as the consequences of globalization are concerned. Many scholars have declared globalization as the main subject in focussing largely or explicitly only on adults, and youth are assumed to be less fully formed social actors or subjects less able to exert the agency in the face of globalization that some scholars are, rightly, eager to document. Theorists mention our youth irrespective of any religion to be engaged in an ongoing process of social and cognitive development, therefore they suggest they have higher responsibilities and acquire more rights as they move into adulthood. However, globalization creates an assumption on behalf of our youth that marks traditional work and citizenship; for example, young citizens are not limited to enjoy global processes to the extent that they have rights (Orozco & Hilliard: 206). In many cases it is seen that such rights are limited while socializing into strict rules or norms of political involvement rather than being considered thinking agents who may express important critiques of citizenship and nationhood. An example of 'globalization' misuse before us is that of extremists to which Muslim youth is escorting, in the name of religion, rather in the name of fundamentalism. Liberalism or Extremism Theorist Rawls elaborates that liberalism is a significant aspect in making a visionary world which retains genuine pluralism along with providing a dimension that promotes global political, economic, and cultural humanity with handful opportunities for co-operation, and competition. Unfortunately 'foreign' Muslim youth has accepted the fact that a global society hinges on the concept of reasonable pluralism which according to Rawls goes parallel to the diversity among multicultural people with different traditions of thought, both religious and non-religious. This has provided them with a threat of entering into race 'war' or politics where the fault lines no longer exist between 'Muslim Americans' and 'white Americans' (Maira, http://cssaame.com/issues/24/maira.pdf). On the contrary, there are Muslims particularly youth, who are embarrassed to accept that Islam stand for humanity and unity. Despite Islam provides an authentic base for coexistence and co-operation, this Muslim youth follow their cultural heritage and want to impose the Islamic faith upon the rest of the World. This youth is unable to embrace the flexibility of being a liberal Muslim and are unable to cater for the demands of changing times. Globalization escorts Muslim youth towards extremism in situation where they remain unable to accept this reality that sharing the perception of interdependence between the West and the Muslim world is what is required by a global world order. While acknowledging that global processes has promoted in joint economic ventures, increased trade, and the movement of goods, it has proved that restructuring Muslim values can be the building blocks for future co-operation. This is where Muslim youth lacks confidence and trust and leads to extremism. Globalizing Violence Young Muslims who form radical socialization, while accompanying violence form gangs who offer dislocated youths discourses, practices, and forms of organization that allow them to re-territorialize their lives. This is the local reasserting against global forces that help promote globalized environment around their communities and families. Muslim fundamentals who often form gangs also provide a context where the self can be recentered in an intimate setting, where loyalty and collective identity are central. However, such localization that thrust Muslim youth, particularly illiterates against the forces of globalization are themselves shot through with conflict and implicated in some of the same global processes they seek to address (Vasquez & Marquardt: 120). In light of such contradictions, that takes place between Muslim youth on the basis of culture and on the grounds of citizenship, evokes the feeling of radicalism. This has adverse side effect on the Muslim youth who lives in the West because they are held liable to pay the price for the fundamentalism their other Muslim brothers present before the world. Of course here it is globalization that accounts for the innocent Muslims who are the sufferers. It is globalization that ends up in conflicts that has profound local effects. In the name of 'war on terror', in addition to the large number of Muslim casualties, the conflict evokes widespread dislocation that affects majority of areas where Muslims reside. This includes particularly those areas where the army follows some strategy against 'terrorists', and where guerrillas operate, entire villages are wiped off for the violence that globalization teaches our Muslim youth. Even Muslim students are not refraining from such 'measures' that has to occur in the name of 'war on terror'. This way globalization affects our Muslim youth not only economically but to the extent where such 'war on terror' initiatives touch the everyday lives of students. Racial Profiling Although many scholars globally have provided compelling post-structuralist analyses to deconstruct the 'making' of youthful identities in educational institutes, few have indicated how oppressive styles of whiteness can be challenged, resisted or transformed. Recent post-structuralist approaches suggest that globalization has held responsible for making 'identities' clear in the area of ethnicity, and has been able to challenge the fixity of 'colour' models of race and racism. Globalization, many contemporary cultural theorists have referred to as the threshold where racism emerges but not something inherent amongst youth as a consequence of racial privilege, but, rather, when all ethnicities are immersed with elements of class difference around a number of identities. This approach is applicable to our Muslim youngsters who amidst the development of identity politics, suffer at the hands of social exclusion of minority groups in the West. This arise a sense of dominance and sub-ordinance among Muslims, to which the elders does not respond, but youth does. It is the social inequalities of racism that are marked by global processes after suffering at the hands of poverty, they look toward the West. Even power relations are dependant upon global structures which continually produce and reproduce in often unpredictable ways as the contours of oppression and resistance shift and intertwine (Nayak: 143). Rather than seeing through the power lens of closed binaries, globalization has created means and methods to distinguish between Muslim youth on the basis of different castes, colour, sex, and social status, therefore where the former categories come to dominate and subsume the latter elements, post-structuralist analyses investigate the multiple interconnections that globalization has created between race, gender, sexuality and social class. In particular, the way global change has affected Muslim youth in context with culture and ethnicity is not wholly unproblematic and challenging as compared with earlier models of race and racism. Many scholars view such globalized research in the context of emerging forms of cultural hybridity and a new urban ecology because 'new ethnicities' spark a post-structuralist clamour to do away with the innocent Muslim youth. But if such concept is perceived to be true, who is behind the curtain of violence that the same token is there not now a need to do away with essentialist notions of Muslim youthful subjects as either 'innocent angels' or 'terrorist demons'. Such questions even do not blame being 'globalized' but they put the onus on globalization for it increases those binary relations between Muslims that create a room for racism towards composite forms of discrimination and internal gradations. Obviously, it is through globalization that racism is deconstructed in a way when Muslim youth enters West as asylum seekers or those non-Muslim minority groups whose cultural experiences do not chime easily with the ideological harmonies adhered to by Muslim majority. Globalization theorists concentrate more to youth studies while including them not just as examples of other processes but as areas that contain their own processes of responding to or even creating globalized culture than to any other aspect. And when it comes to Muslim youth education we are well aware of those 'madras' or 'mosque like madras' that aims to cater all the poverty class under the umbrella of religion. Therefore there is a need for globalization theorists to work on the consequences that globalization upholds on Muslim youth culture and education, thereby moving beyond approaches that are largely local or national in focus, or even universalist in their assumptions, to be able to link schooling and youth development to a globalized context. This does not indicate that there is a question of whole world outside Muslim schools and madras but to analyze the mediums of being so global. There is a question that needs to be answered by having a wider analytic frame and can take account of issues such as immigration, economic shifts, or media consumption that impact the lives of our children and students in very tangible ways, ending up in 'extremism'. Increased capacity of being globalized has stimulated an unprecedented flow of immigrants to the international structure and to the immigrants themselves. Most of the immigrants are youngsters from the third world Muslim countries and as newcomers are able to cope up with many international origins and a wide range of cultural, religious, linguistic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. Whether they challenge a nation's sense of unity or not, it is obvious for the West to consider them as pain in the neck. Here globalization intimidates both, the Muslims as well as the original residents of the areas in which newcomers settle, therefore Muslim youth starts cooking up against them. Muslim immigrants and their subsequent youngsters are considered into the receiving society as a primary challenge of globalization, therefore they are often deprived of their rights resulting in long-term social implications. Globalization has no doubt created an identity but to formulate an identity that allows comfortable movement between Muslims and non-Muslims is at the very heart of achieving a truly global soul. Global capitalism Globalization has not left our youth behind those variants that range from the anti-authority libertarianism to a new-conservatism which, though economically conformist advocates a considerable amount of intervention within the public sphere. In other words, globalization has attracted Muslim youth by adhering to the supremacy of the market as the optimal authority in resource allocation, with free trade, opportunity, self-regulation, and individual enterprise providing a sure means to reward everyone (Newman: 8). If we talk about Muslim society and youth in the United States, libertarianism is most prevalent amongst marginal groups and has never made any meaningful impact on public affairs. It is often overlooked that behind such extremism, there is a serious coherent philosophy that represents the youth for a simpler, less competitive and regimented way of life on the part of millions of citizens throughout the world. One of the above discussed contentions presents dangerous chauvinistic and extremist societal energies which are influencing Muslim youth under the shelter of religion. Globalization has made the ultra-nationalist responses consider about threatening the achievements of the modern secular world that had been based on the normative side of the evolution of an anarchic society of states of humane governance (Dunning: 285). It is of significance to acknowledge that there are strong positive as well as negative effects and potentialities arising from the various aspects of globalization, to which our youth is subjected. The above discussion suggests that without the pursuit of justice and without establishing political and management infrastructures which could operationalize and actualize justice in relations between states, economies, and peoples of the world, a peaceful, prosperous, and co-operative global human society may remain a dream. Works Cited Dunning John, Making Globalization Good: The Moral Challenges of Global Capitalism: Oxford University Press: Oxford, England. 2003 Maira Sunaina, Accessed from < http://cssaame.com/issues/24/maira.pdf> Nayak Anoop, Race, Place and Globalization: Youth Cultures in a Changing World: Berg: New York. 2003. Newman Otto, The Promise of the Third Way: Globalization and Social Justice: Palgrave: New York. 2001. Orozco M. Marcelo & Hilliard Baolian Qin, Globalization: Culture and Education in the New Millennium: University of California Press: Berkeley, CA. 2004. Vasquez A. Manuel & Marquardt Marie Friedmann, Globalizing the Sacred: Religion across the Americas: Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, NJ. 2003. Read More