Focus Article: Study on Islam and the West – Mutual Anxiety
Review by Mona Naggar
Germany’s Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations has brought forward an intercultural study on political violence in the West and the Islamic world, past and present. This study, worked on by one German and two Arab scholars.
In his attempt to open a dialogue with the Islamic world political scientist Jochen Hippler critically examines modernity and its relation to violence. Since the Enlightenment the hope has existed that societies and states would be able to resolve their conflicts with a minimum of violence.
The Western world has in fact struggled hard to reduce interstate violence during the past few centuries. This is connected above all with the development of state orders, functioning judicial systems and internal mechanisms for regulating violence.
But the modernization process has also produced violent phenomena of unimaginable magnitude such as colonialism, Stalinism and German fascism. Non-Western societies, too, experience on their path to modernization genocide and wars of varying magnitude, such as the Armenian genocide at the beginning of the twentieth century or the division of Pakistan in the 1970s. Read more…
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World Commentary
- Between Pop Culture and Jihad: Muslim Youths in Germany
- How Do Women Influence Political Islam in Indonesia? by Susan Blackburn
- Iran and Leftist Confusion by Reese Erlich
