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Specific
Strategies for Meeting Western Mentality
4. Specific
Strategies for Meeting Western Mentality
We have uncovered
the underlying, basic features which have produced secularism and New Age
mentality. These are a lower, primitive layer of polytheism, a second layer of
Christianized superstition, and an upper layer of imperial control. Whatever
the pretence of rationality and individual freedom, basically, the Westerner
has a magical concept of the world and believes the must be controlled.
The Muslim
missionaries in the Balkans built on this foundation and the result was the
only stable and permanent Muslim communities in Europe. Their strategy worked
on the basis of superstition and military control. The Sufi practitioners used
sleight of hand tricks to awe the superstitious Christian population and thus
convinced them of the superiority of Islam by miracle-working. They reinforced
this by military control. These were the two things that Europeans could
understand and they worked.
On the other side
of Europe Islam failed to preserve the flower of European civilization,
Andalusia, because of its dependence on other means of presenting Islam. In
Muslim Spain the emphasis was on reason and culture. There was no European Dark
Age, merely because Paris and London were agricultural market villages. There
were centres of civilization at the time, but all of them were in Muslim Spain.
Reason and culture were ploughed under and the Christianization of Andalusia
five hundred years ago turned the cultural and intellectual centre of Europe
into a ghetto from which it has never recovered.
The conclusion is
that the most effective way to reach Westerners remains trickery and
miracle-working along with a show of power. These are the very methods
presently used in the West. Marketing advertisement is an appeal to trickery
that by-passes the reasoning processes. The threat of military power continues
to be the only way of controlling the Balkans even today.
Obviously there is
a self-defeating element in such an approach. There is another aspect of
history, and that is the fact that Medieval Islam contributed culture, science
and philosophy to the West. These continue to have an influence, and if
constantly applied have the potential of spreading Islamic values. The
challenge is to maintain these elements of Islamic influence in one's contact
with secular individuals and, insofar as one can, to influence matters more
broadly. These influences have continued for over a thousand years. Muslims may
and can retrieve the pre-colonial values of Islamic civilization through
education, the arts, and sciences. Globalized civilization is of such a low and
superficial character that it is unable to compete with the vitality of what
has been proven through centuries of success to be better. A bold penetration
of the academic world on one hand, and the world of entertainment on the other,
with Islamic education, science, and arts would be irresistible. The best
strategy in dealing with secularized Westerners is to develop these areas in
one's personal life and aggressively share them.
