LIVING ON THE BORDERLINES: BEYOND DIALOGUE OR CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS

Muqtader Khan

Muqtader Khan is Assistant Professor of Political Science
at Adrian College. He is also Director of the Center for the Study of Islam
and Democracy, Editor of Ijtihad: A Return to Enlightenment, and Managing
Editor of the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences. He holds a PhD in
International Relations from Georgetown University. His latest work, Islam
in International Affairs, will be published by Routledge
Press.

The long-standing discourse on Islam and the West essentially
advances two paradigms. The first involves a clash of civilizations between two
alien and competing ethos and the second advocates a dialogue between two value
systems which not only share a common heritage (Abrahamic monotheism) but have
already contributed to the development of each other for centuries. The
conflict-based paradigm was made famous by Sam Huntington, and the present
Iranian President, Mohammed Khatemi is the leading advocate of the conciliatory
approach.

But interestingly, what these two approaches have missed is
that the presence of significant Muslim communities in the West has already made
both these paradigms redundant. Muslims who live as communities in the West
interact with it and participate in all its elements, politics, economics,
culture, without assimilating have actually gone way beyond clash or dialogue.
They have precipitated an existence on the borderlines of these two
civilizations and are demonstrating how practice can shape both theory and
politics of identity. While in the first two paradigms, identity drives theory
and politics, in the case of Muslims in the West; life/practice drives the
theory and politics of identity. In this paper I shall explore four essential
consequences of Islam in America and the lives that Muslims have created for
themselves on the border of Islamic and Western civilizations.