REVERSE CIVILIZATIONAL PROCESSING, EUROCENTRISM OR POLYCENTRISM DIALOGUE

Saied Reza Ameli

Saied Reza Ameli is a doctoral student in Sociology of
Culture and Mass Media at the Royal Holloway University of London. He is
former managing director of the Islamic Center of England, and founder
of the Institute of Islamic Studies. His research interests include
religious identity, globalization and intellectual discourse. He has
presented several papers in the international conferences such as:
"Eurocentrism and Islamophobia,"Cultural Globalization and Muslim
Identity," "Consequences of Cultural Globalization on Religious
Identity," and "The Process of Globalization and Iranian Identity in
Britain."

For several years Western civilization considered as dominant
and chief force of civilization for rest of the world. Today the reverse
processing is under construction. It is inevitable that without dialogue a
mutual exchange of knowledge, information, and culture as well as civilization
heritage; no civilization can be alive anymore. From the points of view of
postmodernist, it is no longer as easy for Western nations to maintain the
superiority of adopting a civilizational mission' towards the rest of the
world, Eurocentric hegemony in which the others are depicted as occupying the
lower rungs of the world, which they are gradually being educated to climb up to
follow their betters. Rather, this modernist image, at the heart of
modernization theory, is being disputed and challenged. Having said that, this,
then is one important sense in which postmodernism points to the decentring or
polycentring of culture and civilization. The emphasis in polycentrism' is not
on spatial relations or points of origin but on fields of power, energy and
struggle. The poly' does not refer to a finite list of centers of power but
rather introduces a systematic principle of differentiation, relationality, and
linkage. From this perspective, there is no epistemologically privileged for any
single community or part of the world, whatever its economic or political
power.

Indeed, dialogue needs sort of equality and power balance
between nations, cultures, and civilizations. In a fair and equitable dialogue,
no one can represent the world' dominantly. In contrast, Eurocentric dialogue
is overbalancing exchange of knowledge, information, cultures, and Civilization
experiences.

In the frame of equivalent dialogue, polycentric
multiculturalim is an option for mutual fairness and practical civilizational
interchange of knowledge within global civil society. Hear polycentric
multiculturalism differs from liberal pluralism in several manners, which will
be elaborate in this paper.