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.