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.