True freedom starts with breaking the chains of mental slavery. Unfortunately, most Muslim states, barring a few exceptions have not made that transition.
Muslims need to undergo a revolution in thought in order to determine their true destiny. This must begin by shedding Western ideas that they imbibed during the colonial era.
Imperialism uses a large number of tools to maintain its hegemony over the rest of the world. None is more powerful than language and the mind of the colonized people. Freedom cannot be achieved without decolonizing the mind.
They opened fire with cannons and bombs on the houses and quarters, aiming specially at the mosque, firing at it with those bombs. They also fired at suspected places bordering the mosque, such as the market. And they trod in the mosque with their shoes, carrying swords and rifles. Then they scattered in its courtyard and its main praying area and tied their horses to the prayer niche They ravaged the students' quarters and ponds, smashing the lamps and chandeliers and breaking up the bookcases of the students and the scribes.
Few Muslims doubt that one of the major tasks facing us is the reversal of the impact of colonialism on our societies. However, the extent of this impact is seldom noticed. YUSUF AL-KHABBAZ discusses the need to decolonize our minds.
There is also a problem between dichotomizing between Islamic and Western, since many Muslims, for all intents and purposes, are following the modern Western lifestyle, including in their expections of what purpose schools should serve. So, is it the job of an Islamic school to teach Islamic to non-Muslims?
I would recommend exploring the work being done around turning schools into something more like community centers, that would be open all year round, and in the evening and on weekends, providing a range of services not just for children but with community needs in mind. This is a way of keeping the system intact but redistributing the money and power among those who the system is supposed to serve, not just distant and detached bureaucrats, politicians and business men.
While there are growing global discussions about the role of education in people’s lives, most ongoing discussions focus on children and schools. In many cases, the role of adults and the family in education is neglected or marginalized in these discussions. Part of this problem, perhaps, stems from a general misunderstanding of education, which is most often equated with merely going to school. An important first step, therefore, is to make clearer distinctions between education and schooling.
Education is about a process of becoming, and so the education one seeks is a crucial factor in what one will become. However, it is also important to broaden the definition of education beyond formal schooling, to include all the informal ways we learn. In this context, Islamic education is the process of becoming a Muslim, which can include learning a vocation or various forms of abstract knowledge, but first and foremost it is becoming a Muslim.
Despite the current socio-political tensions between the Islamic and Western worlds, there is a largely unquestioned allegiance on the part of many Muslims to the normative modes of thought and action associated with Western modernity. Since the days of gaining limited independence from direct colonialism after World War II, most discussions on education in the Muslim world have been concerned with seeking empowerment in the modernist world system.
With the increasing American colonial presence in the Muslim world, beginning with the 1991 war against Iraq and gaining momentum on the heels of 9/11 with recent invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, there have been numerous efforts aimed at reforming school curricula and revising textbooks. From Saudi Arabia to Indonesia, American officials have been pressuring local governments to eliminate anything that the Americans say promotes “violence and terrorism.”
The quality of the school will depend on the quality of the community it serves. But the majority of them are just cesspools. There’s no way your children can go to these, without getting ‘soiled’, not to mention that it could even be very dangerous for them.
1By the late 20th century, the recognition emerged that this system had largely run its course or that it was becoming obsolete and in need of some sort of reform. The main benefactors of this aging system—America, Europe, and Japan—fought each other in horrifically violent wars, which were called “world wars” because they involved the colonial spheres of influence of those powers, and which spanned the entire planet.
Few Muslims doubt that one of the major tasks facing us is the reversal of the impact of colonialism on our societies. However, the extent of this impact is seldom noticed. YUSUF AL-KHABBAZ discusses the need to decolonize our minds...
Colonization, as you know, is often formally seen as a period of history when the European and American powers forcibly and physically held colonies throughout what is now called the Third World, and from which they drew fabulous wealth. This organized plunder by the Western powers began with Spain, whose adventure in the Americas was ironically funded by gold from the Islamic caliphate they had just destroyed. Spanish colonial power soon gave way to other powers, so by the end of the 19th century, most of the world was physically colonized by Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, Holland and America (which was a British colony that itself became a colonizing power).
Imagery is the key to understanding TV, and there are several angles we could select in order to evaluate the impact of this imagery on our lives. We could look at biological or physiological impacts, or we could look at cultural or social impacts, even political and economic.
1Schooling is a relatively new phenomenon in human history, really only extant for about a century in most of the world, less in some places and more in others, but relatively new. It is an institutional response to several social needs, such as the need for social order, the need for acquiring marketable skills, the need for passing down one or another state ideology or identity.
Culture is nothing more than the way we live our lives, and it can be informed by religion or not. If you are asking about a more monolithic entity like "civilization" then maybe we can say that Muslim civilization has declined, but that is nothing new. All civilizations rise and fall, including the Western civilization. It is somehow natural, and civilization is what we make it. Culture, on the other hand, is more local and regional, more amorphous and less linked to material objects like monuments and cities, which are what we usually use to judge civilization.
Generally speaking, there can be no single culture, since culture, as understood by social scientists today, refers to the way of life of a particular people at a particular time and place. Culture also has two dimensions, the material dimension and the symbolic dimension.
The title is a way to get us rethinking the simplistic notions of globalization being Americanization, which is endlessly, and often fruitlessly, debated. In a way, framing a discussion in terms of going "beyond" Americanization, is way to encourage thinking about globalization as a complex topic. Many of those who say globalization is Americanization miss the positive aspects of globalization - with our without America.
