{"id":20015,"date":"2016-07-10T07:03:41","date_gmt":"2016-07-10T06:03:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=20015"},"modified":"2016-07-10T07:03:41","modified_gmt":"2016-07-10T06:03:41","slug":"muslims-and-modernity-the-road-from-jihad-to-brexit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=20015","title":{"rendered":"Muslims and modernity: the road from jihad to Brexit"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As a believer in lifelong learning, I regularly attend short courses at a London further education college called the City Lit. This weekend, I attended a one-day course entitled <em>\u201cHope And History: A Short Introduction To Contemporary Issues In Muslim Contexts\u201d<\/em>. Our tutor was Pakistani-born Dr Farid Panjwani, a lecturer at the Institute of Education, who was very informative and balanced.<\/p>\n<p>Dr Panjwani gave a few basic facts about contemporary Islam:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>About 22% or one in five of the world population is Muslim<\/li>\n<li>Of all Muslims, Sunnis are around 85% and Shias are 15%<\/li>\n<li>Most Muslims are not Arab but Pakistani or Indonesian<\/li>\n<li>In the UK, there are 2.7 million Muslims or 4.5% of the population<\/li>\n<li>The largest component of UK Muslims (40%) are of Pakistani origin<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>He emphasised that there are huge cultural differences between Muslims around the world and warned against the Western tendency to see Muslim societies as monolithic.<\/p>\n<p>Dr Panjwani explained the major consequences of colonialism and modernity for Muslim nations:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A displacement from political power with the fall of old, long-standing empires such as the Ottomans<\/li>\n<li>The marginalisation of the Islamic legal tradition governing largely personal matters (sharia law)<\/li>\n<li>A challenge to social structures with new modern occupations and new gender roles for women<\/li>\n<li>Social conditions such as the power of political elites and high levels of unemployment that nurture rage and a sense of injustice<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>He explained that a key question for most Muslims around the world is: \u201cHow does one remain true to one\u2019s religion while living a successful modern life?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I found it interesting that Dr Panjwani mentioned a book which was published 20 years ago:\u00a0<em>&#8220;Jihad vs McWorld&#8221;<\/em> by Benjamin R Barber. I read this book at the time and reviewed it <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/currentaffairs.html#Jihad%20vs%20McWorld\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Today we tend to use the word &#8216;jihad&#8217; (which actually means &#8216;struggle&#8217;) in the context of Islamic fundamentalist movements like ISIS but, in the sense that Barber used the term, it could be seen as referring to the anti-establishment, anti-globalisation, anti-immigrant movements that we see today in so many European countries and in the support for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders (in different ways) in the United States.<\/p>\n<p>Indeed, on one interpretation, there is even an element of similarity between those Muslims who reject Western values and seek to assert their distinct identity and those British voters who supported Brexit in order to oppose the political and business establishment and express antipathy to immigrants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As a believer in lifelong learning, I regularly attend short courses at a London further education college called the City Lit. This weekend, I attended a one-day course entitled \u201cHope And History: A Short Introduction To Contemporary Issues In Muslim Contexts\u201d. Our tutor was Pakistani-born Dr Farid Panjwani, a lecturer at the Institute of Education, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20015"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20025,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20015\/revisions\/20025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}