Faith and the Environment
1985
Ismail Serageldin
Download
As the Muslim world shakes and stirs in a fitful search to reaffirm its independent identity, it confronts the cultural as well as the political realities of a world dominated by the West generally and the United States specifically. This has lead many in the Muslim world to define their identities by emphasizing the "otherness" of the Muslim being from the hegemonic world context.1 Doubtless there is much truth to this "otherness", but emphasizing it at the outset leads to a "rejectionist" approach which, to my mind, is narrow and constrictive and in fact does not do justice to the richness and variety that Muslim culture has achieved in the past, and can achieve again, by the more self-assured process of adaptive assimilation that characterised its confrontations with the Greek and Roman cultures at the time of the early Muslim conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries A.D.