[Islam-Online- Politics]

Our attempt to understand the root causes of recent attacks on Islam and the efforts to distort its image must begin by examining the relationship between Islam and emerging realities on the ground. For, as I will endeavor to demonstrate, it is not by sheer coincidence that the campaign against Islam receives its momentum from certain powerful quarters in western society, the center and stronghold of the global order of today. The campaign against Islam is a conscious and deliberate effort by the established global order to discredit a universal belief system which has been presenting itself as a civilizational alternative to western secularism, and to undermine a historical movement which, as its critics admit, has the potential to become a globalizing power. The recent western interest in Islam dates back to the mid-1970s, when the Islamic way of life became the choice of an increasing segment of Muslim society. The rejuvenation of Islamic ideas and practices was felt in all levels of society, including the educated and well-to-do, and took various forms, including intellectual and political.
This development came as a surprise to many western scholars and policy makers, who, a decade earlier, had declared the triumph of western liberalism and the demise of Islam in the Muslim world. Daniel Lerner made, in The Passing of Traditional Society, the following assessment of the place of Islam in the Middle Eastern society:
whether from East or West, modernization poses the same basic challenge-the infusion of "a rationalist and positivist spirit" against which scholars seem agreed, "Islam is absolutely defenseless." The phasing and modality of the process have changed, however, in the past decade. Where Europeanization once penetrated only the upper level of Middle East society, affecting mainly leisure-class fashions, modernization today diffuses among a wider population and touches public institutions as well as private aspirations with its disquieting "positivist spirit."1
By the late 1980s, the western perception of Islam took a drastically different form. With the spread of Islamic reassertiveness eastward and westward, within and beyond Muslim society-a phenomenon often referred to as Islamic resurgence-many eminent scholars in the West began to view Islam not as a dying creed of purely historical significance, but as a formidable force, potentially threatening to western globalization. In his widely read and highly celebrated book, The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama had the following to say about Islam:
It is true that Islam constitutes a systematic and coherent ideology, just like liberalism and communism, with its own code of morality and doctrine of political and social justice. The appeal of Islam is potentially universal, reaching out to all men as men, and not just to members of a particular ethnic or national group. And Islam has indeed defeated liberal democracy in many parts of the Islamic world, posing a grave threat to liberal practices even in countries where it has not achieved political power directly. The end of the cold war in Europe was followed immediately by a challenge to the West from Iraq, in which Islam was arguably a factor.2
While Fukuyama moves quickly in the next paragraph to dismiss the relevance of Islam on the grounds that it "has virtually no appeal outside those areas that were culturally Islamic to begin with," the fact remains that Islam is perceived by the author to pose a threat to western globalism, as it is capable of providing a "coherent ideology" and is "potentially universal, reaching out to all men as men."
The above sentiments are echoed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, an American statesman and foreign policy strategist. In Out of Control, a book published shortly after the demise of the Soviet Union, Brzezinski sounds more alarming as he warns against an Islamic expansion to Central Asia, taking advantage, as he puts it, of the power vacuum created by the collapse of the Soviet empire:
Since nature abhors vacuum, it is already evident that outside powers, particularly the neighboring Islamic states, are likely to try to fill the geopolitical void created in Central Asia by the collapse of the Russian imperial sway. Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan have already been jockeying in order to extend their influence, while the more distant Saudi Arabia has been financing a major effort to revitalize the region's Moslem cultural and religious heritage. Islam is thus pushing northward, reversing the geopolitical momentum of the last two centuries.3
While Brzezinski does not dismiss the capacity of Islam to effect sociopolitical transformation of global proportions, he rightly points out to the current limitations of contemporary Islamic reassertiveness, reflected in the absence of a concrete model for translating Islamic ideals into social reality.

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