Modernization under the Rules
of Globalization
Javed Jabbar
When referring to the ‘rules of
globalization’ it is tempting to drop the ‘s’ and say globalization is the
rule of a single state. And to say this is not to demonize the United States. It is to
appreciate its extraordinary power and creativity. For instance, the World Intellectual
Property Organization in 2002 registered 44,500 applications for new patents from the
United States. The next four countries, including Germany, Great Britain, Japan and the
Netherlands, could not together equal more than 40,000. That is the kind of unprecedented
lead a single country today enjoys in terms of technical creativity.
And that is related to the real root of its
power. That root is the first amendment to the United States Constitution which says, in
effect, that there shall be no law to abridge freedom of thought or expression.
We are living in a world where a single
country’s economy is ten trillion dollars strong. Elements of its armed forces are
physically present in over 100 countries at the same time. That is certainly going to
shape globalization. How do we deal with the singularity of a particular state? It may be
the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, which
were precursors of contemporary globalization. Or it may be democracy, which is offered as
the ultimate model, but which, particularly now in South Asia but also earlier in the
1930s in Europe, fails to produce checks and balances. It can distort the whole direction
of society and generate extremism while all the institutional and theoretical checks and
balances collapse.
How are these emerging tensions viewed?
First, we have to note some contours, for example, cultural contours. Bergson1 said that
‘culture is the sum total of man’s products’. But that may be too physical
a definition. There is also the view that culture is about a society’s capacity to
stimulate the creativity of its people simultaneously on several levels. The level of life
and family, the level of work and productivity, the level of free speech, the level of
arts and crafts, the level of political institutions.
And if the individual in Asia or Europe today
lives in that context of culture, the media are inevitably part of this modernizing
process. They are a kind of soothsayer who advances globalization. But the media also
deliver self-fulfilling prophecies. There is a dangerous nexus that seems to be emerging
between corporate media and state power as a silent partnership and even under the banner
of ‘freedom of expression’, whereby corporate media actually advance the
interests of states.
The other contour is the decline of the
state. News of the death of the state is premature. We are, in fact, living not in the age
of nations as suggested by the term ‘United Nations’. We are living in the age
of the state. Never before has there been such a large corpus of global laws, policies and
rules on an interstate basis. States have negotiated this new framework of human
existence. So the state is not going anywhere. However large multinationals may become,
the state is only changing its role. It is not being eroded, particularly post-9/11.
Another contour is that modernization wants
us to separate church from state, which is fine, because the church represents a
theocratic extreme that is not acceptable. But it also wants us to go to another
extreme– the secular state. And what does this mean in terms of an individual’s
life? You separate
the church from the state: you separate the
body from the soul. You want the individual to fill this vacuum with the pursuit of
rational scientific thought. And that is where the crisis begins, with the bypassing of
the spirit.
It is spirituality that is required in a
state. A state need not be religious and need not be theocratic. It does not need to be
secular but it can be spiritual. And the need therefore arises to foster the spiritual
state based on the Sufi tradition,2 which is the real essence of Islam and which takes a
mystical, value-based, experiential approach to Islam and not a hand-me-down type of
approach. Where do we stand in Asia in general and in the Islamic world in particular
against these contours?
I would refer to the great Muslim philosopher
and social scientist, Ibn-i- Khaldun, who lived about 700 years ago. He formulated the
concept of ‘assabia’, which really represents social cohesion, group loyalty and
solidarity. Even though it is sometimes misread as cultivating loyalty to a tribe or
promoting parochial interests over those of humanity, the more profound application of
assabia is the universality of the human community which has broken down in virtually
every Islamic country.
And that is the root of the crisis, because
the tensions within Islam are perhaps far greater than the tensions between Islam and
Europe today. There are tensions between sects and schools of thought, and tensions
between a government that might represent a Muslim majority but is unable to satisfy the
expectations of Muslim civil society.
The tensions between Muslim states were
perhaps worst expressed in the Iran-Iraq war, which lasted almost a decade and cost the
lives of millions of people. There are the tensions of Islam and the absence of ijtihad
which is the real development of jihad that has nothing to do with violence. Jihad is the
struggle for self-improvement. The Prophet of Islam, after scoring a decisive military
victory said, ‘And now begins the real jihad’. And from that comes ijtihad,
which is allowed for in Islam but which we in Muslim countries have abandoned for
centuries. It is the interpretation of Islamic sources, applying contemporary and new
knowledge and rationality to what has been revealed in the Holy Quran and by the
traditions of the Prophet.
The rules of globalization from the Pakistani
perspective have to be seen from how unique Pakistan is. Pakistan could be called the
single most unique country on the planet today.
There are five categories of nation states.
The first is the historical state, of which China, Persia and Egypt are examples. The
historical state occupies the same territory and has had the same people and the same
language for thousands of years. The second is the migratory state. Millions of Europeans
migrated to North America, South America, Australia and Southern Africa, and got rid of
the locals or subsumed them. They created beautiful new states: migratory states. The
third is the permutated state, for example Germany. This is no disrespect to Germany, but
Bismarck brought together Germany in the nineteenth century and created the state out of
something very historical. The fourth is the post-colonial state, such as Jordan, Iraq,
Uganda and Kenya. The fifth is the religion-based state, and there are only two states in
this category: Pakistan and Israel. Whereas Israel does have a historical connection with
the land on which their prophets first preached Judaism, Pakistan has no similar
historical claim of a direct connection between our Holy Prophet’s original land and
the territory of Pakistan. As a word, ‘Pakistan’ is a synthetic creation. It is
a beautiful but new ‘put-together’ name, unlike Israel, Egypt, or China.
Pakistan is a country that had to develop its identity soon after it was created.
Pakistan was the most modern state to be born
– and at only three month’s notice. Lord Mountbatten, on 2 June 1947, decided to
‘create’ India and Pakistan on 14-15 August 1947 by arbitrarily moving up the
original approximate target of 1948. Pakistan became the first country in the world born
with two wings separated by a thousand miles of territory. It was the first country
post-World War II to disintegrate, in 1971, and therefore had to reinvent itself, to
create a sense of ‘Pakistaniat’.
We are a lopsided federation with four
provinces, one larger in population than all the other three. And it began with a man who
was an ultra-modernist: Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Under the shadow of Gandhi he is not as
well-known internationally and is misperceived as the ‘divider’ of South Asia.
The fact is that he wanted to remain within a confederal India right up to 1946. He could
barely speak the Urdu language and yet millions listened to him rapt, because they totally
trusted his integrity.
Today Pakistan is ruled by a military
general, which is one of our many contradictions. But the good news is that the mullah
alliance, known as the enemy of liberalism, secured less than 11% of the popular vote.
After the bombing of Afghanistan, the people of Pakistan, uneducated as the majority may
be, had great political sense. They gave General Musharraf 84% approval rating in an
opinion poll (by Pew Research), which shows the kind of enlightened motivation that people
have the capacity for.
There is a silent revolution going on in
Pakistan today. 33,000 women are elected to local government councils, 17% of seats are
reserved for women in our legislatures and yet the barbaric custom of karo-kari, where a
woman can be killed by her brother or her husband merely on suspicion of illicit sexual
relations, remains in certain areas.
Lastly, Pakistan is the epitome of freedom of
expression in Asia and in Muslim countries. By any standard it has some of the highest
levels of freedom of expression. In fact, I would suggest there is more freedom of
expression in Pakistan’s media than in countries with higher levels of social and
economic development such as Singapore or Malaysia. Singapore’s per capita income is
about US$22,000 and Pakistan’s is about US$400.
The tensions arising from the rules of
globalization will have to be dealt with by each Muslim country in its own context. Islam
is a very heterogeneous set of cultures. It has its homogenous unifying faith but it is
necessary to increase the level of enlightenment and knowledge in Europe about each
individual Muslim society. (Courtesy FES)
(Javed Jabbar is the founding
Chairman of the South Asian Media Association and a former minister of information in
Pakistan.) |
