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Prospectus |
The waning of the twentieth century has been characterized by the irrepressible effervescence of
Islam. The end of empire released powerful forces partially suppressed by colonialism. The
effect of this explosion has been global and profound, benign and sinister. It has produced
reactions of fear bordering on panic and hope for the recovery and radiation of values held
dear by all civilizations.
During the past decade two new idioms affecting the perception of Islam in the West have
commanded attention. The first, caricaturing Islam as the "Green Menace" replacing the
Soviet "Red Menace," is significantly negative. The second is a slowly emerging recognition
in ecclesiastical, intellectual and political circles of the theological validity and
demographic, hence political, weight of Islam. This latter idiom, is somewhat more
positive in its effect. These two themes co-exist in a dialectical relationship. The
dominance of one over the other cannot be clearly foretold. If militant radical trends
among a minority Muslim group increase and expand spatially, then the emerging global
respectability of Islam will be in eclipse. If these radical militant actions subside, a
new globally–triumphal recovery of Muslim identity linked with spiritual growth and political
influence could very well be the result.
These themes can be better understood by analysis of their content and by a survey of the
structure of the highly complex world of Islam. The religious paradigm of the Muslim belief
system has been exhaustively examined for several centuries in an enormous corpus of literature
in many languages, hence no replication, or even summary, of that monumental bibliographic
accretion is attempted in this essay. We seek instead to classify and evaluate elements of
the paranoia towards Islam and to balance it with countertrends suggestive of a tranquil,
constructive meeting of cultures. There then follows a tentative taxonomy designed to suggest
an order for a complex world of ethnic, geographic, political variations united in a central
theme of transcendental importance: Islam.
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