fundamentalists of many stripes have become highly adept at weaving the cultural, political, and economic backlashes against globalization into one flag and one broad political movement that seeks to take power and pull down a veil against the world". The point, he asserts, is that between Muslim states and Western states, cultural disparity is vast, and "the greater the discrepancy between a country's cultural norms and the norms of the globalization system, the more wrenching will be the process of adapting to it".
Such cultural discrepancies can obviously be expected among Muslim states and those of the West. If Western principles are understood to be the guiding principles of globalization, so Western nations need not suffer in the transition. Indeed, globalization is often accompanied by a loss of national sovereignty for those who expect to participate. Even among the Western nations of Europe, the debate over nationalism and sovereignty has raged throughout the 90s as the European Union has demanded that all participants must relinquish a degree of autonomy in the name of economic integration.
For Muslim states, the thought of losing national sovereignty under economic consolidation is abhorrent to many, particularly fundamentalist thinkers. Economic integration with the world at large obviously opens the floodgates for Western culture and media; and as Akbar S. Ahmed attests in History Today, "athe cultural invasion of western media imagesathe stereotypes of Islam in the Western mediaacoupled with the indifference of the west[to Muslims], combine to create a focus on the West as the enemy". Indeed, resistance to globalization seems to divide the planet into two camps, with Islam on the one side and the West on the other.
In this configuration, Ahmed states,
Western ideologies seem mainly to be rooted in a vision of the world as secular, democratic and ordered by the need to acquire material goods fo...