ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Hamid Mowlana elucidates four cardinal concepts of the Islamic worldview that may serve as the fundamental principles of ethical communication in Muslim societies: (1) tawhid (unity, coherence, and harmony of all in the universe), (2) amr bi al-ma’ruf wa nahy’an al munkar (commanding to the right and prohibiting from the wrong), (3) ummah (community), and (4) taqwa (piety). It is his thesis that, in contrast to the ethical foundation of the modern West with its emphasis on the secular, ethics in the Islamic world are predicated on the inseparability of the religious and the social. Throughout Islamic history, he asseverates, information has been not a commodity but a moral imperative. Hence, imported communication systems of the modern West have not gained a broad popular base in the Muslim region. According to Mowlana, the challenge of Muslim nations in the globalization era is “how best to devise structural changes and institutional setups that would help to maintain the precious communication and ethical balance which has been traditionally part of the Islamic civilization.” The Islamic principles of tawhid and ummah can easily find their resonance with African ubuntu philosophy (Chapter 14), East and South Asian traditions of thought (Chapters 8 and 32), and Native Hawaiian epistemology (Chapter 9). Islamic ethics, as Mowlana depicts them, bear a remarkable resemblance to the ethics of African communities (Chapters 7 and 13) and Confucian societies (Chapters 17, 19, and 32) in that they all insist on responsibilities as the concomitant of rights.
