ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the role of Islam in the process of economic development and cultural change by engaging in a cross-cultural comparison of the role of Islam in national development in Malaysia and Nigeria. It adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to demonstrate how, through the intersection of geography, history, politics, organizational leadership and nationalism, Islam has played different roles in shaping national development in the two countries. The main thesis of the chapter is that geography, locality and culture interact with and serve to complicate the process of class, state, ethnic group formation and articulation and the ways in which religion is empirically conceptualized and practiced. Northern Nigerian Muslims did not begin to seriously realize their relative lag in modern development until the 1950s when, because of social and political developments after the Second World War, the liquidation of colonial empires became inevitable.
