ABSTRACT
The triumph of Western civilization in the twentieth century—a widely accepted if somewhat ambiguous phenomenon (Roberts 1985)—was received by the Muslim world with ambivalence. On the one hand, Muslims were delighted to be able to share the benefits of modernity, manifested most vividly in a rise in the standard of living made possible by rapid advances in scientific and technological innovation. On the other hand, they were well aware that such progress was achieved by the West at the cost of a decline of religion, the clearest indication of the prevalence of secular norms in almost all aspects of life. Post-World War II academic discourses on modernization consistently harped on the theme of the inevitability of the decline not only of religion, but also all primordial phenomena as identified by anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1963) in his ground-breaking essay on “the integrative revolution.”
