Islam Between East and West

Abstract

Islam Between East and West is a remarkable work of multidisciplinary scholarship by a Bosnian Muslim lawyer who is currently serving a fourteen-year term in a Yugoslavian prison for his Islamic activism and “fundamentalist digressions”. Educated in Sarajevo and Paris, Alija Ali Izetbegovic has been active in Islamic work throughout his adult life. Writing, lecturing, and organizing Islamic educational and welfare activities, he has been a constant source of intellectual and spiritual inspiration for thousands of young Yugoslavian Muslims. Alija’s main objective in this book is to examine the roots of the cultural crisis, moral anarchy and political upheavals of the modern West and to show how these are related to the influence of partial truths and reductionist ideological perspective. The central thesis of this book is that there are three distinct views of the world that reflect three different elemental possibilities: the religious, the materialistic, and the Islamic. Islamic worldview is integral in that it combines both pure religiosity and pure materialism. While pure religion emphasizes conscience and pure materialism emphasizes nature, the focus of Islam is on man who lives in the worlds of both conscience and nature. The author then shows how both pure religion (Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism) and materialistic philosophies (Socialism and Capitalism) have given partial answers to life’s integral questions of “ideals” and “interests” and how they have been trying to compensate for their primal inadequacies and half-truths through continuous compromises in both theory and praxis. The author argues on the basis of considerable historical evidence that the actual realization of these two opposing views of the world has been quite different from what they originally aspired to achieve. A modified, post-renaissance humanist interpretation of Christianity and the religio-moral basis of socialist egalitarianism with its teleological view of history clearly demonstrates that ...