Упрощенная HTML-версия
Author : D. Trofimov
Deputy Director, Fourth Department of the CIS Countries, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Fed-
eration, Candidate of Science (History)
THE WAVES OF DESTABILIZATION in the Middle East that
have risen high in recent years, terrorist acts that follow one an-
other, persecution of those who think differently or follow different
religions in the Muslim countries and even outside them bring to
mind, once more, Prof. Huntington. Indeed, can Islam and vio-
lence, Islam and democracy and, in the final analysis, Islamic and
non-Islamic values cohabitate within the frames of the steadily
globalizing community of men?
Any religious system, Islam being no exception, is much more com-
plicated and has more dimensions than its description; this article
is merely another attempt to outline certain important problems
that should be discussed. We can easily identify as least several
scores of fundamentally different "Islams" of trends and madhhabs (schools of thought or in-
terpretations) or even "Islams" of different countries and regions. In everyday life, we deal with
people, not civilizations, some of whom do not necessarily accept the whole set of the so-called
Islamic values.
IN DIFFERENT COUNTRIES, Muslim and non-Muslim communities interact differently.
Within the American "melting pot" and Canadian multicultural-ism the process is not smooth
yet conflict-free. Multicultural communication in Russia and Central Asia still relies, to a great
extent, on the old Soviet basis; this means that so far individual elements of civilizational oppo-
sition can be controlled fairly successfully. Labor migration to Russia, likewise, is conflict-free:
labor migrants are, on the whole, carriers of the common post-Soviet identity. Cohabitation of
Muslim and non-Muslim societies in the Middle East, Asia and Africa is not smooth at all, to
say the least.
Europe is not only living amid an obvious crisis of multiculturalism; the loss of its own civiliza-
tional identity under pressure of migrant flows from the Muslim East has become a fact.
ISLAM is a civilization of the word which is frequently sacral and, by implication, more important
than human life. A rightly chosen word can bring glory or even power.
At the individual level, people should demonstrate tolerance, mutual respect, the desire to un-
derstand and accept each other within the permissible variety and observation of clear and re-
ciprocal rules of co-habitation, the main of them being "When in Rome, do as the Romans do."
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