What the West Doesn’t Owe Islam

Globalization has brought more and more peoples and societies around the world into contact with international standards of law, commerce, and communication. That process has also enabled a number of formerly underdeveloped societies to experience extraordinary patterns of economic growth, especially in the last third of the twentieth century. For some scholars the rise of Asian economies during this period has suggested an impending “Pacific Century” along with the thought that, after all, Asian societies such as China must have hidden cultural “resources” that enabled them to make the modernizing turn that apparently did not conform to Western models of the past.1

In part, as a reaction to these developments, North America and to some extent Europe experienced the flowering of multiculturalism, which includes the view that all peoples and societies are equal.2Sometimes this point of