Islam and anti-globalization movement

taken from http://abdennurprado.wordpress.com/

Islam and anti-globalization movement

February 4, 2010

Genealogy of reactionary Islam

The need for an Islamic theology of liberation appears to many as a logical conclusion the result of the vicissitudes suffered by Muslim communities in the last century and the international geopolitical situation in the early twenty-first century. To understand this need, we must go back to the Cold War era, when Western powers sided with the conservative currents of the Islamic world to prevent the meeting between the Islamist movements and the international left. An alliance that still acts as a suffocating on Muslim populations.

Everything leads us to the key issue of corporate globalization and the role they play in it from OPEC countries. We attended the collaboration reactionary sectors of the Islamic world with corporate globalization, to the point that today they are one of the pillars of it. Tariq Ramadan has referred to this alliance as follows:

"The entire Islamic world is under the tutelage of the market economy. The apparently Islamic countries from the standpoint of law and government, following the example of Saudi Arabia or petromonarquías, are more integrated economically neo-liberal system founded on speculation and submerged in transactions with interest (in reference to usury). " [1]

Already two decades ago, the economist Susan George highlighted the role that OPEC has played since the 70s of last century in the growing inequalities between North and South. Susan George says:

"The oil producing countries behaved like true capitalists, hoping to make lots of money to rely on professionals from New York or London. In this way, they lost an historic occasion and opened the door to tremendous coup concocted by countries that were already rich. The debt created by Western governments, banks and their agents, such as the IMF, has further weakened the South (comprising the member countries of OPEC), have been placed in a situation worse than before the great age of the loans, and opened the door to a real re-colonization ". [2]

Some countries have large external debts, including some of the self-proclaimed as "Islamic states", supposedly governed by Sharia law. Saudi Arabia (47.390 U.S. $ 2.006 billion), Pakistan (42.380 2006), Sudan (2006 est. 29.690.), And Iran (14,800 2006 est.).. Someone should remind the ulama , Grand Mufti and other government scientists that usury is forbidden in Islam ... Why Saudi Arabia, one of the major oil producers, has external debt, when thousands of Saud family members are assigned a monthly annuity only because the family? Most of this debt has been spent on weapons, bought from their owners. Make no mistake: these countries are only "Islamic" in those aspects which concern the State, especially in all matters relating to social control.

The obsession with religion understood as an extreme moral, a stifling puritanism obsessed with honor and sexuality, is a means to alienate Muslim populations, acts as a veil that prevents analyze the real causes of social injustices they suffer, and presents the perpetrators of these injustices as guarantors of national identity and honor. We are witnessing an extreme form of darkness, the hand of the reactionary mullahs, who occupy prominent places for their significance in the history of Islam, such as the University of al-Azhar or Meka Mosques and Medina. Obscurantist vision of Islam that is thwarting any possibility of critical thinking among believers, condemning their companies to remain in backwardness and ignorance. If religion is reduced to this, we could certainly subscribe to Marx's phrase, according to which religion is the opium of the people . Fortunately, religion is much more than this, or is it something else, a potential that can be put at the service of human liberation, insha Allah.

At this point you have to place the anti-communist discourse promoted by certain Muslim institutions from the Arab world to Southeast Asia. We are in the era of cold war, when communism is the absolute evil that now represents Islam. A good example of the relationship between Islam, anti-communism, secular dictatorships and Western interests occurs at the time of the call infitah (opening) promoted by Sadat in Egypt in the 70s of last century, in order to liberalize the economy (after the stage of "Arab socialism," declared overcome). Left trade unions and oppose the privatization policies and openness to foreign investment, but they are supported by the ulema of al-Azhar and the Muslim Brotherhood. Sadat supports the jamaat (assemblies) Islamic universities, to weaken left-wing student organizations, one of the main focuses of the opposition. It is in this context that we situate the emergence of anti-communism of the official ulama. Return to religion and liberalism go together. The successive shaykhs of al-Azhar fatwa issued anti-communist. Shaykh Muhammad Fahham launches a diatribe against students demonstrating against the government, called wicked and compel them to behave religiously. Abel Halim Mahmud Shaykh says that "Zionism is the mother of communism." Shaltut The imam said that "communism is Kafur. The Communist shells rosary does not say 'Al-lahu Akbar' but 'Marx is great'. "Hasanayan Muhammad Majluf, Mufti of the Republic, suggested that the Communists are regarded as apostates from Islam, in an era in which this could cause serious prejudice[3].

In Indonesia, the two largest Islamic organizations in the country (Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiya, with several million members) are involved in a decisive way in the anti-communist. During the years 1965-1966, Suharto unleashed a wave of killings that took the lives of over a million communists. As Noam Chomsky has reported, U.S. officials gave lists of communist sympathizers or local authorities, who were conducting a merciless manhunt, with the support. The Muhammadiya declare the jihad against the Gestapu (the Communist Party of Indonesia). It is sad to see the involvement of the two largest Islamic organizations in the country in one of the most tragic events of the twentieth century, which led to the deaths of more than one million people by the mere fact of being a communist militants.

But this alliance is not a thing of the past. Currently, some Muslim populated countries in the top positions in terms of income per capita in the world: Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, Brunei, Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia, countries develop their economies under U.S. military protection. But this privileged position not only manifests in the form of development cooperation from other Muslim countries. We must remember the many situations in which Muslims live in a dramatic situation. Hundreds of thousands of them crammed into refugee camps: Sahrawi in the Algerian desert, Sudanese in Darfur, Rohingya in Bangladesh and Thailand. Other situations are less dramatic, such as Chechnya, Somalia or Ethiopia. These situations of extreme poverty exist side by side with waste. In contrast, pharaonic projects include (in the sense of the word Koran) carried out by the petro-millionaire dynasties of the Persian Gulf, such as construction projects in Dubai ultra luxurious grand hotels gaining ground to the sea, in which you can even find ski slopes.

There is (that we know) a genuine development aid from rich Muslim countries organized by the third world. There is large-scale humanitarian aid, and hundreds of organizations working to alleviate immediate needs, but not a global project to help poor communities to generate their own coping mechanisms in the future. At this point one could deplore the way in which Saudi oil money wasted by financing major universities and hundreds of madrasas through which foreign populations are indoctrinated, creating a fracture in all Muslim countries between traditional Islam and Wahhabism. The only concern of Saudi Arabia in all human tragedies mentioned is to infiltrate and use them to impose their conception of Islam stickler destroying local traditions all in the name of religious purity, always at the service of imperialism. Saudi Arabia has earned hatred of the vast majority of Muslims in the world, both for its policy of dissemination of Wahhabism, for their support for U.S. domination, and by the contempt shown towards the plight of Muslims throughout the planet.

Wahhabism is not an orthodox interpretation of Islam but a reform movement, born in Saudi XVII century AD Later, the word reform has taken the sense of abandonment of an organic conception of the community in terms of power structures created with the industrialization. A state like Saudi Arabia represents the abandonment of tradition by economic interests, and was chosen by the British because it fit the plans for exploitation of natural resources designed for the Middle East. His appearance gives them an Islamic appearance, while the Modernist's work makes it easier to govern like their masters. Through the "open door ijtihad (interpretive effort in jurisprudence), the ulema in the service of the State are allowed to launch fatwas to justify everything that the government has an interest: the presence of American bases in Saudi, or the legality of political assassination, drug trafficking. In terms of international politics, Wahhabism is passing Islam as a piece of the market economy, working in particular with the International Monetary Fund.

Saudi Arabia: a country that trades in arms but it calls itself Islamicshort hand because the child who steals an apple, where the rulers live surrounded by an extravagant luxury while foreign debt reaches astronomical figures ... But the Prophet Muhammad (saws .) said: "He who racked with what has, that's who Al-Allah provides, and one that accounts for goods and accumulates to that is to whom Allah cursed and Al-away on your side" . What they have done in the cities of Medina Meka and leaves no room for doubt. Where a few years ago were the tombs of the companions of the Prophet (pbuh) now crowd the Mercedes dealership or Chrysler. In places associated with the prophetic mission of Muhammad (saws) there are now five-star hotels run by foreign companies. The destruction of heritage, collective memory of Muslims, is part of the policy of the Bani Saud since its inception. It's the same dislocation that is occurring on a large scale, operating from within Islam, from its very geographic center.

This is the entrance of Islam in the society of the spectacle: Wahhabism represents the Westernization of Islam, the abandonment of tradition to find its resemblance to the culture of representation and image. Image culture: the acceptance of images of different traditions, but not its contents. We are in a world where tradition says the idea of being reduced to folklore. This is what gives Wahhabism: not Islam but only its appearance, not truth but a stereotype. In this culture of the image are determined to "representatives of God on earth" of all religions, such as advertising, economists of the New World Order, news makers. Saudi Arabia as the birthplace of Islam, plays the perfect role for the policy of Western powers, a policy that can only end with the sacrifice of the image they have created themselves. The concise definition of Tariq Ramadan reflects a majority opinion:

"Saudi Arabia: the crossroads of all the lies and hypocrisy. First, from the West, where governments, although they know the horror of the dictatorship of the reactionary slavery and corruption, are silent for economic reasons. Then from the East and too many Muslims, who, because of financial manna, respond with silence more apparent betrayal and more odious to the principles of Islam. "[4]

Today we witness new episodes of this collaboration, never revoked. The reverse land reform carried out in 1999 by Mubarak, which involved the recovery of agriculture by capital leases, was backed by the Islamic Jamaat and the Muslim Brotherhood in the name of Sharia law and the right to property. You can still find on the website of Yusuf Qaradawi, an Egyptian also a fatwa in which he said that it is incompatible to be a communist and Muslim (the fatwa in response to a woman who asks her if she can marry "a Muslim communist" : the answer is no it is haram to marry a Communist, because the Communists are nothing short of evil who do not believe in anything ... even though the woman's question makes clear that the man in question is a Muslim). Qaradawi himself sitting to the right of the Emir of Qatar as U.S. troops prepare to invade Iraq from bases huge loan from the emirate, a country in which the Egyptian immigrants (among others) living in semi-slavery ... This certainly justifies the rejection of the left when working with Islamist movements, and highlights the close relationship between religious fundamentalism and neoliberalism. Quoting Samir Amin:

"In the realm of real social issues, political Islam is aligned in the field of dependent capitalism and imperialism dominant. It defends the principle of the sanctity of property and legitimizes inequality and the requirements of capitalist reproduction. The support from the Muslim Brotherhood in the Egyptian parliament to recent reactionary laws that strengthen the rights of the owners at the expense of tenant farmers (most of the small peasantry) is but one case among hundreds. There is no example of even a single reactionary law promotion in any Muslim state to which Islamist movements have opposed ... It's easy to understand, therefore, that political Islam has always had in its ranks with the ruling class of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan . The local comprador bourgeoisie, the new rich, beneficiaries of the current imperialist globalization, generously support political Islam. And it has forgone an anti-imperialist perspective and replaced by a stance "anti-Western" (almost "anti-Christian") that obviously leads only to the companies concerned to a dead end and does not therefore constitute an obstacle to the deployment of imperialist control over the global system. The history of the Muslim Brotherhood is well known. The Brotherhood was created by the British and the monarchy in the 1920s to close the passage to the Wafd, secular and democratic. Their mass return of Saudi refuge after Nasser's death, organized by the CIA and Sadat, is also well known. We are all familiar with the history of the Taliban, trained by the CIA in Pakistan to fight the "communists" who had opened schools for all boys and girls. He is also well known that Israel supported Hamas in the beginning as a way of weakening the secular and democratic currents of the Palestinian Resistance. Political Islam would have been much more difficult to move beyond the borders of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan without the strong support for continued and determined United States. Saudi Arabian society had not even begun to move beyond its traditional boundaries when it was discovered oil in the ground. It was concluded between the two sides an alliance between imperialism and the traditional ruling class, sealed immediately, which gave a new lease of life to the Wahhabi political Islam ... It is easy therefore to understand the initiative taken by the United States to break the united front of Asian and African states established in Bandung (1955), creating an "Islamic Conference" immediately promoted (since 1957) by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Political Islam entered the region by these means. The minimal conclusion to be drawn is that political Islam is not the spontaneous result of the assertion of authentic religious convictions by the peoples concerned. Political Islam was erected the systematic action of imperialism, supported, of course, by obscurantist reactionary forces and subordinate comprador classes. " [5]

In short, Islam is being used in power, in many cases to justify privilege and oppression, and fight the Left. This use by the State is often linked to the imposition of a reactionary view of Islam, focusing on forms and in the imposition of a morality of the herd. Corporate globalization and religious fundamentalism feed on each other, are two sides of the same phenomenon. Structural measures promoted by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank create the conditions that make it possible (even inevitable) the resurgence of fundamentalism, and ultimately, this fundamentalism justifies the intervention of the Western States. All this explains the Western support for reactionary vision of Islam.

But we must say that the analysis of Samir Amin is in excess maximalist: while it is clear that the dominant political Islam (especially the current Wahhabi / Salafi promoted from Saudi Arabia) appears as an ally of imperialism, it can not be inferred that all political Islam should be encased in that category. There is growing awareness of this problem within the Muslim movements, a problem whose resolution goes to build a new global alliance with the left and the global justice movement, as soon defend. There is no other choice but to work in this direction. It would be a blunder by the anti-capitalist movements in Muslim countries to raise their fight outside of Islam, Islam being the axis around which life in these societies. Fighting Islam and capitalism at the same time does not seem reasonable, and less if we realize that Islam is today one of the few living alternatives to neoliberal globalization.

Islamic theology of liberation

At this point we understand the importance of Islamic theology may charge release (TIL) in the context of the struggle of peoples against corporate globalization and the new imperialism and against the hegemony of alienating ways of understanding Islam that appear related to them. That is, to break the alliance between corporate globalization and religious fundamentalism.

TIL mean by a speech and a social practice that foregrounds the Quranic mandate to build a just and egalitarian society, in which the human being's spiritual dimension is taken into account, as opposed both to the reactionary views of Islam and neoliberalism. Facing drift towards Islamist movements ultra-conservative positions in the political and moral, the TIL recovery arises from the revolutionary message released by the Prophet Muhammad fourteen centuries ago, against the oligarchy of the time.

The TIL gains new strength in the post-11-S, with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the situation of Muslims in Burma and the continuing Palestinian Genocide. But above all, the TIL comes as awareness of the social impact of corporate globalization. The rise of neoliberalism and free market philosophy poses a threat to equality and social justice, as both conceived as a market society that reduces human beings to the extent of producer-consumer. A liberalized market economy, which has no regard for social affairs, or by indigenous cultures or by environmental concerns, can not promote overall economic and social welfare, not ensure sustainable development. Neoliberalism increasingly threatens civil rights, particularly the right to education, paid employment, and health.

Faced with this situation, the TIL proposes a radical reform of Sharia, which serves the disadvantaged. Proposes reform of Muslim family codes, in order to achieve full equality of women and men. It also proposes to incorporate the issue of economic justice in contemporary discourses based on Sharia, and concentrate on horizontal issues, themu'amalat or social transactions rather than on aspects of 'ibada or acts of worship. This reform is inspired by the notion of the sovereignty of Allah, that only Allah is our Lord, and therefore no one can be master or lord of his fellows. This understanding of Islam leads to question the ritualistic understandings and / or alienating religion. In applying these principles, it is necessary to create unions inspired TIL capable of vindicating the rights of workers in contexts where Islam is the religion of state, and where everything revolves around Islam.

The TIL supports the involvement of Islam in politics. If all components are removed ethical (religious) policy, medicine, economics ... what are we left? The post-Western civilization: a system of widespread depredation of the planet earth, which serves no rational or ethical criterion ... In western countries this system receives the counterbalance of civil society, mainly through the struggle of the communists and the anarchists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the civil rights movement emerged after the Second World War. But the counterweight is not strong enough today worldwide, and even less in the so-called third world, where large corporations embark on a policy of natural resource depletion, plundering villages and destroying their cultures, enthroned compliant dictators their interests and funding wars in those places where companies come together to address them. The TIL is presented as a challenge so-called "liberal Islam", which advocates a strict separation between religion and politics, a speech compliant with the new requirements for establishment . There is a policy of infiltration by think tanks Western, which promote anti-fundamentalist Islamic discourse and defense of the compatibility between Islam and democracy, human rights, etc., but is not critical of the policies promoted by the IMF International, the World Trade Organization and the World Bank. It's called "moderate Islam", promoted by British and American governments, as an offensive parallel to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The TIL has a prominent representative in the Sudanese Mahmoud Taha, who in his famous work The second message of the Koranidentified the ideal society proposed by the Prophet Muhammad with a "democratic socialism" (although the proper term to define their proposals would rather Communism .) According to Taha, the achievement of this ideal of community is necessary for human fulfillment. In a society ruled by selfishness and exacerbation of passions, human beings can not activate their full potential or live as a creature capable of Allah. At the same time, he believes that socialism can not be done without taking into account the spiritual dimension of human beings. Hence the failure of historical materialism and the Soviet regime, whose materialist conception of man was no different in substance from the proposal by capitalist society. Taha includes the perspective of democracy, gender equality, ecological values ...

The TIL does not deny its links to Muslim and even reformist Islamist movements, and can cite Shariarti Ali Sayed Qutb or to support their positions. Roots in the reformist movement before it was phagocytosed by Saudi Arabia and was set to serve the interests of corporate globalization and conservative policies. This return to the revolutionary origins of Islamist movements is the proposal of Shabbir Akhtar, in The Final Imperative: An Islamic Theology of Liberation . This is a British intellectual who disciple of Sayed Qutb recognized. The TIL could be linked with Islam, which recognized the totalitarian excesses committed and promote an openness to gender equality, ecological and democratic values. The Egyptian-born Swiss thinker Tariq Ramadan is presented as a bridge figure, which explains why media violence with which it is treated in the West.

A book to consider is Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire of Iran Hamid Dabashi. The criticism of the Islamic Republic of Iran will not lead him to embrace Western modernity as a panacea, but quite the opposite. Dabashi believes that the Islamic ideology has ceased to be the main factor of resistance against "colonial modernity." Militant Islam emerged certain conditions and remains a prisoner of them. Not able to meet the needs of the present or the challenges of corporate globalization. To renew the aspirations of the Muslims is necessary to review the concept of "Islamic ideology" in the sense of providing a local response and therefore limited to what is presented as a global challenge. No ideology of otherness to awaken the energies and create the necessary synergies to deal with predation global centers operated from corporate globalization. Neither this globalization is the "West" or Bin Laden "Islam." Most notably, they must overcome the legal views of Islam, leading to a multiple split between Islam and the West, Islam and human rights, Islam and feminism ... A series of fractures that are exploited by the empire to undermine and discredit the Muslim resistance.

The only way to save these fractures is to think of an Islamic ideology of liberation in convergence with other similar movements throughout the world. Muslims are not alone in the struggle. They can not keep thinking about his struggle with his back to the rest of the world, neither in terms of Islamic supremacism. An ideology that divides the world between Islam and West or between believers and nonbelievers have nothing positive to contribute. The contemporary situation we are dedicated to syncretism and the acceptance of universal values. Believes that Islam must rearticulated in relation to global capital. As a result of the globalization process, the massive migration of workers have dismantled the dichotomy "center-periphery" or "islam-west", which might have its raison d'etre during the colonial era. Dabashi defends multiculturalism and explores the similarities and differences with Christian theology of liberation, called an understanding. The revolutionary potential of Islam should be put at the service of humanity, not to serve the cause of Islam. Think in terms of diversity and syncretism, and not in terms supremacists.

Rather than a theology, we should speak of a theodicy, natural theology and rational universalist court, which seeks its foundation within the human being. Theodicy Dabashi defines this as "a form of liberation theology that not only realizes the existence of their moral and normative shadows, but, in fact, embraces " [6]. In the view of Dabashi, this theodicy achieved Islam itself free of its ghosts, its atavistic and forms of idolatry generated over the centuries. It is not only to rethink Islam in terms liberators, but to think from an Islam free of itself.

Islam and anti-globalization movement

The statement "liberation theology" refers immediately to the struggles of Christians in South America and the Third World, to overcome the alienating vision of Christianity and recover as a message of individual and collective liberation ... So, speaking of a "Islamic theology of liberation" we are getting from the first game when converging forces on a global scale, moving towards a joint response of the various religions to the challenges of globalization.

But this alliance is not only between religions. We affirm that Muslims struggle for social justice is in line with the global justice movement, against the alliance of religious fundamentalism (which actually has nothing Islamic ) and corporate globalization. You can not separate our analysis on the current situation of Islam in the state of the world in the global era. The global dominance of financial corporations leads to the disintegration of countries and the hunger of millions. The effect of the prohibition of usury or other principles of Islamic economics in Muslim countries would fail to change the new world order. The major Western financial companies would easily find ways of penetration. This means that in the context of globalization, there is the slightest possibility of a local Islamic society. Everything points to the increasing participation of Muslims in the global justice movement , as a key to the future.

We are in the beginning of construction of a global civil society, civil society no longer finds its way to political participation through the framework of nation states, but through a new emerging global ethic, based on solidarity and love to the plurality, in the struggle of peoples for their survival. We are placed in the field of values: democracy, freedom of religion and conscience, ecological values, distributive justice and gender equality. At the same time implies a resistance to the savage capitalism that threatens entire populations to hunger and uprooted from their ancestral cultures and worldviews. This struggle to be done from the defense of diversity and against the Euro-centric paradigm, so linked to racism and colonialism.

While there is hunger in the world, everything else is secondary. In the early twenty-first century, 950 million people living in situations of chronic hunger, 30 million people die each year because of poor distribution of food, 11 million of them children under 5 years. These figures surpass us and embarrass us, we sink into despair and force us to rethink our way of being in the world. We can not keep thinking back to this reality that we are accused, which shows the darker face of modernity. In this field, every action must be preceded by a serious study of the real causes of hunger.

The causes us back to economic, political, social, global. The local can not be thought without reference to global and vice versa. The world is one, mankind is one. We can not think breaking up, nesting, as if the wealth of the West would be independent of third world poverty, as if the earth is not one, as if Indonesia might not lead to fields to feed livestock feed in Canada, if prices howto from seeds that a farmer has to plant in Korea is not decided in Chicago, as if the drugs that can save children from a village in Zambia, but they do not have money to buy, were not patented in Lausanne.

From the awareness that we are all one, we must say it clear that hunger is not an accident or an accident of nature. There are situations of natural disasters causing famine, chronic hunger but of whole populations we are talking about is not an accident but the result of certain economic structures, relations with criteria established international criminals. We are governed by criminals, mass murderers who wear silk ties and smiling in the media to the masses. We know that the present food production could feed twice the world population, population growth is not a direct cause of hunger, and that many of the countries that have suffered terrible famines are actually exporting food. We know that in Europe and North America each year are wasted or thrown away tons of food to keep prices set by large companies, prices unaffordable for the less disadvantaged. We have seen entire countries move from situations of prosperity to poverty in a few years, because of economic policies promoted by the World Trade Organization. We have seen how social services are deteriorating in countries rich in raw materials. We have seen how the debt contracted by dictatorial governments to buy arms choking the life of the peasants, double victims of an irrational international economic policy, which has lost all ethical and humanitarian approach.

It is a system based not on meeting the basic needs of the individual and the search for balance, but in the exacerbation of passions and creating artificial needs that enslave the individual, keeping in a constant state of dissatisfaction. From an Islamic point of view, it is clear that this system is reprehensible and must be combated. I do not intend to fall into anti-capitalist rhetoric hollow and outdated. The Islam is on the side of the trade. The ability to create wealth and technological development are essential tools for the eradication of poverty, an achievement of humanity. For the first time in history we are in a situation of overproduction, in which the human being is capable of producing food to meet or exceed the basic needs of the world population. From this knowledge, it is necessary to make a lucid review on the aims of this wealth creation and the development of production, which can not be to the mere accumulation of capital beyond the needs of the people.

All who have studied the problem of hunger in the world know about the difficulties faced by these attempts. From the institutions the situation seems blocked. International institutions responsible for poverty reduction are strongly influenced by the persons concerned in perpetuating inequalities. United Nations departments are both the International Monetary Fund and the FAO. The contradiction between measures that promote the body either can not be more confusing.

Faced with this situation, the civil society on the planet should be put in motion, and Muslims can not be outside of this search for global solutions to global problems. Several years ago we saw the emergence of a transnational social movement that aims to address the challenges of globalization, which has brought together around the World Social Forum. Social movements are at the forefront, and that means looking ahead, beyond the present political situation. This means placed against the dominant economic and political system. In this area, there are many measures already taken at which Muslims could (should) join:

• To join initiatives and campaigns that promote the reform of the United Nations, towards a participatory democracy that enables the achievement of its founding objectives.

• Work with the World Social Forum.

• Support the campaigns that promote debt forgiveness.

• Support these campaigns to ensure access to drinking water of every human being.

• Support the campaign for the implementation of the Tobin Tax.

• Report the business of war, and demand that our elected representatives to fight the arms trade.

• Report situations of collusion of religion with economic and political power designed to perpetuate situations of injustice

• Moderate your needs and make efforts to eradicate consumerism.

• Ensure that the investments we make are ethical, and not in contradiction with a culture of peace.

• Ensure that companies adopt codes of ethics, to respect fair trade criteria.

• To join the campaigns that promote the elimination of tax havens.

• Work towards the reduction of polluting energy sources and encourage the use of alternative energies.

However, the participation of Muslims in the global justice movement today faces significant challenges. One is the Islamophobia and stereotyping, as well as traditional religious militant anti-Western left fixed, unable to overcome the Eurocentrism in which Westerners are indoctrinated. The collaboration of religious traditions and social movements is difficult at a time which is imposed as a dogma of faith the idea of separation between religion and politics. This is to relegate religion to a strange "private sphere", denying the right to demand justice from our conviction. Therefore, from the religious traditions we must clarify what is our motivation in the project of building a global civil society. We must banish every shadow of doubt hanging over our traditions, to dispel the doubts raised by this collaboration. Fortunately, we are no longer in the era of dogmatic Marxism-Leninism and anti-religious. On the contrary, there are many elements of spirituality within social movements.

The other impediment is internal to Islam: the difficulties of many Muslims to renounce the idea of a state based on the supremacy of Islam. Islam, at the moment which is reduced to a political identity, draw a border with non-Muslims, preventing their participation in the global justice movement. Islam has much to contribute in the fight against global injustice, if we are able to overcome a supremacist view and / or exclusive of our religion. We must break down the conceptual barriers separating Islam from other traditions or proposals and work on the basis of shared goals. The struggle against inequality, oppression and hunger, is the struggle for the dignity of every human being, and it is quite feasible to think this fight regardless of religion as the vehicle that gives meaning to most the inhabitants of the earth,insha Allah Al-.

Notes

[1] Globalisation. Muslim Resistance (ed. Tawhid 2002), including translation into Castilian.

[2] Jusqu'au cou, enquête sur la dette du tiers monde (ed. La Découverte, 1988, pp. 68-71)

[3]We take these references Zeghal Malika, Guardians of Islam , pp.140-144

[4] Minority Islam , ed. Bellaterra, p.333

[5]Samir Amin, Political Islam in the service of imperialism

[6] Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire , p. 18