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| The Hindu Phenomenon |
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RETREAT AND RAGE |
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the colonial nor the post-colonial state need have set out
deliberately to weaken rural or tribal societies. That is the
unavoidable logic of modernization by way of growth of large urban
centres, the decline of rural communities and tribes economic
and political, if not in numerical, terms, and the spread of
education, transportation and means of communication. Attempts to
promote economic development, access to enormous resources byway of
oil revenues, especially since the early seventies, remittances by
emigrants to oil-rich Gulf states, and foreign aid were also bound
to reinforce this logic.
The ascendancy of high Islam
also accounts for the failure of attempts at secularization in the
Muslim world. As Gellner has put it, the presence of this genuinely
indigenous tradition has helped Muslim escape the dilemma which has
haunted many other Third World societies: the dilemma of whether to
idealize and emulate the West or whether to idealize local folk
traditions and indulge in some form of populism. They have had no
need to do either because their own high variant has had
dignity in international terms. |
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