Islam Between East and West

Islam Between East and West is a remarkable work of multidisciplinaryscholarship by a Bosnian Muslim lawyer who is currently serving a fourteen-yearterm in a Yugoslavian prison for his Islamic activism and “fundamentalistdigressions”. Educated in Sarajevo and Paris, Alija Ali Izetbegovic hasbeen active in Islamic work throughout his adult life. Writing, lecturing, andorganizing Islamic educational and welfare activities, he has been a constantsource of intellectual and spiritual inspiration for thousands of young YugoslavianMuslims.Alija’s main objective in this book is to examine the roots of the culturalcrisis, moral anarchy and political upheavals of the modern West and to showhow these are related to the influence of partial truths and reductionistideological perspective.The central thesis of this book is that there are three distinct views of theworld that reflect three different elemental possibilities: the religious, thematerialistic, and the Islamic. Islamic worldview is integral in that itcombines both pure religiosity and pure materialism. While pure religion emphasizesconscience and pure materialism emphasizes nature, the focus ofIslam is on man who lives in the worlds of both conscience and nature.The author then shows how both pure religion (Christianity, Hinduism andBuddhism) and materialistic philosophies (Socialism and Capitalism) havegiven partial answers to life’s integral questions of “ideals” and “interests” andhow they have been trying to compensate for their primal inadequacies andhalf-truths through continuous compromises in both theory and praxis. Theauthor argues on the basis of considerable historical evidence that the actualrealization of these two opposing views of the world has been quite differentfrom what they originally aspired to achieve. A modified, post-renaissancehumanist interpretation of Christianity and the religio-moral basis of socialistegalitarianism with its teleological view of history clearly demonstrates that ...