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Muslims As Co-Citizens of
the
West . . . Rights, Duties, & Prospects
One major side-effect of the current process of economic and cultural globalization seems to be that our world is becoming multireligious. In particular, this results from the accelerated spread of lslam. There are already six million Muslims in the United States, virtually all of them American citizens, with an impressive and growing infrastructure. In Europe, due to labor migration, foreign students, war refugees, and asylum seekers, the number of Muslims is around four million in France, perhaps three million in the United Kingdom, and 2.5 million in Germany. Altogether, including Bosnia-Hercegovina, there may be about twenty million Muslims in western and central Europe today.
The Concept and Role of Culture In Socio-Scientific
Systems: Some Case Studies
The term "culture" has two interesting connotations in social thought. Both carry important implications on the kind of social interrelationships that are generated by the preferences formed at the level of the individual. Since culture is an intermediate course for generating interrelationships, which in turn reinforce and continue the very meaning of culture, a cause-effect relationship must exist between social transformation and culture. In this, the formative basis of culture, the individual and groups must play a determining role. Such a social-political-institutional approach to the study of culture, though not prevalent in common literature, has played a central role in two opposing schools. The first school was generated from Ibn Khaldun's concept of the "science of culture." The second was given life by the ontological status given to culture by Hegel in his definition of the "world spirit," which he associated with the heart of western civilization. (Weber, too, saw in culture the same characteristic.) These two perspectives have recently been invoked by Fukuyama to expound his own theory of the "end of history." He sees the Hegelian dialectical process to be at the heart of an atomism of culture-the "isothymia," as he calls it-and governing individualism.
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