The global Muslim community: Challenges and opportunities

Ashar Awan

With about 2 billion, the Muslim community is one-fourth of the global population [1]. The shared history, beliefs, and norms attach them with a strong knot that is invisible but holds them tightly. Above all, the force that fastens the Muslim community is the shared identity of being Muslim. Identity is a much-appreciated driving force behind human being's sense of responsibility, belonging, and self-respect. While, for the Muslims, their huge community is an opportunity to benefit from cooperating, it is also a challenge to keep the large community united. The biggest challenge to Muslim identity is ethnicism and sectarianism. Ethnicism and sectarianism are dividing the global Muslim community into subgroups. Due to ethnic and sectarian identities, the single Muslim identity gets mild, and these secondary identities become strong.

Moreover, when the ethnic or sectarian groups within the Muslim community feel threatened and suppressed, their ethnic or sectarian identity becomes more important to them. Therefore, the value of social justice and equal opportunity in Muslim society is undeniable for achieving cohesion among them. As long as social justice and equal opportunities exist in a large group, all the members of the group feel an attachment to their shared identity. However, once they start to feel persecuted and oppressed, they prefer their secondary identities and make subgroups. 

After highlighting the importance of social justice and equal opportunity, the second challenge to the large global Muslim community is that they could not institutionalize their trade agreements. Agreements that are aimed to initiate cooperation between the Muslim community globally. Trade is the most critical institution in the history of human beings. Trade caused war, reforms, revolutions, discarded old philosophies, and developed new philosophies. In the modern era, nation-states are friends and rivals of others based on their trade benefits. There is no such important thing in modern capitalist society as trade benefit. The revenues of trade enable countries to develop weapons, wage war, provide social security to their citizens and invest in health and education. Trade among nations is a potent weapon of the modern world in which countries and a group of countries such as the European Union support their allies to forward their global agenda. The status of GSP and custom membership of the European Union are examples of these trade-based tools for the global agenda. This challenge could be met by cooperation in Muslim societies in terms of trade preference. The Muslim traders/countries - regardless of their trade volume and the product or service they sell/buy – could prefer fellow Muslims at least up to a possible level. In this case, the benefits of trade will gradually bring improvement to the Muslim community globally. 

The third and most significant challenge to the Muslim community globally is the iron hand of the global financial system. Above all, the banking system at the national level in Muslim countries and its connection with international financial institutions, including IMF and the World Bank, is the root cause of deprivation in Muslim communities. These financial institutions are research-based and spending a tremendous amount of money on developing an invisible cage of financial laws and policies. Interest-free banking is a long-term solution to tackle the global financial weapons of IMF and the World Bank as there is no compatibility between the interest-free banking system and the interest-based mechanism and policies of these financial institutions. 

Fourth and last, the war of values between the religious and secular forces is undeniable. Values are formed and disappeared over time. The primary factor behind changing values is media and education. The one who controls media and education can control the values system. The Muslim community globally is connected to two educational systems and media. One is based and related to their religion, and the other is secular and operated from elsewhere. The Muslims learn religious values from Friday sermons and religious scriptures besides their exposure to secular values via media and education in modern institutions. However, conflicting values from the two sources make them confuse sometimes. Therefore, a global sensitivity among thinkers in the Muslim world is required to tackle this issue via developing strategies to fill the gap in media and curriculum. 

  [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/religion-by-country