Modernization Quotes
Each generation believes that technology and modernization is overtaking their way of life and forcing change upon them. In 1938, the very success of consumerism—that people have choices they never had before—placed stress on some people who had grown up making very few decisions as there was only one way to do almost everything. In the late 20th century having 500 television channels and thousands of more entertainment and educational possibilities with the Internet was a source of great stress for an entire generation of people who for most of their lives chose from the three major networks for their entertainment.
This quotation illustrated the extreme polarization between the current fundamentalist Muslims, and the Muslim modernists and the West. Kamal Ataturk, the great leader and stateman who is the father of modern Turkey, is castigated by the author for leading the new Turkish parliament to depose the Caliph – the civil and religious autocrat, one of whom reigned from after the death of Muhammad till his abolishment in 1924. Most of the rest of the world credits Ataturk with being one of the great leaders of all time—one who led a democratic revolution which transformed Turkey into the only Muslim secular democracy, requiring pubic secular European type education for all children, giving women the right to vote (before the U. S. even), adopting a European alphabet and dress, and outlook on life—creating most remarkably a total cultural revolution with virtually no loss of life. No revolutionary leader, before or since has led so extensive a political and cultural revolution, and it was a bloodless revolution. Turkey, into the 21st century, was by far the most powerful, industrialized, scientific and modern nation of Muslims in the world and others were far behind. Yet many Islamic theologian still castigate Atatork for his great achievements as being against the will of God.
At the time, Muslim clerics had a great deal of influence and in many cases legal control over all facets of Turkish society much as exists in other Islamic societies today. They even controlled what was taught in the schools. Remarkably, without bloodshed, Ataturk broke both the power and the influence of the clerics on all official and public activities. Many Turkish Muslims even developed a type of reformed Islam with the relationship between the individual and the clerics one of parity much like Protestant churches in the West. At the same time there was a more orthodox part of the population and while they sent their children to religious schools, they also attended public schools so even the orthodox Muslims in Turkey learned science and modern subjects which are still not taught in most Islamic schools and madrassas.
Ataturk as part of his radical reforms elevated secular teachers to a very high social status and moved science and engineering into the curriculum over the objections of traditionalists and Islamic fundamentalists, and he did this in an overwhelmingly Muslim country.
Tibet and some other ethnic enclaves of China have been almost impervious to the general improvement in the standard of living that China accomplished at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st. China is not the only nation to have this difficulty. Some would argue that America still has it with some of its Native American nations. The great challenge is trying to develop and modernize a culture that does not want to be modernized at the moment but still wants many of the benefits of modernization.
"Innovator" in this sense refers to one who innovates within Islam—who tries to change or reform the religion departing from the original,literal, message of the Prophet. This concept which was embedded into Islamic culture, became one of the intellectual barriers to scientific and technological development of literal islamists.
