El profesor americano-iraní Vali Nasr ofrece una interesante perspectiva del mundo musulmán en su último libro, Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World
Su visión matizada, alejada de estereotipos y generalizaciones, conecta bien con la mía. En el primer capítulo se refiere al punto álgido del fundamentalismo, que fue en el 79-80 y no en en el presente. Un extracto (págs. 10-11):
The larger truth about fundamentalism's drive to power, though, is that since 1980 it has toppled no more dominoes. The Taliban visited horror on Afghanistan, but this rag-tag army of religious zealots and tribal warriors amounted to no more than an incomplete insurgency in a broken corner of the Muslim world - an antique badland even before decades of war ravaged it. There have been no additional Irans, and the prospect that another Islamic state will arise - whether through peaceful means or violent ones - has been steadly declining.
The West must remain vigilant against fundamentalism, but that should not stop Western policymakers and public from seeing the "whole picture" in the Middle East, and a vital truth of the region is that the fundamentalist strain of Islam is not practiced by the vast majority of the population, and is not on the rise. What is true is that since 1980, a broader wave of Islamic resurgence has swept across the Middle East, and fundamentalism has surged that wave rather than fueling it. The Islamic resurgence is much larger, deeper, and more complex. The vast majority of Muslims are moderate and pragmatic when it comes to religion, balancing law and piety with a healthy dose of mystical practices and folk religion.
It is not fundamentalism that accounts for the ubiquity of Islamic influence across the region today; rather it is the other way around: Widespread Islamic fervor - which can, but does not have to, take on a fundamentalist form - has allowed fundamentalism to survive past its prime. It would of course be foolish to ignore fundamentalism and the extremists associated with it, but it is also imprudent to consider fundamentalism the end-all and be-all of what we need to know about Islam and the Middle East. It is time that we take a good look at the vitality of the energetic blending of Islamic piety and capitalist fervor that is flourishing in many pockets around the region.
