Západ jako téma islámského reformismu

The article deals with the Islamic evaluation of the West or a phenomenon of the so-called "failure of the West" as treated in various trends of Islamic Reformism. The author stresses a multiplicity of reformist attitudes towards al-gharb - the West, which has been mostly understood as the space of Christian and colonial impact on the civilizational body of Islam. The alien values of the West have been accepted and absorbed, or - even more frequently - refused and resisted. Nevertheles, except of militant reformist movements in rather marginal areas of the Islamic world, major trends of modern Islamic thought were more or less based on an assumption of the success of the West, at least in certain key aspects of human life. However, by the end of the 1970s the concept of the failure of the Western civilization emerged as an important assumption. The author supposes, that the issue has at least two dimensions: (a) The perception of the West's failure seems to be a result of ever higher education and emancipation of inhabitation in most Islamic countries. Those people are much more politically aware then they used to be a half century ago. They ask for a new political and ideological milieu vis a vis non-popular regimes. In an ideological vacuum they escape from inauspicious reality to the well-known space of Islamic values, which comfort them. (b) Nationalist regimes of various colouring failed in their strive to separate the Islamic religion from the politics and the state. A secularist model of society, so familiar to both the capitalist and communist experience of the West, seems to be for the mainstream of today's Islamic reformism the most fatal historical mistake, which the Islamic societies have to avoid.