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• Deal And Kennedy Strong Cultures Argued That Culture Can Be Shaped By Managers

Islam’s relationship with the West, though it goes far into antiquity, has been overburdened with rivalries and marred by conflicts. From the Christian crusades of the Middle Ages to the fatwa on Salman Rushdie at the close of the millennium, the predominately Christian societies of Western Europe and North America have been suspicious and fearful of Muslims.

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Conversely, Muslim adherents of Islam find much in Western social values and practices antithetical to their tradition.The arena of conflict between these communities is changing rapidly, primarily due to the technological innovations of the information age and the confrontation of cultures. No longer are geographical boundaries adequate to separate these cultures. Western values are propagated by TV programs via satellite into the Islamic nations of the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa. At the same time, Muslims of the diaspora are creating religious and cultural enclaves using Arabsat and the Internet, as well as traditional channels.Yet, recent Islamic migrants to Western nations face the dilemma of finding their authentic voice in popular Western culture, balanced against their fears of cultural assimilation and loss of identity. Muslims as a group have had less success compared to other religious or ethnic minorities, like the Jews or African Americans, in opening “a window on the multidimensionality of what can be called cultural ecology” (Mowlana, 1996, p. They seek to know how is it possible to move toward the center of Western culture without compromising deeply-held religious beliefs and traditions.Navigating the cultural conflicts between Islam and the West is not a trivial challenge given sharply contrasting worldviews; the two domains of knowledge are poorly matched.

Islam offers a totalized worldview encompassing all spheres of community intercourse: political, economic, social, etc. The West isolates the spheres of knowledge and action and enshrines the individual. Despite overtones of “civic religion” in Western societies, they are extrinsically secular; traditional Muslims are overtly committed to the sacred as the cornerstone of community and family life.The clash that arises from conflicting worldviews leaves emotional and psychological scars. Among recent migrants to Europe and North America, many Muslims agree with American Islam scholar Yvonne Haddad (1991) in their “frustration and dismay as they continue to experience prejudice, intimidation, discrimination, misunderstanding, and even hatred” (p. Yet, in the midst of these uncertain encounters, Islam and Western society are finding ways to adapt, if incompletely, to each other’s worldviews and values. ISLAM’S STRUGGLE FOR ACCEPTANCE IN THE WESTMuslims’ compatibility with Western cultural values taps into the broader question of how they have adapted to conditions historically in all their respective host nations.

The Islamic world consists of diverse ethnic, cultural, and geographic populations, and faces the challenge of uniting diverse national cultures.There are thirty countries, mainly in Asia and Africa, with a total population of about 900 million, in which Muslims have an overall majority; many more countries have sizable Muslim minorities. The total Muslim world population is close to 1.5 billion, one-quarter of the total world population (Hoogvelt, 1997).The Muslim population has grown rapidly in Europe and North America in the past two decades. There is a growing Islamic presence in the United States, although it is concentrated primarily in a dozen major urban centers (El-Badry, 1994). At the close of the twentieth century, there were approximately thirty-five million Muslims in Europe and North America, with about 1,250 mosques and Islamic centers in the United States.Adaptation of Islamic peoples into a secular society depends on their resourcefulness. In the recent analysis of Islam in diaspora, there is evidence of a “tentative ascent” into Western society (Haddad, 1991; Esposito, 1992; Haddad and Smith, 1993; Lebor, 1997; Haddad & Esposito, 1998; and Haddad, 1997).

Arabs in general find acculturation to be somewhat more difficult than other immigrants, especially those who are more distinctly identified as Muslims (Gordon, 1964; Tavakoliyadzi, 1981; Naff, 1983; Abou, 1997; and Faragallah, Schumm & Webb, 1997.) 1No longer satisfied to be strangers in a strange land, some Muslims are beginning to claim a kind of cultural ownership in America. They point to Black African slaves who held Islamic beliefs until as late as the early part of the twentieth century.

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Earlier, migration of the Melungeons came to North America prior to the 1600s. Scholars assert that Muslim groups may have preceded the Plymouth Plantation and Virginia settlements on the shores of the “new world.” Moors who were expelled from Spain made their way to the islands of the Caribbean, and from there to the southern United States. The first waves of Arabic immigrants from Lebanon and Syria occurred in the 1870s and 1880s (Haddad, 1997).Even though Muslims embrace different religious traditions (i.e., Sunni and Shi’ite) within the broader Muslim community (umma), they share, to a significant extent, a common textual language (i.e., Arabic), and common religious beliefs based on the Koran with their basic duties expressed in the five pillars of Islam: profession of faith, prayer, alms-giving, fasting, and pilgrimage. Traditional Muslims affirm, as did Pakistani anthropologist Akbar S. Ahmed, one of the leading interpreters of Islamic values for Western audiences, “Islam is essentially the religion of equilibrium and tolerance; suggesting a breadth of vision, global positions and fulfillment of human destiny in the universe” (Ahmed, 1992, p.

THE CHALLENGE OF ISLAMIC UNIVERSALISMMore than two decades ago, Edward Said (1978) argued that Western values were dominating the Arab and Islamic worlds by a curious twist of global consumerism: Arabs exchanged their oil in the open world marketplace for a foreign and antagonistic Western culture. Said argued, “The Arab and Islamic world remains a second-order power in terms of the production of global culture, knowledge, and scholarship” (p.

323).Muslim adherents disagree about the power of Western values to secularize Islamic culture. Traditionalists argue either for severance of Islamic nations with Western institutions, or for globalization of Islamic values. Among a new class of Muslim neo-fundamentalists—a group Oliver Roy (1994) calls lumpen intelligentsia or “Islamic new intellectuals”— there is concerted effort to counter Western science and ideology with equivalent concepts drawn from the Koran and Hadith or Sunnah, the most widely accepted authoritarian guides to the Islamic canon.Some Islamic intellectuals are ambivalent, too, about the desirability of a “public sphere” for common discourse, and the role of democracy from which Western societies derive their base for rationalized public action. At best, Muslims have deep ambivalence about their role as “co-citizens” in the West (Hofmann, 1997). At worst, Islam’s defensiveness amounts to what has been described as “a holding operation against modernity” (Sivan, 1985, p. 3).Simultaneously, the West has been reluctant to embrace Muslims at or near the “cultural center.” Those who distrust Islam’s collective motives point to the uneven treatment of outsiders ( dhimmi) in mixed populations where Islam has been dominant (Ye’or, 1985). Img friendly hospitals. The history of Muslim-Christian dialogue includes periods of great hostility and open war, as well as times of uneasy toleration, peaceful coexistence, and even cooperation toward shared goals (Kimball, 1991).

A growing consensus, however, suggests Islamic- Western tensions may be growing with the expanding information society (Yamani, 1994).Among those most fearful of Islam’s designs for global expansion are writers like noted French-Catholic historian Jacques Ellul (1985), who cautioned, “Whether one likes it or not, Islam regards itself as having a universal vocation and proclaims itself to be the only true religion to which everyone must adhere. We should have no illusions about the matter: no part of the world will be excluded” (p. 28).Some Islamic leaders do promote the goal of internationalization and globalization. Such designs have been circulating in the Islamic world at least since the days of early Islamic modernists Gamal Al-Din Al-Afagani (1839–97) and Mohamed Abdu (1849–1905). More recently, Egypt’s Sunni leader or Mufti, Nasr Fareed Wasil, affirmed that Islam should not be reticent in developing its case for globalization.

He argued that Muslims should not fear globalization and should seek to benefit from all the means of progress in science, economics and wealth. In his opinion, Muslims should be careful to protect themselves from the negative effects of this kind of expansion, remaining aware of the danger of being dissolved in the world and losing their identity (“An Interview with Egypt’s Mufti,” 1998).The dialogue between Islam and the West over fundamental disagreements in worldviews has occurred quietly, behind the controversies (Lewis, 1994). In the short term, whether Muslims find a voice in Western culture depends on the success they achieve in developing strategies to blend two radically different “cultural ecologies” (Mowlana, 1993). The Western secular model privileges a rational, reasoning mind in the pursuit of individual and collective fulfillment; and Islam’s model emphasizes justice and tradition as the basis of a legitimate community and family life. DEMONIZATION OF MUSLIMS IN WESTERN MEDIAMuslims are critical of Western media because of their invasiveness. Within Arab nations with controlled borders, the deluge of messages and images conveyed by communication technologies from around the world is perceived as a “cultural invasion” (Ghaffari-Farhangi, 1999). As Ahmed (1992) assessed, the average Muslim is “as disgusted as he is confused with his own sense of impotence in shaping reality around him; he can no longer challenge what is real or unreal, no longer separate reality from the illusion of the media” (p.

3).Others have observed the struggle to develop a comprehensive theory for mass communication to compete with Western theories of communication (Hussain, 1986; Pasha, 1993; El-Affendi, 1993; and Al-Hajji, 1998). It is not widely appreciated, however, that very few efforts have been advanced—West or East—pertaining to the role of media in acculturation of ethnic groups (Kim, 1988, 1995; Korzenny & Ting-Toomey, 1992).Ahmed (1992) has been especially outspoken about the role of Western media creating an inverse version of Islam’s worldview, saying, “By their consistently hammer-headed onslaught, mass media have succeeded in portraying a negative image of it. They may even succeed in changing Muslim character” (p.

Deal And Kennedy Strong Cultures Argued That Culture Can Be Shaped By Managers

The Western media offend Muslims at two levels: first, Muslims are often demonized in media programs as fundamentalists, terrorists, or religious zealots; and, second, many Western cultural practices, including drinking alcohol, gambling, and permissive sexual activities are too offensive for Islamic moral-ethical tradition.Growing more astute to political action, Arab and Islamic action groups now address the imbalances in the negative images that have been used in media programming for at least two decades (Al-Disuqi, 1994; Ghareeb, 1983; Kamalipour, 1995). American movies that Muslims interpreted as particularly offensive were Arnold Schwartzenegger’s True Lies; 20 th Century Fox’s The Siege; Hanna-Barbera’s Arabian Nights; Disney’s Aladdin; and MGM’s movie and video Not Without My Daughter.Television has been condemned most frequently because of its invasiveness. It conveys the modernist message in the most enticing forms directly to Islamic homes. This amounts to a “destructive campaign of ideas diametrically opposed to Arab and Islamic concepts, encouraging loose morality and immediate satisfaction, placing love and life and its pleasures over everything else, totally oblivious of religious belief, and of punishment and reward in the hereafter” (Silvan, 1985, p.

4).Islamic parents are offered a wide range of guidelines on American customs, mix-gendered activities, and media use. In the book titled Parents’ Manual: A Guide for Muslim Parents Living in North America (1976), Islamic parents are offered a wide range of guidelines designed to avoid conflict. Muslims are urged not to celebrate birthdays, for example, because they are an expression of an unacceptable selfishness.

Even though most American holidays, such as Christmas and Easter, have essentially been secularized, they are “one more element in the mass culture which each year enables manufacturers and merchants to take in millions of dollars through an elaborate system of gift exchange” (p. Mixed-gender activities, such as dating, dancing, and swimming, are regarded as sexually permissive.Muslim attitudes toward the invasiveness of American television and movies are especially harsh:Many (TV) programs are downright harmful and vicious in their effects. Among the harmful programs, which should be strictly avoided by Muslim children and adults, we would list the following: shows depicting illicit sex or center around sex themes, including comedies, and shows depicting crime, violence, sadism, depravity, and anything which can be considered degrading to religion, moral values, or human dignity ( Parents’ Manual, 1976, pp. 139–140).Of particular worry to conservative Muslims are the romantic subplots and vivid violence in many media programs.Alternatives to such entertainment have been scarce until recently. One of the first in a series of Muslim-friendly productions is the children’s cartoon Salam’s Journey, a forty-minute, U.S.- produced, animated movie created by Hollywood-trained artists and producers. Using fictional characters, the film weaves a story from the Koran about the adventure of a young boy in an Ethiopian kingdom.

The avowed goal was to sell at least 100,000 copies of the film. The creators sought to create a plot based on friendship, trust in God ( Allah), and family values. The production scrupulously avoided un-Islamic images and messages.Missing in the dialogue over accommodation of Islamic values in Western culture, however, are the voices of young Muslims who find new ways to invent religious traditions in a modern milieu.

Find more information about:ISBN: 78102871OCLC Number:8494498Description:vii, 232 pages; 24 cmContents:pt. Cultures -1. Strong cultures: the new 'old rule' -2. Values: the core of the culture -3. Heroes: the corporate right stuff -4.

Rites and rituals: culture in action -5. Communications: working the cultural network. Putting cultures into practice -6. Corporate tribes: identifying the cultures -7.

Diagnosis: learning to read cultures -8. Symbolic mangers: managing the culture -9. Change: reshaping cultures -10. Cultures of the future: the atomized organization.Responsibility:Terrence E. Deal and Allan A. Kennedy.More information:.Abstract.