Module 9: Postmodernization and emancipation
  Lecture 27: Dilemmas and Paradoxes

In this milieu, further advancement and new awakening among the leaders in the colonial countries, made them search for identity or roots, producing a desire to combine the Western success and Eastern values but as time passed Westernization superseded this eclectic tendency. Success has its own value framework. If you want to succeed you must accept the value framework of success. Economic modernization, therefore, leads to cultural modernization. Here and there, you also notice desire to resurrect tradition but when the whole social and political environment of society changed, the attempt to resurrect tradition could not have been very successful. It is now manifesting in the form of fundamentalism and terrorism.

To quote Shariati:

They have created a people who do not know their own culture, but still are ready to despise it. They know nothing about Islam but say bad things about it. They cannot understand a simple poem but criticize it with poorly chosen words. They do not understand their history but are ready to condemn it. On the other hand, without reservation they admire all that is imposed from Europe. Consequently, a being was created who, first became alienated from his religion, culture, history and background, and then came to despise them. He was convinced he was inferior to the European. And when such a belief took root in him, he tried and wished to refute himself, to sever his connections with all the objects attached to him and somehow make himself like a European, who was not despised and looked down upon, and at last be able to say, “Thank God I am not an Easterner since I modernized myself sufficiently to reach the level of a European.