University of London

The crux of my talk today is that in view of the fact that the overwhelmingly large majority of Pakistani people are ill-prepared to side with any party in the present war, the only way to defeat this war and win peace is through the construction of the Third Perspective, emerging from a critique of the two perspectives of the warring parties, this being pre-eminently the historical task of the social scientists of Pakistan and of the Islamic world in particular, and of the non-Western world in general.

The unforeseen products or consequences of modernity have been a matter of central concern in modern scholarship especially since the first world war in the early last century.  But to mention among them modern religious extremism especially pronounced in the Islamic world might seem going against the self-evident and therefore an obviously absurd hypothesis, for modernity, in the given consensus, is perceived as a movement of thought and social practice rising in opposition to the religious worldview. However, that it was a consequence following inevitably from the founding premises of modernity is hoped to become apparent as this exercise questions some of the fundamental assumptions about the nature of religion, on the one hand, and the social, cultural structure of the past, or of the premodern civilizations, on the other, on which the edifice of modernity is founded.

The unforeseen products or consequences of modernity have been a matter of central concern in modern scholarship especially since the first world war in the early last century.  But to mention among them modern religious extremism especially pronounced in the Islamic world might seem going against the self-evident and therefore an obviously absurd hypothesis, for modernity, in the given consensus, is perceived as a movement of thought and social practice rising in opposition to the religious worldview. However, that it was a consequence following inevitably from the founding premises of modernity is hoped to become apparent as this exercise questions some of the fundamental assumptions about the nature of religion, on the one hand, and the social, cultural structure of the past, or of the premodern civilizations, on the other, on which the edifice of modernity is founded.

This exercise evolves in the context of the seismic shift in the centre of power taking place on our planet from the West to the East, with the latter seeking to establish itself as the hub of the emerging global industrial civilization. However, the problems and challenges as well as widely shared anxieties and uncertainties arising from the plantation and adaptation of industrial way of life to the vast soil where, following man’s transition from the primordial nomadic to sedentary, agrarian mode of life, the first civilizations came into being some five to six millennia ago, are not the only imperative driving this exercise. Taking into account also the crises of economic, intellectual, and moral nature with which modern industrial civilization has intermittently suffered since its inception in Great Britain around two and half centuries ago, we propose a complex of hypotheses, or ensembles of ideas, towards its reformation and future evolution not only in the East, but also in the West and the world at large.