The writer Ali al-Sharqi wrote a reading of the book (Globalization and Society) by Sayed Mahmoud Al-Mosawi in al-Wasat newspaper, in its issue 1877, published on Saturday, 27 October 2007, corresponding to 16 Shawwal 1428 AH.
The writer briefly reviewed the most important chapters and contents of the book..A Reading of the Book “Globalization and Society”
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Al-Wasat – Ali al-Sharqi
The book “Globalization and Society: New Challenges and the Program of Tasks” by the writer Mahmoud Al-Mosawi has been published by “Dar al-Thaqafa” and the “Dar al-Jinan” bookshop in Bahrain; it runs to 64 pages in medium format.
The author divided this book of his into three parts:
The first part, in which he dealt with globalization and society, the new challenges and the program of tasks. The second part, in which he dealt with individual culture and collective thinking, between the tendency of the ego and the necessity of participation.
As for the third part, in it the author spoke about specificity in the era of globalization.
Now let us briefly review a portion of these parts. Under the heading “Introduction”, the author asked: Have our Islamic societies really become consumerist in character, occupied only with marginal and superficial matters? This may be the bitter truth that we do not wish for, but if we look around us, left and right, we will find that, among the people in our society, as for those of them who are occupied with some matter, the matter does not go beyond personal and individual concerns of partial effect that does not go beyond their noses. And a subject such as globalization meets with nothing in our societies but aversion and neglect; it is natural that such a study will not make many mouths water—not because it does not touch their reality in any way, but because it does not fall within the circle of tolerance at all; and people are enemies of what they do not know, as Imam ʿAli (a) says.
Under the heading “The Concept of Globalization and Its Challenges”, the author wrote:
When this term first appeared on the world stage, it was in a purely economic garb, since it aims at the process of operating capital globally, such that the whole world becomes a single market for particular producers, represented by the major Western companies. Globalization has been defined as the active, free and accelerating movement of global financial and commercial initiatives; it is the abolition of legislative, customs and other borders and barriers before the movement of the transport of goods and capital, with the aim of making the world a single market for Western products, to reinforce the confidence between the rich world and the poor world, so that the West becomes richer and the developing and backward countries more abjectly poor, contrary to justice and equality of opportunity among all human beings.
Under the heading: Individual Culture and Collective Thinking, the author wrote: The Creator, Majestic and Exalted, has granted the human being, in his individual capacity, a special standing among all the other individual creatures, and has distinguished him with creative distinctions that the creatures below him do not obtain. At the head of those distinctions and properties is the power of reason, the power through which he is able to look at things in their overall dimensions, since it gives him an inferential dimension for seeing life through a conscious and responsible lens that takes into account his principles, his points of departure and his intellectual criteria, so that he strives to realize his aspirations and goals.
As for under the heading “Specificity in the Age of Globalization”, which is the last part, the author wrote: Resounding cries are rising in cultural circles and forums, calling for openness to other societies as one of the conditions of progress and one of the features of civilized societies. The appearance of this claim of openness becomes clear to us as beautiful and progressive when you set it against the concept of closedness, with the negativity that this concept suggests, since among what it suggests is withdrawal into one's shell, lack of momentum, backwardness and lack of renewal; so openness, by this contrast, will have a connotation in the human mind opposite to those connotations that the concept of closedness suggests.
