WHICH MISSES THE FUNDAMENTAL TRUTH...:

New Age Muslims keep the faith but embrace modernity — study (Keach Hagey, November 22. 2008, The National)

A significant and growing percentage of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims are striving for lifestyles that are both religious and modern, representing a largely untapped market, a new study of Islamic consumers says.

This profile particularly describes consumers in the UAE, where 45 per cent of the national population – the highest percentage of all the countries studied – fit this category of the so-called “New Age Muslim”, according to the study by the advertising agency JWT and the market research firm AMRB.

“We often try to describe an lslamic or a Muslim consumer as westernised or not westernised, which is totally stupid,” said Roy Haddad, the chairman of JWT MENA. “No Arab, or no Muslim that I know, wants to be more westernised. Yes, we want to be modern. But we are not western.”

“Effectively, there is no contradiction between modernity and Islam, and that is what people don’t understand a lot. Dubai is the best example of that.”

...that there is no difference between Modernity and Westernization.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 22, 2008 1:53 PM