الكاتب: Maryam Jameelah

One of the most blindly accepted assumptions shared by leaders of thought throughout the world is that modern western civilization is uniy.ersal and that the drastically changed conditions resulting from recent scientific and technological advances have rendered tbe preindustrial heritage of all non-European peoples obsolete. Expressing this view, David Reisman, an American-Jewish sociologist, declares: The ethnocentric predicament is confounded by failure to realize that modernization appears as wJstetnization by historical coincidence, Modernity is primarily a state of mind - expectation of, progress, propensity to growth, readiness to adapt oneself to change. The nations of tho North Atlantic area first developed the social processes - secularization, urbanization, industrializ1tion, popular participation by which this state of mind came to ~prevail. The Western model is only historically western. Sociologically it is global. The recent h!story of the Soviet ·Union and Japan shows how effectively these processes modernize societies that are geographically rimote from the West. The identical process reappears in virtually all modernizing societies ·on all continents of the world. regardless of variations in r,.ce, colour or creed. That the theoretical model presented in this- book has been validated by flow of events since its first publication in 1958 is highly gratifying to me as social commentator. on our world.