Introduction

The past two decades has been a sad period for the ummah (global Muslim community). The sense of triumph at the Soviet Union's defeat in Afghanistan was quickly overtaken by the senseless violence that ensued among rival factions of the Afghan war. As if the travails endured in Bosnia Herzegovina were not enough, sectarian warfare was crippling Muslim-majority countries such as Sudan, Algeria, and Pakistan. By the late 1990s, violence had spread to the previously calm Southeast Asia, whose societies were well-known for their softer culture and greater religious accommodation with local customs vis-à-vis their Middle Eastern counterparts. The rapid spread of news through advancements in information and communication technology (ICT), particularly with the arrival of the Internet, meant that worldwide Muslim empathy with their suffering religious brethren was more swiftly and easily triggered. When Muslim terrorists were held liable for the airborne attacks on New York's World Trade Centre (WTC) and the Pentagon, United States of America (USA) on 11 September 2001, the stage was seemingly set for a battle between Islamic and Western civilizations as originally propounded by the Harvard academic Samuel Huntington. Among reasons cited by Huntington in his prognosis of a future ‘clash of civilizations’ were the shrinking of the world to become ‘a smaller place’ and the weakening of the nation state ‘as a source of identity’, the gap consequently filled mostly by religion, especially in its ‘fundamentalist’ forms.