Islam • 145all connection with their roots, and experienced a sinking loss
of identity.
Where Europeans and Americans had been allowed to
modernize at their own pace, and to set their own agendas,
the inhabitants of the colonized countries had to modernize
far too rapidly and were forced to comply with somebody
else's programme. But even Western people had found the
transformation of their society painful. They had experi-
enced almost four hundred years of political and often bloody
revolutions, reigns of terror, genocide, violent wars of reli-
gion, the despoliation of the countryside, vast social up-
heavals, exploitation in the factories, spiritual malaise and
profound anomie in the new megacities. Today we are seeing
similar violence, cruelty, revolution and disorientation in the
developing countries, which are making an even more diffi-
cult rite of passage to modernity. It is also true that the mod-
ern spirit that developed in the West is fundamentally
different. In Europe and America it had two main character-
istics: innovation and autonomy (the modernizing process was
punctuated in Europe and America by declarations of inde-
pendence on the political, intellectual, religious and social
fronts). But in the developing world, modernity has been ac-
companied not by autonomy but by a loss of independence
and national autonomy. Instead of innovation, the developing
countries can only modernize by imitating the West, which is
so far advanced that they have no hope of catching up. Since
the modernizing process has not been the same, it is unlikely
that the end product will conform to what the West regards as
the desirable norm. If the correct ingredients of a cake are not
available-if rice is used instead of flour, dried eggs instead
of fresh, and spices instead of sugar-the result will be differ-
ent from the cake described in the cookbook. Very different
ingredients have gone into the modern cake of the colonized
countries, and democracy, secularism, pluralism and the rest