Universal Commonality and Citizenship Values: core principals of Islamic Philosophy: a lived Sufi reality and challenge for all contemporary societies and civilisations

It has long been held that Western democratic societies offer the world a singular cultural opportunity of individual freedom and self-actualisation within a liberal and pluralistic civil society. It is postulated that this apparently unique socio-political development is indivisible from a capitalist economy and a secularisation of society. Some proponents maintain that all non-Western societies must evolve according to this European/North American formula in order to achieve the same end state or, inevitably, must react in an anti-democratic manner with severe limits on civil society. Others postulate the colonial experience as the defining component of their histories and promote the development of an entirely reactive model as the only alternative in a final stage decolonisation and de-Westernisation approach. In Western and North American societies this understanding of a polarisation of models has influenced discussion about different and competing interpretations of civil society and citizenship as well as competing interpretations of multiculturalism. Within the Islamic world competing Islamist definitions jostle for control over what constitutes the 'one true' Islam as the predominant competing form of resistance to Western ideology. This paper will argue that the history of Sufism, as well as its present day lived experience, offers a mediating bridge between conflicting and extremist interpretations of opposed systems of civilisations. Sufism carries within it the activated seeds of an Islam of the 'juste milieu' from the time of the first community of Medina through to the challenges of the present day. It reveals the conception of a 'clash of civilisations' to be an impoverished polarisation of a rich historical and pluralistic dialogue between Islam and the wider world.