The writer, author of Bridging Islam and the West: An Indonesian View (2009),
is an assistant professor in religious studies, University of California, Riverside
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2010/12/20/global-islam-between-images-and-reality.html
Globalization has made the world of Islam more heterogeneous than homogeneous. It continues to shape Islam identities and moralities, imagined or real, at both global and local levels. What is conceptually homogenous is Islam itself, but what it means differs.
Globalization in its broadest sense is not new, and early Islam normatively preached trans-racial, trans-ethnic solidarity of the community of the believers, although information technology today has made them even more aware of the world.
Islam emerged as a local path of Prophet Muhammad and his followers, but with the power of the Koran and Arabic, Islam has ever since become increasingly global, crossing non-Arabic Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas. From early times, Muslims have been politically divided into the Shiite and the Sunni, the Khawarij, the Murji’a, the Mu’tazila, and so forth, although the efforts to unify them have never ceased.
