Central within the current debate on the impact of the information and communication technologies are the theories of the “global culture” and “cultural clashes”, or global village and clash of civilizations. According to the first theory (ICTs) will generate global culture or American culture and homogenous religious patterns; the cultural dimension of globalization. On the other hand, theory of cultural clashes claims that ICTs intensifies awareness of cultural differences that ultimately lead to cultural clashes. From the Islamic intercultural communication perspective, Islamic world communication values provide a “Third Way” based on peaceful and democratic coexistence among different global cultures. The “Third Way” also opposes the principles of both global culture and cultural clashes. To use the words of Ali Izetbegovich, the Muslim President of Bosnia: … As Islam in the past was the intermediary between the ancient cultures and the West, it must again today, in a time of dramatic dilemmas and alternatives, shoulder its role as intermediary nation in a divided world (Braibanti, 1999). By the same token, I argue that the universal intercultural communication values of Islam could solve all the problems related to and generated by the dominant global and homogenous culture perspective, and those of the clash of cultures perspective. And definitely, this is the meaning of the Third Way, the Islamic way. In this paper, I also think that theories of global culture and clash of cultures threaten the democratic intercultural communication and undermine the potentials of the Islamic intercultural communication.
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