 "Suleiman the Magnificent, the longest-reigning sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Photo: Wikimedia Commoms")
The Idea of the Muslim World
A Global Intellectual History
Author: Cemil Aydin
Publisher: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2017
Pages: 293
Price: Rs 599
A caliphate was set up in Mosul in June 1994, 70 years after the abolition of this august office in Turkey by the republican government of Kamal Ataturk. Then, as now the “caliph” purports to represent the global Muslim community, the “Muslim World”, but targets millions of Muslims who do not share his narrow, rigid and violent belief-system.
This “caliph”, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, is not alone in making his universalist appeal: in 2009, US President Barack Obama also addressed “the Muslim World” from his podium in Cairo, attempting to correct the errors of his predecessor who, with his words and actions, was believed to have wounded and alienated this global community.
Pluralistic cultures
In this timely and well-researched book, Cemil Aydin looks at the historical background that has shaped the idea of this monolithic community, which embraces a civilisation, a religious tradition and a geopolitical entity, a unity that is not ascribed to any other world faith or geographical space. He locates its origins, not in the early days of Islam or the Crusades, but in the late 19th century when European powers had brought almost all the Muslim communities under imperialist domination.
Aydin points out that before the colonial era, there had been no sense of the “Muslim World”. Muslim empires had diverse Muslim communities in terms of their backgrounds, schools of thought, and the spiritual paths they followed, and who at the same time lived with large numbers of non-Muslim communities.
The conflicts of the three major empires of Europe — the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman — were those of imperial empires, not the clashes of religious groups, so that the idea of “Muslim friend and Christian enemy did not apply”.
The medieval period, Aydin notes, shows no evidence of an Islam-West divide in Christian-Muslim relations.
Suleiman the Magnificent, the longest-reigning sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Photo: Wikimedia Commoms
Muslim-West divide
The situation began to change in the 19th century when European powers clamoured for the independence of various Christian communities — Greek, Serbian, Romanian or Bulgars — in the Ottoman empire, while themselves expanding colonial control over Muslim communities in Asia and Africa.
European colonialists viewed the Muslims in their realms as a distinct “race” that was at once racially distinct (both due to their Semitic ethnicity and religious difference) and inferior. This attitude was strengthened by the views of Christian missionaries who saw western political and scientific achievements “as signs of God’s favour to Christians”.
Muslim intellectuals responded to this racism with a discourse of a pan-Islamic community that was shaped by certain recurring themes: the idea of a monolithic “Islamic civilisation”; Islam as a universal religion; recent Muslim history as a product of Western humiliation; the consciousness of an “eternal conflict” between Islam and the Christian West, and finally the need to oppose Western domination through the efforts of a globalised Muslim community. These themes, however ahistorical even fantastical they might have been, shaped an “imagined global Muslim community”.
The idea of this global community got embedded both in the minds of Muslims themselves and their European overloads. As European states went to war with each other they feared this global mammoth and sought to mobilise it on their side.
Pan-Islamism resurrected
Historical evidence, however, suggests that such a cohesive community never actually functioned unitedly in pursuit of Muslim interests in the 20th century. After the Second World War, revolutionary Muslim leaders like Nasser and Sukarno anchored their polities not in Islam but in “secular Third World internationalism”. They were opposed by Prince (later king) Faisal of Saudi Arabia who initiated pan-Islamic projects to challenge Nasser’s vision of Arab nationalism. But, after the Arab defeat in 1967, Faisal got the opportunity to institutionalise his pan-Islamic vision with the setting up of the Organisation the Islamic Conference (OIC), while maintaining a pro-West political posture.
The last quarter of the 20th century has thrown up Islamic organisations that articulate a universal message of Islam, but one that is shaped by a very narrow and selective understanding of Islam’s texts and traditions, even as the Muslim world itself is riven by discord and conflict. These developments have given a fresh resonance to anti-Muslim racist attitudes in the West and the revival in political and academic circles and in popular opinion of the “clash of civilisations” thesis.
The universalist message of Islam is mainly being provided by transnational jihadi groups, one of which, the Islamic State, has declared itself to be a “caliphate”, while the two principal Islamic states, Saudi Arabia and Iran, are engaged in a ruinous confrontation that has its roots in their strategic competition, but which is being defined largely in sectarian terms. This has divided the Sunni and Shia communities politically for the first time after the original schism following the death of Prophet Mohammed.
Global jihad
The book misses some important points. While Aydin speaks of the jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s, he does not refer to it as a “global jihad”, an initiative that mobilised over a hundred thousand Muslims from across the world to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the biggest Muslim collective exercise of modern times. This cooperative enterprise of the West and leading Muslim nations, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, spawned radical Islam, that has ended a positive view of “Islam” as the “natural ally of the West” and fomented widespread Islamophobia.
Again, Aydin’s presentation of the contemporary Muslim scenario could have been more detailed. He ends his narrative abruptly in the mid-1990s, thus excluding all discussion of the last 20years of Muslim-West experience, such as the events of 9/11, the Iraq war of 2003, the consolidation of the sectarian divide, the emergence of the Islamic State and the lethal attacks by Islamic radicals in Europe and the US.
These developments have ensured that Muslims are today viewed as a monolithic community that is illiberal and fanatical, and they are more estranged from the West than at any time in recent history.
The author is a former diplomat
