Islamic identity.. origin from Islam or a reaction to the racism of colonialism?

We continue with Dr. Jamil Aydin's book "The Idea of ​​the Islamic World: A Global Intellectual History", in which he argues that the Islamic world is a secular colonial concept.

Aydin argues that the Islamic world did not derive conceptually and historically from the Qur'anic concept of the nation, but rather it is a paradoxical concept, as there are breaks between both words.

The nation refers to a group of believers, while the Islamic world is a geopolitical unit of analysis.

It refers to a global community that shares customs, interests, and political experience differently than a non-Muslim one.

The Islamic world as a concept is opposite the Christian West and in eternal conflict with it.

It is a concept based on the idea of ​​a static, abstract Islam stripped from its historical, social and cultural contexts.

It is a concept that requires comprehensive political unity and witnesses fluidity in the arrangement of both religious and strategic priorities over time.

In the end, it refers to an ethnic and cultural category, not a group of believers.

It is a concept that always lives in a continuous process - of creation, discontinuities, mutations, and re-creation - revolving around the caliphate, the nation, and the Islamic international movement.

In the end, it is nothing more than an illusion that continues.

Islamists and Westerners alike speak of the "West" and the "Islamic world", but Eden regards this duality as a kind of "tribalism", and argues that it is dangerous colonial propaganda.

Aiden builds his arguments through a transcendental, genealogical, historical narrative, to show the modernity of the idea of ​​the Islamic world and how it was formed and developed, and the constant efforts to exploit this idea for political purposes by Islamic and Western forces alike.

Aiden concludes that the concept of the Islamic world itself is an invented secular concept, and there is no better evidence for that than the fact that the “Islamic world” was produced rhetorically in the context of action and reaction between proselytizing and Orientalist campaigns on the one hand, and activists of the Islamic internationalist movement and Islamic modernists/reformists in the 150 years Last.

Below we discuss Ayden's main ideas and arguments and the historical stops at which he stopped.

action and reaction

Muslims did not imagine that they belong to a global political unit until after the European hegemony reached its zenith in the late nineteenth century. The Islamic world as a concept is not the source of religion, but rather it is the counterpart of imperialist globalization and the racism that accompanied it.

The concept emerged from the legacy of the racist imperialist vision of Muslims, as well as from the intellectual and political strategies through which Muslims resisted this racial identity created by colonialism.

In the period from 1814-1878 in which the imperial international system was strengthened, the Islamic identity began to take a global character in the context of its response to the narrative of racial inferiority emanating from Europe. It was built upon all the Islamic groups that would appear later in the following century.

Muslim scholars were pushing the missionary arguments with their own arguments, and communication and communication technologies in that era had a key role in spreading these arguments across Islamic societies, and this led to the launch of what would later be a new tradition in which Islam would be in the position of a cosmic and global religion, able to respond to the challenge of Christian missionary And his calls for Islamic inferiority.

From here began the globalization of Islam politically.

The story of "Al Tarboush" tells a tale indicating the logic of the action and the reaction that was and will continue to prevail. With the passage of the nineteenth century, the relationship between Islamic societies and Christian rulers and neighbors began to shift, as they began to interact increasingly on the basis of religious differentiation and difference, which the logic of empire had previously overshadowed. The fez comes as an important example in this context.

The fez law was part of a larger system of Ottoman modernization reforms aimed at promoting and affirming equality among Ottoman subjects. When a Turk, an Armenian, and a Greek wear the same clothes, no one will be able to determine their religious identity from their appearance. By the 1890s, Muslim reformers around the world had adopted the fez to emphasize the compatibility of their religious faith with modern progress, but Europeans saw the fez as a symbol of the Islamic enemy rather than an Islamic version of cosmopolitan modernity. Thus, the fez - which was a symbol of the cosmopolitan imperial identity - became a symbol of the global Islamic identity in half a century.

The Christian national movement of the nineteenth century was an important, and perhaps surprising, source of inspiration for a globalized Islamic identity.

Christian nationalist revolts against their Ottoman rulers strongly shaped and politicized Islamic identity, the Greek revolt against the Ottomans helped catalyze a shift in European public opinion against them, and European empires moved to support Greek nationalism.

At about the same time as Greek independence, another European project shook the structure of the imperial system.

While the Europeans were calling on Christians to decide their fate, France invaded Ottoman Algeria, which was a stark contradiction.

The contrast between Greek liberation and the cosmopolitan conquest of Algeria established a continuous pattern.

The nineteenth century contains a paradox of function. The reforms of the Ottoman Empire and its struggle to preserve the logic of empire in the midst of a growing wave of Christian nationalism is paradoxical. While the Ottomans had done everything in their power to preserve the cosmopolitanism of the European club, they came to be defined by a distinct Islamic identity, both in European metropolises and in Islamic colonies. Islamic internationalist thought had a growing awareness of the extent of the expansion of Muslim-majority regions and the huge peoples present in them, and evangelical missionaries played an important role in establishing the imagined united Islamic world. Counting the numbers of Muslims reinforced European racism, as it magnified the perceived danger to Western hegemony.

Islamists have falsely portrayed themselves as the original representatives of devout Muslims, and this illusion has been used to justify Western Islamophobia. As always, false assumptions about a unified and self-sustaining Islamic world ostensibly benefited the activists of the internationalist Islamic movement, who exploited this perceived unity to win the support of Muslims across the world. By the mid-1990s, these vicious cycles of Islamophobia and Islamophobia, which feed off each other, solidified the illusion of the Islamic world and stifled the other diverse voices and political demands of actual Muslims in different regions of the world.