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 Quranic 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. As for the Islamic world, it is a unit of geopolitical analysis, and it refers to a global community that shares customs, interests, and political experience differently from 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 an abstract, rigid Islam that is stripped of its historical, social and cultural contexts. It is a concept that requires a comprehensive political unity and that witnesses fluidity in arranging both religious and strategic priorities over time. In the end, it indicates an ethnic and civilized group, 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 persists.
Islamists and Westerners alike talk about the “West” and the “Islamic world,” but Aiden considers this duality a kind of “tribalism” and argues that it is dangerous colonial propaganda. This idea was exploited 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 this than the fact that the concept of the “Islamic world” was produced rhetorically in the context of action and reaction between missionary campaigns and Orientalism. On the one hand, and activists of the internationalist Islamic movement and Islamic modernists/reformists in the last 150 years.The following discusses Aydin's main ideas and arguments and the historical stations he stopped at.
Contrasting religious and political considerations
The modern Islamic world has seen contradictions between religious and political considerations in the practice of the concept of an Islamic world. Aiden tells many stories to prove this. The first is the story of Sultan Tipu, who was ruling the Sultanate of Mysore in southern India in the late 18th century. He was suffering from the encroachment of the East India Company on his lands, so in 1798 he appealed to the Ottoman Sultan Selim III in the name of Islamic solidarity in order to be able to push the British outside his borders, and Tipu tried to secure French support. But Sultan Selim did not help him or help him, as the Ottoman Empire at the time was in alliance with Britain and Russia against Napoleon, who had just invaded Ottoman Egypt. The result was that the British forces invaded and plundered the Mysore region in the following year in cooperation with other Indian Muslim kings, rivals to Tipu such as King Nizam in Hyderabad. The idea of Islamic solidarity was politically impotent.
Even in the ninth century, there was no definitive boundary between the Islamic world and the Christian West. In 1867 Sultan Abdul Aziz visited Europe on an extended tour and was warmly received in the French, British, Austro-Hungarian and the kingdoms of Belgium and Prussia, and this visit - like many other indicators - was a sign of inter-imperial cooperation and the priority of imperial identity over religious identity.
There was no international Islamic response to the Napoleonic invasion; Napoleon's arrival in Egypt, like all other forms of Western empires' conquest of Muslim societies in the late 18th century, did not lead to the emergence of any visions of an Islamic global identity. But despite this, it must be said that Napoleon's campaign against Egypt went beyond the first European imperialist activities; It was Napoleon - and not the Egyptians or the Ottomans - who tried to build an abstract concept of Islam, as Napoleon himself was thinking of converting to Islam, and he did not see any contradiction between the roles he aspired to as a protector of Muslims in Cairo and being a republican revolutionary in Paris. For his part, the Ottoman response to the French invasion of Egypt stemmed from the classical imperial strategy, which is free from any religious or civil disputes on the one hand, and which welcomes any help from the Christian powers on the other. It is in this context that the Ottoman refusal to assist Tipu in his war against the British in Mysore can be understood.
The British helped the Ottomans drive the French out of Egypt; Where they destroyed the French fleet off the Egyptian coast. After British assistance to the Ottomans in expelling the French, Sultan Selim III established a new honour, the Brotherhood of the Crescent, and awarded the first medal to the Commander of the British Navy, Admiral Nelson, who in turn wore the medal proudly and used the title in diplomatic correspondence. Nelson's membership in the Crescent Brotherhood is even written on his tombstone, showing a kind of imperial cosmopolitanism that transcends Christian and Muslim religious identities.
Even in the ninth century, there was no definitive boundary between the Islamic world and the Christian West. In 1867 Sultan Abdul Aziz visited Europe on an extended tour and was warmly received in the French, British, Austro-Hungarian and the kingdoms of Belgium and Prussia, and this visit - like many other indicators - was a sign of inter-imperial cooperation and the priority of imperial identity over religious identity. When the Ottoman traveler and jurist Abd al-Rahman Effendi wrote about the universal character of the imperial framework, the world for him was divided not according to religious belief, language, tradition, and geography, but according to empires that ruled large areas with very diverse subjects. Imperial reforms were not necessarily seen as secularization and Westernization.
Likewise, the Turkish journalist and reformer, Namik Kemal - and others - did not make a clear distinction between the Islamic world and the Christian West. The Ottoman elites believed that they could maintain a degree of differentiation while empowering their empire through the Western civilizational model. In 1848, the Ottoman Sultan granted protection to the Hungarian and Polish revolutionaries. The Ottomans also benefited from their alliance with Britain in the Crimean War (1853-1856). The Ottoman elite supported the British against Muslim and Indian fighters during the Indian Revolution of 1857.
So from the perspective of both Muslim and Christian elites, much of the 19th century was an era of diplomacy, strategy, and imperial expansion. The Ottomans continued to respect their alliances; For example, in the 1940s and 1850s, when the Caucasians - a stone's throw from the Ottoman border - were resisting Russian imperial expansion, the Ottomans did not provide any support to their Muslim brothers, even though the Russians had been enemies of the Ottomans for a long time. Many Muslims also participated in the British, French and Russian armies, and prominent Indian Islamic international activists supported the expansion of British rule to include Muslims in East Africa and the Middle East. The allies adopted a propaganda discourse that challenges the idea of jihad and even the legitimacy of the Ottoman claim about the caliphate.Sharif Hussein's revolution was a great achievement for British anti-jihad policies, and destroyed the trauma of the war. In addition to the internal conflict between the Russian and Ottoman empires, Britain won the war but lost the loyalty of its Muslim subjects.
The despair of Muslim colonialists from great promises of liberation, such as the Wilsonian Principles and Bolshevism worldview, prompted a greater adherence to global Islamic solidarity in the post-World War I period. The Turkish War of Liberation broke out under the leadership of Ataturk, and Muslim Turkish leaders sought help from the Muslim world in the victorious British Empire without using the word jihad. And the movement of the Indian Khilafah active movement in the field of the internationalist Islamic movement. Support for the Khilafah movement was crucial for Turkey at the Lausanne Conference; Indian Muslims played a direct and decisive role in bringing Britain to the negotiating table. But the thrust of the underlying deal in Lausanne was that Turkey could become a nation-state as long as it excluded the Ottoman Empire and made it a thing of the past.
And then - while the body of the Islamic world moved to the rescue of Turkey - Turkey seemed ready to cut off the head of that body. Realpolitik considerations made it impossible to retain even the spiritual authority of the caliphate. Many Turkish leaders in the republican era believed that Turkey would be harmed if it appeared to be a leader in the Islamic world. They firmly preferred to adopt Western civilization, which was impossible in the presence of the Caliphate in Istanbul. Thus, the declaration of jihad in the First World War - along with the Great Arab Revolt - irreversibly destroyed the golden age of the internationalist Islamic movement based on the Ottoman-British alliance. The abolition of the Caliphate ended half a century of global Islamic political thought linked to the model of Ottoman modernity. The caliphate may not have had the same meaning throughout history, but between 1880 and the 1920s it was clear that it became a refuge for the demands of Muslims under European colonialism.