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 unit of geopolitical analysis, and it refers to a global group that shares customs and interests And political experience differently from the other non-Muslim.

The Islamic world as a concept is opposed to the Christian West and in eternal conflict with it, 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 civilized group, not a group of believers, and 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, and builds his arguments through a historical, genealogical and critical narrative that crosses the centuries; 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 last 150 years . In what follows, we discuss Aiden's main ideas and arguments and the historical stations he stopped at.

Islamic history as written by historians in the modern era presupposes a complete and comprehensive Islamic unity.

Yet even so, true Islamic political experience from the seventh to the eighteenth centuries tells a story of pluralism, conflict, and change.

The idea of ​​the Islamic world will appear later, along with the civilizational narrative of the West, which emerged late

The myth of unity and abstract Islam

The concept of the Islamic world presupposes a comprehensive political unity and internalizes a single, completely undifferentiated Islamic whole. But in fact, on the contrary, the Islamic societies of the 19th century were not actually less diverse than their predecessors in the previous millennium, but the reformist elites hoped to reformulate their societies as such (that is, as less diverse), and those elites transformed the content and principles of Islam from their dynamic nature to a state of stasis in order to create unity that leads to the empowerment of Muslims. The reformist elites of the 19th century aimed to place Islam in the position of an enlightened and tolerant religion, and thus to place Muslims on an ethnic equal footing with their Western masters. As a result, the concept of Islam appeared abstract, and this concept of abstract Islam - which is the main essence of Islamic reform and the internationalist Islamic movement - was presented at the beginning of the 20th century.Abstract Islam means stripping Islam and making it free of its geographical, cultural and historical contexts and factors, so it becomes ossified and calcified, meaning that Islamic beliefs and laws remained rigid and fixed in an eternal manner and did not witness any kind of change and diversity, and this requires that Islam is one thing, whether it was in the Arabian Peninsula during the days of the Companions, or In Indonesia 700 years ago, and in America today.

Islamic history as written by historians in the modern era presupposes a complete and comprehensive Islamic unity. Yet even so, true Islamic political experience from the seventh to the eighteenth centuries tells a story of pluralism, conflict, and change. The idea of ​​the Islamic world will appear later, along with the civilized narrative of the West, which emerged late, but before it Muslims in different parts of the world were in contact through education, trade, pilgrimage, politics and kinship, not only religion, nor through collective competition with the other non-Muslim. Moreover, the political loyalties and Muslims' perception of themselves did not stem primarily from belonging to a global religious or civilized bloc. There was no clear dichotomy between Islamic and non-Islamic lands. It is not possible to find the roots of the modern distinction between Islam and the West in Muslim-Christian relations in the Middle Ages.The absence of an Islamic political system based exclusively on the concepts of the caliphate and the nation did not prevent the trans-empire sharing and transmission of customs, rulings, and values ​​stemming from Islamic religious and legal traditions. But most importantly, common religious knowledge and practice never meant or assumed a transnational political unity. The traveler Ibn Battuta, for example, did not have an abstract and universal concept of Islamic civilization.

Between 1814 and 1878, the process of racial discrimination against the Islamic identity began between the 1920s and the 1880s, as did the racial discrimination against the black identity and the Asian identity. This process challenged the imperial balance. In this context, a racial awareness of unity, ethnic and geopolitical difference appeared, coexisting sometimes with imperial loyalties and realities and contradicting them at other times.

This racial consciousness was historically very new. Under political conditions, Muslims were sometimes conquerors, at other times loyal subjects of empires ruled by Christians, and sometimes under occupation. Under these circumstances, it was not logical to reduce the Muslim world to a single, undifferentiated group. But despite this, with the changing conditions in the second half of the 19th century, the process of transforming Muslims into a civilized one began, and racial discrimination against Muslims began in European metropolises and among Muslims themselves.

By the latter half of the 19th century, orientalists began to produce more solid theories of racial hierarchy.

It was this new ethnicity that was challenged by the activists of the internationalist Islamic movement, but their strategy came the opposite of what they wanted.

The emphasis of the activists of the internationalist Islamic movement on spiritual ties with the Ottoman Caliph and the comparison of the conditions of Ottoman Christians with the conditions of Muslims under European rule encouraged European paranoia about the clash between Islam and the West, and Muslim modernists intensified the ethnic discourse by proudly responding to orientalists, addressing an imagined European imperial center.

In their critical interaction with Orientalist and geopolitical arguments, Muslim thinkers transformed Islam and Islamic identity into an abstract, sluggish and rigid concept.