The Islamic World as a Secular Concept (1)

The Islamic world is a colonial secular concept.

This is the essence of what Professor Jamil Ayden proposes in his book "The Idea of ​​the Islamic World: A Global Intellectual History".

Ayden argues that the Islamic world did not derive conceptually and historically from the Qur’anic concept of the ummah, but rather a concept that is separate from it, as there are discontinuities between both words.

The ummah refers to a group of believers, while the Islamic world is a unit of geopolitical analysis, and it refers to a global community that shares customs, interests, and political experience differently from the non-Muslim other.

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.

The Islamic world as a concept is against the Christian West and in an eternal struggle with it, and it is a concept based on the idea of ​​abstract and rigid Islam removed from its historical, social and cultural contexts, a concept that requires comprehensive political unity and witnesses fluidity in the arrangement of both religious and strategic priorities over time, and in the end it refers to An ethnic and cultural group, not a group of believers, a concept that always lives in a continuous process - of creation, discontinuities, mutations, and re-creation - revolving around the caliphate, the nation, and the international Islamic movement, and in the end it is nothing more than an illusion that is still going on.

Islamists and Westerners alike speak of “the West” and the “Islamic world,” but Aiden considers this duality a kind of “tribalism and argues that it is dangerous colonial propaganda. 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 within the framework of action and reaction between the campaigns of evangelization and Orientalism from On the one hand and the activists of the international Islamic movement and the modernists / Islamic reformers during the last 150 years, and in what follows we deal with Aydin's main ideas and arguments and the historical milestones he stopped at.

Ayden’s arguments and narrative elicit many observations.

The first is that the human and political reality is very complex and complex, and no matter how our tools develop, our understanding will remain shorter or more, and that political and strategic considerations continue to govern over other religious, cultural and other considerations, and that ideas do not die, but change, change, disappear, and return and in all their states are political in essence. And its destiny, and that values ​​do not live in a vacuum, but rather in political and historical contexts governed by interest, realism and rationality, and that the idea of ​​the supposed clash of civilizations between Muslims and the West is not historically true, so the truth of the matter is that it is related to political and strategic interests more than anything else.

The concept of civilization as a central concept

The use and employment of the concept of civilization and the concept of Islamic civilization was central;

The thinkers of the international Islamic movement argued that European civilization would not have reached its level without the contributions of thinkers of the Abbasid era, and these writers believed that this proves the progressive orientation of Muslims by nature, and Orientalist Ernest Renan responded by arguing that the achievements of the Abbasid era occurred in spite of Islam and not because of it.

On the contrary, the Islamic civilization - in the reformist vision - received the Greek legacy and merged it with rational and human Islamic values, and in the Islamic golden age, it contributed to the emergence of the modern West.

The historical narrative that establishes the clash between the Islamic world and the modern West is an historical narrative, based on myths about what constitutes the West and the Islamic world.

Modernist Islamic criticism of decadence was harsh and blamed Muslims, arguing that Sufism and popular religious practices were the cause of the degeneration, and therefore the solution is to return to the pure sources of Islam.

These arguments show that the idea of ​​the decadence of the Islamic world presupposed the existence of an Islamic world, and with a retroactive effect, because if the Islamic world was in a state of decline, it must have existed before and then this global narrative - which is built into political geography and scientific and political theories in the 19th century - It was projected retrospectively over centuries past.

Muslim thinkers adopted Toynbee's civilizational ideas at the very moment when nationalism was making colonial discourses on civilizational hierarchy appear abandoned.

After World War II, Muslim thinkers, regardless of their levels of commitment to the religion and their different political leanings, agreed that there was certainly a sharp distinction between the Islamic and Western worlds, and those who would later be known as Islamic thinkers were great admirers of Toynbee. For them, Toynbee’s model of global history was a bulwark against European Central and Secular Nationalism.

The historical narrative that establishes the clash between the Islamic world and the modern West is an historical narrative, based on myths about what constitutes the West and the Islamic world.

For example, texts that narrate the details of the Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry refer to a constant reference to the "holy war", and both sides have mobilized whatever religious discourse they could against the infidels, but contemporary references to the Vienna siege as a clash between Islam and Christianity overlook the fact that the Ottomans fought in this war. Along with the Protestant Hungarians, jihad may have been part of the discourse used in some of these conflicts, but the logic of the Muslim friend and Christian enemy was not present.

The complex relations between revolutionary France, the Ottoman Empire, its Egyptian state, and the Sultanate of Mysore suggest that what emerged decades later as a firm and solid border between the Christian West and the Islamic world - was not inevitable.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Islamic political entities were following the pattern of ruling families and empires that continued to develop over a thousand years, and the geographical area in which Muslims lived, extending from Mali and Nigeria to Southeast Asia, was not connected and so vast that it could not be ruled by a political system. One, and around the year 1800 there were more than 30 ruling families in the Islamic lands.