President Trump’s weekend address in Saudi Arabia, a centerpiece of his first foreign trip since taking office, was billed as an address to the “Muslim world,” much in the same way as President Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo. Though Trump’s focus on the threat of Iran undercut the notion of Muslim singularity, the speech was both presented and received in the context of an imagined global Muslim unity. In The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History, Cemil Aydin asks how, despite “the obvious naïveté of categorizing one and a half billion people” as a single community, this idea’s become so entrenched. “How did we arrive at this point,” writes Aydin, “where a fantastical entity could be so present, so prevalent in political thinking? Why do so many Muslim and non-Muslim political leaders, intellectuals, and religious figures comfortably base many of their arguments and decisions on the idea of the Muslim world without reflecting on the accuracy of the generalization that this term signifies?” In the excerpt below, Aydin begins to trace the emergence of this imagined global unity during the peak of European hegemony in the late nineteenth century, when poor colonial conditions, European discourses of Muslim racial inferiority, and Muslims’ theories of their own apparent decline nurtured the first arguments for pan-Islamic solidarity.
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The idea of the Muslim world is inseparable from the claim that Muslims constitute a race. The distinction of the Muslim world and the Christian West began taking shape most forcefully in the 1880s, when the majority of Muslims and Christians resided in the same empires. The rendering of Muslims as racially distinct—a process that called on both “Semitic” ethnicity and religious difference—and inferior aimed to disable and deny their demands for rights within European empires. Muslim intellectuals could not reject the assumptions of irreducible difference but responded that they were equal to Christians, deserving of rights and fair treatment. The same conception of Muslim unity and difference justified appeals to Muslims as a global community during World War I and World War II. Racial assumptions also ensured that later subaltern and nationalist claims for rights would be framed in the idioms of Muslim solidarity and an enduring clash between Islam and the West, giving rise to the Islamism and Islamophobia of the 1980s and beyond.
It is thanks to this elaboration of both Muslim difference and Muslim unity that contemporary writing, scholarly and otherwise, tends to emphasize Muslim exceptionalism. The assumption is that Muslims, due to their piety and the nature of their faith, naturally resist the liberal international order of independent, pluralistic nation-states. Muslims’ attitudes toward politics are presumed different from those of Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and Christians, whose societies need not be explained by reference to faith tradition or civilizational identity. However, this theory of Muslim exceptionalism is unsupported and unsubstantiated. The Ottoman Empire, Republican Turkey, British-ruled Indian Muslims, Afghanistan, the Saudi Kingdom, Pakistan, postcolonial Egypt, and Iran under the shah ardently supported the imperial and later nationalist world orders. The seeming importance of Islam in the contemporary politics of Muslim-majority societies derives not from theological requirements or a uniquely high level of Muslim piety but from the legacy of imperial racialization of Muslim-ness and from the particular intellectual and political strategies of Muslim resistance to this racialized identity.
The geography and technology of empire were essential to these processes of racialization and resistance in the second half of the nineteenth century. New transportation and communication technologies such as steamships and the telegraph fostered unprecedented levels of connection among Muslims, naturalizing the geopolitical concept of the Muslim world in Europe and its colonies. The networks enabled by these technologies were the medium of pan-Islamic thought born of confrontation with imperial racism.
Imperial racism, but not empire itself. Muslim leaders and thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not, for the most part, anti-imperialists. Instead they sought fair treatment from the four major European empires: British, Dutch, French, and Russian. These were cosmopolitan arrangements, home to wide-ranging ethnic and religious groups. But racialized legal categorizations shared across European empires, the empowerment strategies of colonized Muslim subjects, and tactics employed in imperial rivalries confirmed rather than challenged Muslim difference, ensuring that Muslims would be a separate class within the imperial whole. The British ruled almost half of the world’s Muslims and therefore played an especially important role in guiding the development of pan-Islamic thought. British fears of rebellion and policies of oppression engendered specifically Muslim responses. At the same time, Muslims understood that their vast numbers and the reality of their overwhelming loyalty to the empire all owed them real clout.
Thus Muslim solidarity was of strategic importance. The Ottoman sultans, as the most powerful modern Muslim rulers and overseers of the Muslim holy cities, enjoyed a special position as leaders of the global Muslim community. They used this to their advantage, claiming spiritual sovereignty over Muslims globally and leveraging this influence in political wrangling with the British and other European empires. Seeking a competitive edge by any means available, empires variously used the idea of global Muslim solidarity to weaken their rivals, justify alliances with them, and bolster propaganda campaigns.
The advances of the imperial age led to increased wealth and an intellectual renaissance, including for Muslim subjects of Christian rule. Printing and steamship technologies enabled mobility and productivity in Muslim thought and publishing. Women’s rights, education, and economic activity improved. Yet by the early twentieth century, the categorization of Muslims as an inferior, colored race prone to rebellion against global white hegemony had provoked paranoia in colonial metropoles, leading to oppression and Muslim perceptions of their own victimization.
Late nineteenth-century Muslim intellectuals responded to the inequalities of racialization with a number of strategies. By articulating a concept of Islamic civilization, these reformers sought to elevate the esteem in which Muslims were held and thereby contest the assertion of racial inferiority—if not racial difference itself. Pioneers of the idea of Islamic civilization distinguished the values, ideals, and accomplishments of Muslim societies from Islam as a faith tradition itself but assumed that the civilization was inspired by the values of the faith. This involved a new focus on a “golden age” of lay Muslim philosophy, art, and cultural production.
The reformers’ goal was to make Islam compatible with modernity. Rebutting the likes of French historian and philosopher Ernest Renan, who claimed that Islam was incompatible with modern science, reformist writers argued that Islam was in harmony with modern standards of reason and progress. The civilization wrought by Muslims was the evidence. Modernist reformers emphasized Andalusian Muslim history as a sign of Islam’s contribution to Europe, carving out a place for Averroes and Avicenna in the global history of science and medicine. Discussion of Islamic civilization in relation to world and European history became a hallmark of intellectual life in every Muslim society.
But this strategy of contesting inferiority by upholding a narrative of Islamic civilization only reinforced the European racial discourse in which Muslims were united—and divided from others—by their religion and heritage. Muslim thinking and writing about Islamic civilization created an abstraction linking Mecca to Java and Senegal, Istanbul to Samarkand and Delhi. This narrative of a singular Muslim civilization led to amnesia about cosmopolitan Muslim empires, which could not be reduced to a simplistic civilizational model. Centuries of shared experience with Hindus, Jews, and Buddhists; shamans; Christian Arabs, Greeks, and Armenians; and others were ignored.
While reformers aimed to elevate the nonreligious characteristics of Islamic history to which non-Muslims could relate as equals, they sought to use their faith tradition for new purposes, recasting Islam by collapsing its diverse traditions into a singular world religion comparable to Christianity. Its true spirit recovered, Muslim modernists claimed, Islam would be an instrument in the revival of the victimized, declining Muslim world. As followers of a universal religion compatible with science, Muslims would also appropriate and respond to secular European ideologies such as the Enlightenment, social Darwinism, and progress.
In order to bring uniform and systematic meaning to this new world religion, modernist scholars focused strictly on texts from which they claimed to deduce the essence of Islam beyond differences of culture, time, and place. Of course, there has long been a rich Muslim tradition of textual interpretation. Innumerable debates, such as Ghazali’s critique of philosophy and Averroes’s responses insisting on harmony between revelation and reason, illustrate an enduring struggle to understand God’s will by deciphering and arguing about religious texts. But reformers took a novel approach. They discounted vernacular Muslim practices that, historically, were as integral to the meaning of Islam as was textual scholarship. Late nineteenth-century Muslim intellectuals wrote books with essentializing titles such as The Spirit of Islam, Islam and Progress, The Rise and Decline of Islam, Christianity and Islam, and Women’s Rights in Islam. Whereas earlier Muslim scholarship refrained from such generalizations and preserved a polyvocal tradition, these works lumped together diverse Muslim practices and criticized their supposed impurities or simply overlooked them. Muslim societies of the nineteenth century were not actually less diverse than previously, but reformist elites hoped to refashion them as such, fixing the content and principles of Islam in order to create a unity that would empower Muslims.
This process of reformation unfolds in the work of two generations of modern Muslim intellectuals, from Syed Ahmad Khan, Syed Ameer Ali, and Muhammad Abduh to Rashid Rida, Shakib Arslan, and Muhammad Asad. Their ideas inspired unity not only across faith differences but also what had been wide ranging political and moral agendas. Approaches to slavery provide a case in point. When Ahmet Bey, Tunisia’s ruler, banned slavery in the mid-nineteenth century, Muslim scholars justified the ban on the basis of sharia. But their reasoning did not reflect a monolithic principle of Islam. It was understood that sharia scholars in Egypt and Zanzibar might rule differently. After the Ottomans banned the slave trade, it eventually disappeared in Muslim-ruled states without any universal claims about Islamic rules concerning slavery. Within less than a century, however, Ahmadiyya Muslim missionaries in Europe and America spoke of Islam’s categorical ban on racism and slavery, in contrast with Christianity’s condoning of racial discrimination.
Thus, in time, the nineteenth-century goal of positioning Islam as enlightened and tolerant—and therefore Muslims as racially equal to their Western overlords—produced the notion of Islam in the abstract, providing the core substance of Muslim reformism and pan-Islamic thought in the early twentieth century. This Muslim modernist strategy to defeat the notion of racial inferiority and articulate Muslim belonging in a universal humanity counterintuitively contributed to a rigid Orientalist conception of Muslims as essentially different from the rest of humanity. Ironically, in both the colonial and postcolonial contexts, this assumption further racialized Muslim societies.
Although the historian may distinguish the geopolitical, civilizational, and religious modes of knowledge and discourse inherent in the racialization and reformation of an imagined Muslim world, all were tightly interwoven. Both Christian missionaries and secular theorists such as Renan argued that defects in the Muslim faith itself produced the civilizational decline that legitimized empire. Thus secular Muslim reformers responded by rewriting the history of science and philosophy—typically irrelevant to geopolitics—and theological reformers responded with new religious exegeses. They tried to refute missionary claims and social Darwinism but also, in some respects, embraced them by accepting the narrative of Muslim decline and reinterpreting the Quran and other religious texts to urge believers toward salvation by moral improvement.
This nineteenth- and twentieth-century history helps to reveal falsehoods in today’s dominant narratives about politics in the Muslim world—both the politics imagined by Muslims and the politics of Islam imagined by non-Muslims. The literature of Muslim exceptionalism relies on an essentialized notion of Western Europe as nationalist, democratic, and progressive, in contrast with a conservative, antinationalist caliphate born from selective reading of Islamist critiques of Western modernity and redefinitions of Muslim traditions. Both Muslims and non-Muslims often assume that modern Europe created the notion of national sovereignty at the Treaty of Westphalia and that this norm then spread to the rest of the world thanks to the expansion of Eurocentric values projected as universal. Some of today’s transnational Islamist political projects and identities claim to challenge Westphalian national borders in the name of the borderless Muslim world.
But this narrative of the encounter between the modern West and the Islamic world is ahistorical and relies on myths of what constitutes the West and the Muslim world. In reality, before and during the colonial period Muslims’ political views could be as imperial as Queen Victoria’s, as nationalistic as Gandhi’s, and as socialistic as Lenin’s. In the age when imperialists and reformers were inventing unitary Islam, individual Muslims were anarchists, feminists, and pacifists. They were as modern as their European counterparts. Muslim political visions from the mid-nineteenth century onward, including pan-Islamism, reflect not enduring tradition but rather the particular entanglement of Muslim intellectual history and the shifting international order from the age of empires to that of the contemporary nation-state.
