A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

Why the Expanding Role of Muslim Identity?
Every individual carries multiple identities: family, clan, region, ethnicity,
nationality, religion, gender, language, class, income, profession, avocation.
These various identities intertwine, come and go, operate during different phases
of our daily life: family and clan are prominent during ritual ceremonies,
celebrations, and support networks; political identity during elections; national
identity during military service; religious identity during times of solemn
passage-of-life ceremonies; professional identity during times of professional
work and associations; gender identity in the presence of the opposite sex, and
for females when facing discrimination. Class solidarities can briefly overcome
even ethnicity in periods of economic hardship and collective bargaining.
Differing circumstances evoke differing identity responses.
A Jew in liberal Berlin in 1920, if asked his or her identity, might say,
“German, professor of biology, socialist, Jew,” in that order. Fifteen years later,
under Nazism, the Jewish identity would take on the overwhelmingly urgent
priority of a life-or-death character. An Iraqi Sunni in a Shi’ite Baghdad
neighborhood during the US occupation might find the Sunni identity to be a
life-or-death matter, while Iraqi identity mattered little. Religious identity alone
mattered in Bosnia in 2001, even where everyone’s political background and
language were virtually identical; but the religious identity had not been very
significant ten years earlier in Tito’s Yugoslavia.
At a time when the whole Muslim world is felt to be under siege, the Muslim
identity has often become paramount for most Muslims. Muslims in Malaysia
watch Palestinians being killed on TV, Kashmiris watch Chechens, Nigerians
watch Iraqis, Afghans watch Somalis. Most other identities lose importance
when communities are dominated by violence and the Global War on Terror. But
this is not the normal state of affairs. The excessive prominence of the Muslim
identity over other elements of identity primarily emerges in times of hardship.
Islam then becomes an expanded and international rallying cry. But, in fact, most
struggles are local and ethnic. A key goal of Western policy must be to allow
these regions to calm down, allow life to return to a more normal state, free of
the provocative presence of foreign military forces, which will allow the Muslim
aspect of identity to subside to its customary place as one of many competing
characteristics of an individual’s life. During most times in their lives, Muslims
have many other things to think about than simply being Muslim.
When communities are obliged to protect themselves against others, they
seek to forge common ground against outsiders. This is the context in which we

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have to view contemporary Islamic identity. Fifty years ago in the Middle East,
nationalism loomed far larger than Islam as a rallying force. Yet today the
implications of being Muslim may matter more on the global scale than at any
other time in history. Muslims who seek to rally public support against external
intervention will turn to whichever banner will unite more people most
effectively.
When Arabs finally broke with the multiethnic Ottoman Empire at the end of
World War I, Islam obviously played no role in the event; it was, after all, a
Muslim versus Muslim struggle. When the conflict entailed Arab versus Turk,
only ethnicity could serve as a rallying cry, not Islam. Ethnic nationalism
achieved prominence in the Arab world, for example, under Egypt’s Gamal
Abdul Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s as the basis of resistance against European
intervention and neo-imperialism. But in the face of the ultimate weaknesses of
the Arab nationalist movement, nationalism became discredited as a force and
the Islamic identity took its place—a stage that has not yet ended.
After watching the horrors of ethnically driven nationalism and war across
the globe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we might well ask whether
ethnicity is, in fact, the most enlightened foundation for the creation of borders.
Or is some sort of multiethnic order perhaps a “higher” form of social
organization? Certainly the immigrant societies of the United States, Canada,
Australia, and New Zealand have come to believe that multiethnic orders foster
greater tolerance than ethnically based ones. But then, those immigrant states
had few other options.
In the Muslim world, there is no conviction that ethnicity invariably provides
the best basis for social and political organization. Islam itself instinctively
abhors the forces of nationalism as narrow and divisive, even while
acknowledging that differences are also enriching. “O humankind! We have
created you male and female, and made you nations and tribes, that you may
know one another” (Qur’an 49:13). From the perspective of Islam, it is better to
aspire to unity under the banner of religion, since it will embrace a vastly
broader swath of mankind, and no one is ever excluded from becoming a
Muslim if he or she wishes. Thus, to seek solidarity within Islam is a higher
concept than solidarity within a given ethnicity. And in terms of a rallying cry,
Islam operates very effectively when it comes to a struggle against non-Muslims.
Many Islamists were therefore hostile to ideas of Arab nationalism,
perceiving the very concept of “nationalism” to be a baleful and divisive
Western creation. Indeed, their worst fears were fulfilled in the case of Turkey.
The founder of the modern Turkish state, successor to the Ottoman Empire,
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, crushed nearly all independent instruments of Islamic

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power in the new Turkish nationalist state and adopted an unfriendly attitude
toward Turkey’s Muslim neighbors and toward Islam in general. Worst of all for
devout Muslims, he abolished the very office of the caliphate, the nominal leader
of Islam for all Sunni Muslims—tantamount to an Italian prime minister
deciding impulsively to abolish the papacy. An Islamic world divided by
nationalist differences is seen as impotent against an interventionist West.
In this sense, then, Western wars that are heavily perceived to be directed
against Islam, as in the Global War on Terror, are guaranteed to inflate the role of
Islam and to push Muslim solidarity to abnormal levels.

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