A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

Religion versus Ethnicity in the State
However functional at the time, the idea of administering the state through
religiously based communities strikes the contemporary observer as outmoded,
the product of a different, more religious age. Yet, what then should the basis of
identity be within the state? Ethnicity (language) or religion? One or the other of
these two concepts has constituted the main organizing principle in most
complex multicultural societies for millennia. In the contempory West, the
reigning concept of identity within the state tends to be membership via
“citizenship”—a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” identity—where one professes
loyalty to the state but need not disclose anything about one’s personal
characteristics.
Despite its many wars with neighboring Muslim states, the Russian Empire
nonetheless actively engaged in diplomacy with the Ottoman state, with Iran,
and served at the same time as official protector of Orthodoxy in the Holy Lands
of Palestine under Ottoman control. Moscow cared greatly about the opinion of
foreign Muslims toward Russia; at the same time Moscow sought to enlist
Russian Muslims to advance Russian foreign policy goals in the Middle East, so
that Moscow could speak as a “Muslim power” as well as a Christian power.
Thus, rather than hindering the expansionist vision of the Russian state, Islam
actually facilitated it.
The Russian Orthodox Church itself, however, was far less happy with the
situation; it did not approve of the ecumenism of the Russian state that hindered
the church from pursuing Christian goals across the empire. Russian nationalists
such as the writer Dostoyevsky saw the Orthodox Church as representing the
“soul” of Russia and were opposed to Russian state accommodations with
Muslims. Dostoyevsky criticized the state for “extolling Muslims for
monotheism,” which he called “the hobby-horse of a great many lovers of the
Turks.” He believed that Russia was destined to dominate the Orient.
The degree of Muslim acceptance of Russian rule often depended on the
Russian policies of the moment. The breaking point seemed to come in 1917,
when Moscow finally lurched into the Bolshevik Revolution and the long,
unhappy Soviet experiment. But during all those previous centuries, no serious
bloc of internal Muslim resistance ever emerged, even during Russian campaigns
against Muslim neighbors. In many cases, Muslim fighters, or “jihadists,” fought
their own traditional local rulers—shades of the Middle East today. And a
number of Russian Muslims who could not religiously support Russian foreign
wars against Muslims on the borderlands decided to emigrate from Russia to

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Turkey, sometimes even to fight on the opposing side.
And yet nearly all imperial powers around the world at some point have
attempted to recruit local Muslim elites into supporting the colonial regime and
fending off local rebellion. Thus the Hapsburg Empire before World War I
sought out pliable Muslim rulers in the Balkans. The German Kaiser during
World War I sought unsuccessfully to foment revolt across the entire Muslim
world against British and French imperial rule. The French, equally
unsuccessfully, sought Islamic legitimacy for their conquest and annexation of
Algeria; as did the Germans in their invasion of the Caucasus during World War
II. The Japanese before and during World War II attempted to ally themselves
with the Muslim populations of South and Southeast Asia to fight against
Western armies there. In World War II, the Germans won over the mufti of
Jerusalem in an effort to gain Arab support against Allied forces in the Middle
East. The United States today supports numerous unpopular and nonelected
rulers in the Arab world to help promote unpopular US policies.
But the Russian engagement with Islam is older, deeper, more extensive, and
more complex than Europe’s. One key reason is that the Russian Empire
encountered Muslims as a result of contiguous overland expansion east and
south, unlike the European imperialists who encountered Muslims only through
distant voyages of conquest overseas. Russian forms of coexistence with Islam
persist and always will, simply because they inhabit common space. Russia
remains the sole state in the West that embraces a significant indigenous Muslim
community among its citizenry.

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