The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History

Abstract

Ever since the publication of Samuel Huntington's famous article, “The Clash of Civilizations?,” in the summer 1993 issue of the journal Foreign Affairs, the idea that there is a fundamental conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim, especially Christian, civilizations has gained ground. This idea was of course powerfully reinforced by the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. It was widely proclaimed, on both sides of the conflict, that jihad, a holy war on behalf of global Islam, had been launched. Once this idea had been popularized, it was easy to read back into history, often distant history, the view that there had been a more or less permanent and unremitting war between Muslim and Christian civilization. From the start, it was claimed, with the origins of Islam in seventh-century Mecca and Medina, Muslim rulers had embarked on the conquest of the West (of the East too, of course, where in fact they had greater success in terms of numbers of converts). Muslim armies had poured into North Africa, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, and conquered the whole Iberian Peninsula, from which they were finally dislodged only in 1492 CE. They had crossed the Pyrenees, and their relentless advance was halted only by the heroic victory of the Frankish leader Charles Martel at the Battle of Poitiers in 732 CE (Islamic sources suggest that this was not as significant an event for Muslims as it became for Christians).In the Middle East Muslims had taken from the Byzantine Empire some of its wealthiest provinces as well as the heartlands of Christianity, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. The West retaliated with the Crusades, a centuries-long struggle to retake the Holy Places of Christianity. Later the Ottoman Empire, as the inheritor of the Islamic caliphate, continued the struggle instigated by the Arabs. They pitted themselves against the key Christian powers, the Habsburgs and Romanovs. Successful at first, they were gradually pushed back into Asia Minor, finally collapsing in the cataclysm of the First World War and leaving only a rump state, the new Republic of Turkey. With Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's onslaught against Muslim culture and institutions, and the abolition of the caliphate in 1924, Islam seemed finally to have succumbed to the superior power of Western Christian civilization. The subsequent internecine warfare among Arab states, the splits between Sunni and Shiʿa, the resort to international terrorism by such groups as Al Qaʿida and the Islamic State (ISIL), all seem to point to a profound decline in the influence and power of Islamic civilization. This begged the question, What Went Wrong?, as the renowned scholar of the Middle East Bernard Lewis asked in his 2001 provocative book.It is this received narrative—held, it should be stressed, by contemporary Muslims and Christians—which Cemil Aydin seeks to challenge in this lively and highly topical book. According to Aydin, the idea of a long-standing civilizational conflict between Islam and the West is a myth. There was, he contends, no widely held concept of a unified “Muslim world” before the late nineteenth century. The wars between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, for instance, were understood at the time as clashes of empires, not of civilizations. The Ottomans often allied with Christian powers, such as France and Britain, against the common enemy, whether it was the Habsburgs or the Russians. Similarly, the various revivalist currents in Islamic thought, such as Wahhabism, did not promote any notion of an “essentialist Muslim world” set against other civilizations. They remained largely regional movements—in the Middle East, South Asia, or West Africa—until transregional Muslim communities picked them up and incorporated them into orthodox Islam much later.Likewise, contrary to the received story, Napoleon's celebrated 1798 invasion of Egypt, a part of the Ottoman Empire, did not represent a “Christian modernity” that was bringing civilization to a “backward” Muslim world. Apart from the enormous respect that Napoleon himself showed towards Islam (he even offered to convert to the religion if it would further his cause in Egypt), one of his goals for the Egypt conquest was to continue on to India to help his Muslim ally, the Indian ruler Tipi Sultan, in his fight against the British. Moreover, Napoleon portrayed his invasion of Egypt as an attempt, on behalf of the Ottoman Sultan, to free Egyptian Muslims from the tyranny of rule by the Mamluk aristocracy. It might seem ironic, therefore, yet equally telling, that in recognition of British aid in repulsing the French in Egypt, the Ottoman Sultan awarded the British admiral Horatio Nelson the highest honor available to the Ottoman state, of the “Order of the Crescent,” an award of which Nelson was apparently very proud.The idea of a unified Muslim world did eventually emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, says Aydin, but only in response to the challenge posed by Western imperialism and Western social thought. By the late nineteenth century, the Western empires encompassed the world, incorporating an ever-growing number of Muslims. When the First World War broke out, Great Britain ruled—in India, Africa, and elsewhere—over half of the world's Muslims. This number increased with the establishment of the postwar League of Nations British Mandates in Iraq, Palestine, and Jordan. Britain was, as Aydin emphasizes, “the greatest Muhammedan power in the world” at the time. It is a salutary reminder, given the general focus on the Middle East as the source of Islamic thought and action. As Aydin demonstrates, Indian Muslims in the British Empire played a central role in late-nineteenth-century Muslim thought and political activity. They were even more active after the First World War and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. In addition, they aided Turkey in its struggle against the Greeks and British, forcing the British to agree to the Lausanne Treaty that softened the punitive Treaty of Sevres. Finally, Indian Muslims were also the instigators of the Khilafat movement, which sought to preserve the Ottoman caliphate in the period between 1918 and 1924.One of the great strengths of Aydin's account is his demonstration of the central importance of empire in the evolution of Muslim thought and action. The Western empires—particularly the British, but also the French and Dutch with their large Muslim populations in North Africa and Indonesia—were empires of central importance. Yet the Ottoman Empire played an equally important role in Islam's development. As the seat of the caliphate and the greatest formally declared Muslim power from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire embodied the hopes and aspirations of many Muslims throughout the world. Its fortunes were closely followed, with increasing concern as it repeatedly failed in competition with Western powers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, the Muslim world remained committed to the Ottoman Empire until its demise after the First World War and the abolition of the caliphate by Ataturk.Moreover, the Muslim community had finally, in response to Western thought and imperial policy, come to think of itself as a unified community. Aydin traces this development in detail by examining the way in which Muslim intellectuals responded to the “racialization” of Muslims in Western social Darwinist and racial thought of the late nineteenth century. Influential figures such as the French thinker Ernest Renan characterized Muslim civilization as backward and uncreative, unable to come to terms with Western science and other aspects of Western modernity. In response, Muslim intellectuals argued that Islam was a unified civilization, and the carrier of a “universal” religion that had at various times led the world in scientific development and enlightened thought. They were especially proud of the “Golden Age” of Islamic-led science in the Middle Ages.In this sense, the concept of a unified Muslim world reflected a positive self-image in contrast to the disparaging model constructed by the West. Both Muslims and Christians could think of themselves as inhabiting unique civilizations, characterized by a few major principles. The stage was set for the “clash of civilizations” of a later epoch. Aydin clearly sees this development as dangerous and misguided. He insists that the Muslim world, much like the Christian world, has always been marked by difference and disagreement. The idea of a single Muslim civilization is a delusion, fraught with peril for Muslims. The pursuit of a caliphate today is a chimera. Muslim internationalism is certainly possible and indeed desirable, but it will not be realized through emphasizing an essentialist Islam. Aydin articulates this: In mobilizing their moral traditions, Muslims and their non-Muslim allies should be able to liberate their political struggles from the prison of the imaginary geopolitical unities of the Muslim world and the West, which have been essential to ideologies that have excluded and racialized them. (237) Aydin's book is bold, provocative, and instructive. At the very least it will give scholars and commentators much to discuss. It contains many illuminating episodes, including the role of English historian Arnold Toynbee in disputes over Zionism and the creation of the State of Israel. Aydin shows just how influential Toynbee was among Muslim intellectuals, not only for his views on Israel but also for his criticisms of Western materialism and his belief that the West was losing its supremacy. In addition, throughout his book Aydin introduces readers to many ideas and thinkers generally known only to scholars of Islam. In sum, it is an excellent and timely work.A few critical comments: First, this is a book mainly, and perhaps disproportionately, about the Ottoman Empire. Its history, and the hopes Muslims pinned on it, make up a large part of the discussion. This is odd given that Aydin argues that, in fact, while the Ottoman Empire was a convenient vehicle for Muslim hopes and aspirations, it was not a necessary instrument to that end. Indeed, Aydin shows that the British Empire figured almost as much in the Muslim imagination, given that it was where many Muslims lived in recent centuries. A more wide-ranging account of Muslim thought and activities outside the Ottoman sphere would have been welcome.Second, once the Ottoman Empire crumbled, Aydin was faced with a bewildering series of ideas and movements as Muslims splinter into opposing camps. Ultimately, Saudi Arabia representing the Sunnis, and Iran (after the 1979 Iranian Revolution) representing the Shiʿa, emerge as the dominant forces. But before then, especially in the interwar period, Aydin has difficulty structuring the narrative. We get, instead, a rather tedious and long-winded account of various unfinished strands of opinion. This seems a waste of space that could have been put to better use. Finally, and perhaps most important, one might challenge Aydin on his central claim that the idea of a Muslim world is a very late, and in his view, unfortunate, development. Whatever one thinks of that evaluation, is the claim in fact historically true? Was there really no idea of a common Muslim civilization before the nineteenth century? After all, Christianity, with its divisions first into Catholic and Orthodox, and later with the Catholic and Protestant split, was as divided, perhaps even more so, as Islam. But that did not prevent the emergence, as early as the fifth century and repeatedly affirmed thereafter, of the idea of a unified Christendom, the community of all Christian believers, who could at times act together, as during the Crusades. Even during the periods of the most intense and bitter intra-Christian conflicts, such as the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were many thinkers and statesmen appealing to the idea of a single Christendom to which all sides might belong, despite their serious differences.Was there no equivalent among Muslims? Aydin himself provides a list of the many cultural elements that Muslims shared over the ages: “the caliphate; pilgrimage; and transnational Muslim educational institutions, curricula, and literature” (113). Many scholars have emphasized the tremendous importance of the hajj, the obligatory pilgrimage to the Kaʿaba in Mecca, as a unifying feature for Muslims from the earliest days of Muhammad. The concept of jihad too, with its different interpretations, might give Muslims a sense of a common destiny or a common enterprise in the world. It is hard to imagine that these shared experiences and understandings did not give Muslims worldwide a sense of belonging to a wider community of believers, as shared experiences and understandings did for Christians. An “essentialist” understanding of Islam as a coherent and unified civilization might indeed have to wait until the challenge of an equally essentialist understanding of Western Christian civilization. But neither seems inconsistent with earlier views of a shared world or community, characterized by one's religion as the most important basis for their identity and sense of place in the world.