The Islamic World: World System to ‘Religious International’

Abstract

I am concerned to consider how, over the past two hundred years, aspects of Muslim piety and Muslim worldviews have come to be refashioned with the aim of seeing in what way Muslims might have come to form a ‘religious international’. I start from the position that theMuslim world has always been a form of international; it was the world system which preceded the Western world system, as Janet Abu-Lughod has so rightly described it.1 This world system was held together by the long-distance trade across land and sea and by the connections of ulama and Sufis (learned and holy men) fromWest Africa through to Southeast Asia and China, which formed the arteries and veins along which the life-giving blood of Islamic knowledge flowed and along which new ideas might travel. It was supported by one of the five pillars of Islam, the requirement that believers should perform the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lifetime. During the eighteenth century this world system was beginning to experience a process of religious reform which arguably was to fashion the most important religious change of the Islamic era. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this process came to interact withWestern hegemony in the Muslim world, an interaction which continues to this day.KeywordsWorld SystemMuslim CommunityMuslim WorldIslamic WorldMuslim SocietyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.