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Ed Webb

The Muslim world: Political fiction and sociological fact? - The Immanent Frame - 0 views

  • In his important new book, Cemil Aydın asserts “the ‘Muslim world,’ as a catchall description of people recognizing themselves as Muslims, has never been more than an illusion.” The idea of the Muslim world, Aydın argues, emerged through an exchange between European imperialists and Muslim intellectuals during the late-nineteenth century, and has enjoyed a cyclical revival post-WWII. What Aydın identifies as “the legacy of imperial racialization of Muslim-ness” was met with “Muslim resistance to this racialized identity,” thereby producing a notion of Muslim civilizational and geopolitical difference distinct from the West.
  • Aydın suggests that pan-Islamist ideology today “relies on an ahistorical caricature of the caliphate, one that seems derived more from Islamophobic stereotypes than from Abbasid or Ottoman practices.” What Aydın refers to as historical amnesia also afflicts American and European proponents of anti-Muslim policies, which compel Muslim solidarity and thereby foment pan-Islamist responses.
  • Is it possible to refute a claim as expansive as global Muslim unity without proposing a similarly totalizing theory?
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  • Edward Blyden, a black Protestant in West Africa whose article “Mohammedanism and the Negro Race” interpreted the fate of Muslims and blacks distinctly from white Christians; the British historian Arnold Toynbee best known for his anti-Turkish propaganda; and Ernest Renan, the leading French historian and philosopher who claimed that Islam was incompatible with modern science
  • The continued popularity of the idea of the Muslim world cannot be attributed to the elite alone. Today’s public spheres are saturated with political novices and seasoned politicians, academics, curious observers, and a vast range of nominally interested pundits, all of whom, it seems, have something to say about Muslims and Islam. Comment has never been freer and more pernicious. Any and all opinions find expression through more diffuse communication technologies than ever before. There are no guarantees that the provenance of a concept confines its use within the social networks that may have once given the concept meaning. If Aydın has written the history of an idea’s emergence, to what extent must its endurance account for a wider social field?
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