In the much-vaunted delivery to Muslim delegates in Cairo last week, President Obama’s speechwriters scored a small but significant point. They did this by making the conscious decision to have Obama avoid using the term “Muslim world”, wisely replaced instead by other terms like “Muslim majority countries” or “Muslim communities”.
To me this is just good style, an attention to detail and a healthy sign that the US administration is cognisant that the useage of “Muslim world” is a shoe-horning into one easy-to-pack term the totality of 1.5 billion people all speaking dozens of languages and dialects from every possible racial background and political stripe and stratified into untold numbers of of spiritual sects and sub-sects. If Obama’s address to Muslims, which has global repurcussions, can make a respectful nod to their localised diversity, it can only be a good thing.
Mehdi Hasan, a senior political editor at the New Statesman, does not agree.
He finds it objectionable that people should want to advise against using the term. In fact he takes “great personal offence” to a Quilliam Foundation statement which praised Barack Obama for eschewing the “Muslim world” meme with this:
“Using the term ‘the Muslim world’ only serves to bolster the Islamist and al-Qaeda narrative of ‘the west’ against ‘Islam’ – of a battle of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ or ‘good’ versus ‘evil’.”
Hasan is apoplectic with rage at being told that by using it, he becomes a passive carrier of Islamist GroupThink:
The reality is that, despite the paranoia of the Quilliam Foundation, “Muslim world” is not a phrase conceived exclusively by radical Islamists for nefarious propaganda purposes, which we have then been duped and deceived into using. Nor is it a phrase without real meaning, purpose or import. On the contrary, in a world of multiple identities, both individual and collective, to refer to the Muslim world is to simplify, clarify and identify.
As someone who has often used the phrase “Muslim world” myself, I take great personal offence in now being told by Ed Husain and his patronising thinktank chums that I for one am bolstering the repulsive and divisive “al-Qaeda narrative” by doing so. “Muslim world” is a perfectly valid, alternative description of the “Muslim majority countries” and “Muslim communities” so beloved by the Quilliam Foundation, and not an Islamist conspiracy theory in any shape or form.
But is Mehdi Hasan right?
I’m not quite sure why he is getting so worked up. I admit to making the mistake of using the term “Muslim world” all the time. But the term ‘Muslim world’ is nothing more than lazy shorthand on which “BarabbasFreed”, who comments on Hasan’s article, puts so well:
The phrase “Muslim World” is at best a lazy sloppy generalisation. This includes:
- Bengali speaking Muslims with a philosophy very similar to tantric bhuddism
- Farsi speaking Muslims with a philosophy deeply influenced by Greek Philosophy
- Arabic speaking Salafi style Muslims
- Tribal African Muslims deeply influenced by an animistic outlook
This makes as much sense as talking about the Christian world covering Greek Orthodox, Spanish Pentecostal, Latin Catholic and American Evangelical. The two things clumping these groups together is a shared religion and a percieved common enemy (either America or “the West”, whatever that means). It covers over theological, linguistic, cultural, political and economic differences.The “Muslim World” usually means the “Middle East” and assumes Arabic imperialism in other places.
Such sloppy generalising can then be used by fringe groups with totalitarian tendencies. It is, therefore, a term that should be avoided.
On reading QF’s press release, I find that its only failing was that it adopted a bit of a hectoring tone, a little preachy for my liking, but that is perhaps its intention. Mr Hasan must know that there are some terms from the Islamic lexicon which Islamist groups have claimed as their own for their jihadist ideologies. One of them is the word ummah which, in context, means ‘the community of believers’ but to Islamists the word is nothing less than the spiritual mandate for a trans-national khilafah.
In their press release, QF are right to draw the parallel between the casual use of terms like ‘Muslim world’ with Islamism’s prescriptive use of the term ummah as a way of stirring up religious zealotry and visions of a global Islamic justice system.
Mr Hasan goes on:
In fact, if the existence of disunity and division becomes the criteria for identifying and then ridding from our language such useful and age-old collective identifiers, then what next? Do we abandon generalised talk of “Europe”, given the long and bloody history of war and conflict between the likes of Britain, France, Germany and Italy? Do we stop referring collectively and loosely to “the west”, because to do so would undermine the diversity of individual “western” nations?
Well let’s take a look at the term “the west”. I don’t think it should be used either, for the same reasons of avoiding simplistic terms like “Muslim world”. It is interesting that the term has largely gone out of favour with everyone except Islamists, for whom “the west” is a Judeo-Christian polity out to destroy Islam by a secret Freemason plot. What’s more, it does not take much for Islamists to have this worldview ‘confirmed’ by the Quran.
Let’s take just one example. This is taken from the last verse of the first chapter of the Quran called The Opening [1:7]:
[Guide us]
The way of those on whom Thou hast bestowed Thy Grace, those whose (portion) is not wrath, and who go not astray.
[Pickthall translation]
Islamists have long agreed that this Quranic verse refers to those who have been “condemned” as “the Jews” and those who went “astray” as “the Christians”. They regard “the west” as the theocratic antithesis to the Muslim ummah - the “Muslim world”, to be precise. Hence the ‘good vs evil’ allusion.
This is not very different to how the medieval Church regarded the Occident as “Christendom”. Take a look at the wikipedia definition of the term:
The term “Christendom” has been used to refer to the medieval and renaissance notion of the Christian world as a sort of social and political polity. In essence, the vision of Christendom is a vision of a Christian theocracy, a government founded upon and upholding Christian values, whose institutions are suffused with Christian doctrine. In this vision, members of the Christian clergy wield political authority. The specific relationship between the political leaders and the clergy can vary but, in theory, national or political divisions are subsumed under the leadership of a church institution. This vision would tempt Church leaders and political leaders alike throughout European history.
And that is exactly why the term the “Muslim world” should follow “Christendom” into the dustbin of terminology and fall permanently out of currency. Terminology is important. Don’t hate yourself for using it (‘old habits…’ etc) but do pay heed to what it is being used to endorse.
15 Comments
Three points:
1. Lazy usage and generalisation is one thing, a fair enough point. But this could apply to a lot of different phrases that fly around that can easily be pulled apart aside from “the Muslim world” like as you mention “the West”, one could note “the international community”, “developing nations”, “coalition of the willing”. On top of this we can see “the Muslim world” oftentimes juxtaposed by “the West”; this essential binarism is recapitulated in Obama’s speech even if he uses variously different terms and he is obviously trying to break down barriers. The paradox is to reinscribe the contrast somewhat even as Obama is trying to break it down. See the examples below from the speech:
“Islam and the west”
“many Muslims to view the west as hostile to the traditions of Islam”
“America and Western countries”
“western countries”
“some in the west”
“America and Islam are not exclusive”
“Islam has always been part of the American story”
“partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn’t”
“Just as Muslims do not fit a crude stereotype, America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire.”
“Islam is a part of America”
“America is not – and never will be – at war with Islam”
“United States and Muslims around the world” (X2)
“American Muslims have enriched the United States”
“the United States will partner with any Muslim-majority country”
“United States and Muslim communities around the world”
It’s partly a paradox of effective public communication that generalization and binary categories will reoccur even in an olive branch of a speech like this. America/US is used as a singular term aligned or along with various other Western countries, and an entity called “the West”, and how that relates to “Muslims around the world” (individuals) , “communities” , “Muslim-majority countries” (some named like Iran, Afghanistan etc) but not to “the Muslim world” or “Muslim countries”. An exception is addressed to American Muslims with statements like “Islam is part of America”. On this final point we know that Obama is trying to be inclusive, but in the current moral panic if someone reversed the word order and said “America is part of Islam” would it be construed merely as saying that America is the sort of country that enshrines religious freedoms, or as an agressive statement of Islamization?
2. Quilliam’s point that “the Muslim world” reinforces an Islamist/al-Qaeda “them-and-us” narrative ignores the wider point that the term is widely used as a shorthand for many other purposes that don’t play into a clash of civilisations narrative as such, and have little to do with it at all. The point might be the uses to which the term is put, not the term itself. It may be a useful enough approximation that is widely used. For instance, to give a personal anecdote, while on the Hajj last year, I thought how wonderful it was to see people from all over the Muslim world here performing the Hajj. Now why should that sort of observation be seen as ipso facto reinforcing an al-Qaeda narrative? To overdetermine the issue like this just seems perposterous to me, and oddly given al-Qaeda the whip-hand it doesn’t deserve. “The Muslim world” makes some sense civilisationally, religiously and historically, but not so much politically, culturally or economically as it might once have done. The caliphate was an effective institution until about a thousand years ago; the OIC today is no replacement for it and is little more than a talking shop, but nonetheless politically the idea of the Muslim world is potent enough at least symbolically for such an association of nations to have been formed. I can’t think of another association of nation-states organised around a religion held in common. So “the Muslim world” is an umbrella term which sure enough has a lot of divesity within it but still enough coherence as a generalisation to have widespread usage, even if one can fairly question its utility. Obama used the term “Islam” as a generalization, you use it, I use it and billions of others use it, yet no-one would deny the huge diversity of interpretations across time and place, but there a few commonalities (like the Prophet, the Qur’an, tawhid) that give it sufficient coherence as an umbrella concept. Surely the same could hold true for “the Muslim world”?
3. While rhetoric is never unimportant, there is always a danger of the fallacy that changing descriptions changes the reality somehow. The academics call it linguistic relativism, or the idea that languages determine cognitive categories and thus the way that a linguistic group perceives, thinks and acts compared with any other linguistic group, i.e. the Sapir-Whorf thesis. Less obscurely, Orwell called this “newspeak” in 1984. This is why Quilliam’s press release was distinctly odd — out of all the big issues Obama raised (or didn’t raise), this seems for this reason to be a secondary issue.
Interesting points Yahya and I do see your point about ‘Muslim world’ but surely using ‘Muslim Countries’ or ‘Muslim Lands’ is incorrect and offensive?
Yahya
1) I totally agree that, even with the best of intentions, it is almost impossible to avoid paradoxes of language such as referring to “Islam” as if it were a monolithic community that thinks and eats as one while attempting to be inclusive and sensitive to the diversity of “Islam” in relation to “the west” as in “Islam and the west”. However, terms like “developing nations” still have the notion of being a collection whereas “the Muslim world” suggests a theistic polity – which is simply a misnomer.
2) I have also had the feeling of “how wonderful it was to see people from all over the Muslim world” when sitting in the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca or near the Prophet’s tomb in Medina. It’s a wonderful, inclusive, humbling and cathartic feeling. The same feeling has been inspirational to countless numbers of people; from Ibn Arabi to Malcolm X. The latter, as you know, had until then thought he was a Muslim living according to the racist teachings of the Nation of Islam and which he later unequivocally rejected as a result of that feeling he had on the Hajj.
But that feeling given the atomised and rarefied context of the Hajj is, you must admit, hardly representive. Did you also think “how wonderful it was to see people from all over the Muslim world” in that other multiracial microcosm of the “Muslim World”, namely Dubai International Airport? Did you think “how wonderful it was to see people from all over the Muslim world” when you saw the stark diiferential between the lives of Muslim Amiratis and Muslim migrant construction workers from Bangladesh or Pakistan in Dubai city or Riyadh, Qatar, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi etc and the indifference to their plight by their Arab paymasters? I don’t think you would have a similar anecdote.
3. I agree with you that a change of terminology or descriptions does not change the reality. But a corresponding phenomenon also applies, when terminology is no longer applicable or fit to be descriptive of the reality. It is what happens to rhetoric when the sand shifts under its feet. ‘Christendom’, ‘The British Empire’, ‘Mughal India’, ‘USSR’ are obvious examples and who knows whether the mandate for the “United Nations” is any longer applicable or just plain fallacy.
Ibn Khaldun:
“Muslim countries” if used as a shorthand for countries whose cultural, civilisation, history and religion is central legacy and ongoing reality for that country seems reasonable enough. The objection I assume to using it is if it is employed to overlook or stymie the rights of non-Muslim citizens in a politically supremacist manner. There I would be with you.
“Muslim lands” is more debatable if linked to the Dar al-Islam/Dar al-Kufr or Harb pairing esp. if linked to the idea that historic lands onced ruled by Muslims should revert to their control ipso facto. Struggles for the self-determination of dipossessed peoples is a different matter, but that could be dealt with under a secular language of international human rights and law. For me, Dar al-Islam can be retrived as a term if it is delinked from empire and territory. In this sense, the concept of Dar al-Islam ought or should be perhaps non-territorial today, stripped of the territorial and political implications it once had in an expanding, singular Muslim empire a thousand years ago. Wahba al-Zuhayli compares Dar al-Islam with an ocean in which all Muslims swim, and thus coterminous with the umma – existing everywhere where the individual Muslim conscience remains operative, even if we live in complex totality of numerous nation-states, with 56 members of the OIC today, and millions of Muslims outside of that. Also many of the ulema defined Dar al-Islam in a minimalist and not a maximalist way so that it merely connoted a territory in which basic religious freedoms are secured. Dr Jasser Auda in a recent paper, which he gave at City Circle, argues on this basis that Western countries including Britain score more highly than most Muslim countries in this regard. It should be said of course that calling Britain “Dar al-Islam” is highly contentious politically in that it is almost certain to be miscontrued as a closet means towards a gradualist Islamization rather than a theological affirmation of the virtues of democratic secular freedoms.
Faisal:
Feeling at times inspired and at other times disappointed, even alienated, with the umma/Muslim world is surely just par for the course. These terms are also aspirational/idealistic in that they express an ethic of faith-based solidarity. I don’t want to devalue those feelings even if I have to set them in a sensible context of realpolitik most of time. After that the usage of terms is partly a matter of evidence and of taste.
I take your point that terms/phrases likewise loose their validity when circumstances change, that’s fair enough. But I don’t think that’s the point. To take one reading of the term “the Muslim world” as an incipient anti-West political caucus seeking to instantiate itself as an Islamic superstate and to privilege that one reading for the sake of a particular debate about Islam and politics is just too narrow and over-determining a reading of the term “the Muslim world”. A heavy dose of political realism is needed here, and political fantasies are hardly helpful and mostly counterproductive. But that doesn’t mean at the same time that all other possible meanings of the term should be disregarded either. I argued earlier that other senses of the term “the Muslim world” suggest that it retains sufficient coherence. There senses were historical, civilisational and religious. There is less empirical validity for the political, cultural or economic senses of the term. Havinfg said all that, I’m not aware of any association of nation-states paired together on the basis of a religion like the OIC, even if, granted, it is largely symbolic and a talking shop, and “Islam talk” and “Muslim unity rhetoric” is regularly used to advance the national interest of states like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan. That shows there is still some political potency to a political sense to the term “Muslim world”. It is just a mater of judgement I think in whether one thinks the term retains some sort of empirical or rhetorical (read aspirational) validity.
Wa s-salam, Yahya
Havinfg said all that, I’m not aware of any association of nation-states paired together on the basis of a religion like the OIC, even if, granted, it is largely symbolic and a talking shop, and “Islam talk” and “Muslim unity rhetoric” is regularly used to advance the national interest of states like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan. That shows there is still some political potency to a political sense to the term “Muslim world”.
To me the OIC looks like an advocacy group based on the vestiges of an Ottoman Empire, in the same sense as The Commonwealth Secretariat, located in London, is based on the British Empire.
It seems to produce journals and rubber stamp conferences like these organisations are wont to do. One such journal is “Islamophobia”. I wonder when they will ever get round to producing a report on the record of human rights abuses of *Muslim* Southasian migrant workers in the Gulf States, or the plight of the *Muslim* inhabitants of southern Sudan, or the plight of the “Bihari” *Muslim* refugees in Bangladesh. And that’s just a few instances of disenfranchised Muslims in the “Muslim world” let alone that of some non-Muslim communities. Wherefore the coverage of an “ethic of faith-based solidarity” on those issues?
And just what is so commendable about nation-state associations “paired together on the basis of a religion”? I would find an association based on the the commonality of a shared “historical, civilisational and religious” experience of any other religion to be just as meaningless.
You won’t get much argument from me that the OIC may very well be vestigial. But “historical, civlisational and religious” legacy is never meaningless per se, with respect to an argument about the validity of a term, “the Muslim world”, even if I would freely grant that a post-caliphal nation-state association like the OIC looks rather irrelevant politically. My only point was that the very fact of the OIC suggests some political symbolism around the idea of “the Muslim world” survives.
I note you didn’t address my other points.
But “historical, civlisational and religious” legacy is never meaningless per se, with respect to an argument about the validity of a term, “the Muslim world”
Just how much of this historical and civilisational legacy is really shared by Muslims outside of the Arab world to warrant the entirety of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims to be corralled into an ambiguous term? Is religion enough to enforce a civilisational commonality between a Sudanese warlord and a sari-wearing student in Calcutta because they both happen to be Muslims? I don’t think it is.
The OIC is certainly a symbol of the commonality of a shared “Muslim world” experience but that *symbolism* is too abstract to be anything other than meaningless. There is a shared sense of experience of colonialism between myself and my Ugandan friend yet our experiences are very different and not real enough for a relationship based on some abstract shared ex-colonial solidarity. Why is the same situation different for religion by way of “the Muslim world”, other than because of sentimentalism? Because ultimately, that is all the term “Muslim world” means. And its useage is, as you say, simply a matter of taste.
Well feelings of collective belonging usually are wrapped up with sentiment, memory, myth, history, culture, crisis, family, friendship as well as the more ideologized and politically moblised elements of that sentiment. How mawkish it is a simply a question of taste and judgement. For instance, I can’t really explain why it is that certain things reinforce, for instance, my sense of Britishness, a sense of home and belonging. In the choice of these things I’m rather conventional (and maybe even “mawkish”), like old English churches or country lane hedgerows in the spring, my old “manor” in South London etc. These things aren’t rational or strictly justifiable as such, which is the reason why building any sort of totalising political project on top of them is dangerous. Similarly I do have moments where I feel a solidarity with Muslims — I mentioned the Hajj, but it could be the Friday prayer just gone and making salams after that, an act of kindness from a stranger, a show of hospitality, anything like that. These one can link to the values still found in, but not only, yes let’s say it, “the Muslim world”. That’s why I can’t really accept the reduction of associations to this debate about Islamism and “the al-Qaeda narrative”. This reductionism just reduces us in the end to merely being subject positions in the public and political argument. And Allah knows best.
Indeed. And there’s no accounting for taste.
Sorry, to respond to the first paragraph, which I missed.
I think there are elements in common amidst diversity; there’s no precise gauge of these things — it depends how good an anthropologist or historian one is I suppose in terms of judging these things.
Benedict Anderson wrote of nations that they are (i) imagined, (ii) limited, (iii) sovereign and (iv) communal. Imagined in that “members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”. Limited in that they have “finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations”. Sovereign in that “nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state.” And communal in that “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.” Whatever the depridations of neoliberalism since the 1970s, we still live in the world of nation-states. The challenge for Muslims is that their sense of solidarity is (i) imagined and in certain respects (ii) communal and (iii) limited (but on the basis of faith, not on territory) but is politically no longer (iv) sovereign. From at least the nineteenth century onwards, some among the ulema and the reformers argued that the locus of sovereignty lies with the free will and moral responsiblity of human beings, as recipients of the primordial covenant (mithaq) between God and humanity. Even after the end of the symbol of an assumed caliphate (which is what 1924 really was), I for one would not wish to deny the very real extra-political moorings of solidarity that might still invest terms like “the Muslim world” with some kind of reasonance and meaning.
Wa s-salam, Yahya
Indeed. And there’s no accounting for taste.
Indeed. I’ll take my irony over your sarcasm.
Yahya. Whilst you make an interesting point, I would question how much this relates to what Quilliam hoped to achieve with their press release. They adopt an admonitory tone to those sections of the press who have used the phrase “Muslim world” carelessly – think “Muslim World Protests Against Prophet Cartoons”, “Outrage of Muslim World is Misplaced” etc.
This kind of careless usage of the phrase is, of course, inaccurate but – and I think this is the point Quilliam were making – it serves to reinforce the position of those self-appointed leaders of “The Muslim World” who, by claiming to speak in the name of 1.2 billion Muslims actually deny them a voice – much as Faisal outlines above in relation to the OIC.
If there were regular articles in the press about “The Muslim World” talking about the experience of meeting fellow Muslims after prayer in the way you do then, I would hazard a guess, Quilliam would not have bothered to put out this press release. But the kind of press usage of “Muslim World” that we tend to see does bolster the al-Qaeda narrative and so Quilliam’s press release is, in my book, a valuable contribution. If a slightly didactic one.
No sarcasm meant.
An old Bengali dervish I met at a train station once told me,
“Put your faith in Man not nations”
But it’s just wrong! It is not the Muslim world! Just like I am not from the Christian world! My Ummah/qaum/people in the UK are of different religious backgrounds. Similarly the Egyptians are an older race than merely being Muslim, they have an older heritage and also they are full of Christians, and non-believers in a secular country with a nation state…..
Christian Europe is not an acceptable term to use with the 20 million Muslims here and other faith peoples and no-faith peoples.
It is not that complicated that today, only Islamists like to refer to the house of Islam and the West in this binary way and so it would be advisable to avoid, using this binary language, though we do not intend to create that thinking we inadvertendly support it, by using such language – regardless of it’s rhetorical appeal, or romantic aspirations of Muslim political fraternity, there never has been such political unity since the passing of the Prophet may God grant him peace and bless him.
Not doubting that as Muslims we all care for each other a little more as we are part of the religious fraternity of faith (ummah), but this should not stop us caring for our brothers in humanity or recognising our political ummah nation/qaum, here in the UK and our identities as Brits.
All of the above should not be effected by our feelings for or against Quilliam Sidi Yahya.
George, Faisal, Kamal:
Why insist the term is only political? I reject that: it’s so obviously untrue. Al-Qaeda et al don’t get to determine how we, and I’m being ironic here, might use, misuse, abuse or variously understand or misunderstand those terms; rewriting the lexicon is only another form of WOT PC gone mad! The same argument goes for “Christian Europe” — if intended to exclude non-Christian Europeans, it is offensive. If intended to refer to approximately one and half millennia of interaction between a religion and a continent’s civilisation, culture and history, then it’s fine.
George: Yes the media and politicians can and do misuse terms, but more important is the intent. Obama uses several binary Islam/West contrasts while attempting to build bridges, without employing the term “the Muslim world”. It’s just a largely inescapable problem with language and especially rhetoric.
Kamal: I’m not interested in being “for” or “against” anyone as such. If it’s a poor argument, it doesn’t matter who made it. I don’t know where you got the notion that this is politically motivated on my part. What I don’t like is the regulation of language in this way as if concepts themselves determine intent and political outlook.