An article by Prof. Cemil Aydin, published by Aeon asks-
What is the Muslim world?
If the Government of a country says it is a Muslim country and that it belongs to a wider Muslim World, then the set of such countries is the Muslim World. 57 countries are members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). 8 of those countries don't have a Muslim majority. All Muslim majority countries are members.
One reason less developed countries may want to join the OIC is so as to push through social reform and to abolish superstitious practices in their own socieities. The traditionalists may say 'we have always done things this way', but the reformer replies- 'other Muslim countries are abandoning this practice. We should do so too otherwise we will get the reputation of being backward and lacking in religious instruction.'.
Islamists and Western pundits speak of ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslim world’ but such tribalism is dangerous colonial propaganda
Nonsense! NATO actually exists. So does the OIC. Both were created after Colonialism had gone into terminal decline.
Islamists and Western pundits speak of ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslim world’ but such tribalism is dangerous colonial propaganda
Since there is no colonialism, there is no colonial propaganda. A thing which does not exist isn't dangerous at all. Islam is seen as a way of overcoming tribalism.
ON 17 May 1919 in Paris, three Indian Muslim leaders
who were part of the Indian Delegation headed by Secretary of State Montague.
met the United States’ president Woodrow Wilson
The British, French & Italian Premiers were also present
to
represent the views of the Government of India. Wilson had been reluctant to give India a seat in the League but the size of the Indian army and its role in the MENA meant it could not be ignored.
make a case for the preservation of the Ottoman caliphate in Istanbul,
I think, the Brits hoped that the Caliph would become their puppet in the manner of the Nizam (whose sons would later marry daughters of the Caliph) of Hyderabad.
The Indian Muslim delegates were aware of intense anger amongst young Muslims back home over the Italian conquest of Libya & Ottoman losses in the Balkans.
and for the national self-determination of Anatolia as a homeland for Turkish Muslims.
It was true that the Muslim world supported the Ottoman Caliph and did not want the Greeks to gain Smyrna. But the reason these three Indian Muslims were able to meet Wilson was because they had been put on the Imperial delegation for the purpose of reflecting the views of the India office. I may mention this happened a month after the Jallianwallah Bagh atrocity and a little after the beginning of the third Afghan war.
Montague began the discussion by saying
Mr. President and Gentlemen, I think I can first express our heartfelt thanks for this opportunity of stating our case, because we feel deeply that you gentlemen, who are pursuing the peace of the world in this room, are likely to endanger for a long time to come the peace of the world in the East unless you realize the strength of Mohammedan feeling against the sort of peace that we hear rumored as a result of the war with Turkey.
Montague is saying 'there is a Muslim world and a Muslim public opinion. If you ignore it, there will be war'.
The Government of India feel this particularly strongly;
Because those who serve the GoI actually live cheek by jowl with the 'Muslim world' & 'the Hindu world'. What is particularly worrying is that these two worlds- along with that of the Bolshevik- are uniting against us.
but I would propose today, with your permission, that you should hear the case from my Indian colleagues. The case is always the more forceful when presented by the inhabitants of the country itself, than by one who is privileged to represent them. I am accompanied here this afternoon by my two colleagues on the Imperial British Indian Delegation who are both Hindus. Their object in coming here this afternoon is to demonstrate by the words which they will address to you subsequently the depth and reality with which Hindu Indians sympathize with the case of Mohammedan Indians.
The Indians advocated for the independence of what they called ‘the last remaining Muslim power in the world’.
Iran had declined greatly but it was still independent though Britain was determined to dominate the oil producing portion of it.
Indian Muslim leaders speaking up on behalf of an Ottoman caliphate might appear to represent a global Muslim unity, but such a conclusion would be a mistake.
It is possible that the India Office hoped that Wilson would restrain George & Clemenceau. But it was also true that all three Muslims saw themselves as part of the wider Muslim ummah. They themselves had done well under the Raj but if power slipped away from the British governing class, they themselves might be consigned to the dustbin of history.
In fact, the details, arguments and ideals of the meeting reveal how incoherent and misleading the prevalent presumption is of any distinction between ‘the Muslim world’ and ‘the West’.
The opposite is the case. Montague was saying 'beware the wrath of the Muslim world!' Would Lloyd George come to his senses if he was reminded that India could see a second Mutiny? Don't forget, the Afghans had launched a war two weeks previously.
The Indian Muslims made their case for Turkish independence by appeals to Wilson’s 14 points for peace.
How very strange! When appealing to an important guy you don't mention stuff he has himself committed himself to. You tell him he sucks donkey ass instead.
Wilson, it must be said, didn't think darkies could rule themselves and thus was sceptical of the demand that India be given a seat at the new League of Nations.
Their success in getting the meeting with Wilson owed
everything to the fact that Montague included them in his delegation
much to their sacrifice as soldiers in the British army fighting and defeating the German-Ottoman alliance.
There were 300,000 to 500,000 Indian troops in the MENA at that time.
Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for British-ruled India,
led the delegation.
arranged the meeting because he
thought Lloyd George & Clemenceau had gone crazy. Both were backing Venizelos, the heroic Greek Prime Minister, who hoped to gain even more territory for his country. He was defeated in the 1920 election because his people were exhausted after 8 years of war. The truth is, for all their courage, Greeks, even with allied help, could not hope to take and keep Smyrna from the Turks.
Montague & Chelmsford were worried that the Jallianwallah atrocity- in April- had alienated Sikhs and Hindus. Muslims were being influenced by 'Hijrat'. The Aghans took the opportunity to invade on May 3. It took three months to crush them. Sadly, Lloyd George was in a Messianic mood. He saw himself as prevailing where the Crusaders had failed.
In May 1919, Italian forces landed in Antalya and showed signs of moving troops toward Smyrna. Seizing the opportunity created by a temporary Italian walkout at the conference, Lloyd George fabricated reports of imminent threats to Christian minorities in the area.
Thus, in Mid-May, faced with Italian maneuvers, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson agreed to support a Greek occupation. The Allied Council authorized the Greeks to land in Smyrna with Allied naval and military backing, an operation that commenced on May 15, 1919. Lloyd George subsequently encouraged the Greek army to advance further east into Anatolia, with the intention of forcing the Ottoman government into accepting the punitive Treaty of Sèvres in August 1920.
Montague, who was Jewish, had no reason to believe that a Twentieth Century Crusade against Islam would be at all desirable.
The following interchange between him and his PM is interesting
Montague- 'I don’t know whether you have heard of the very serious trouble that we have had in the Punjab in India, where certain Hindu seditionists, largely influenced I believe by outside influences, largely influenced, I believe, by Bolshevik influences,
Mr. Lloyd-George: Surely, Mr. Secretary of State, the Mohammedans of India must know that most of the fighting has been done amongst the Christians.
Rt. Hon. E. S. Montagu: The fighting has been done amongst the Christians, but the peace terms dictated to our Christian enemies will strike them as so much more moderate than the peace terms which lead to the complete disappearance of our only Mussulman state. And did you see that the Turkish newspapers have published a statement that they thought the terms of peace to Germany very fair?
believed that the British empire, as the biggest Muslim empire in the world, had a moral responsibility to
put on a Fez and give up bacon sarnies?
listen to the Indian Muslim case for the preservation of the Ottoman caliphate.
Montague, like some other British officials, thought that the Raj was vulnerable. If you simultaneously alienate Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims, you may have to circle the wagons till you can evacuate the White population and abandon the sub-continent to anarchy.
All three Muslim leaders asserting their spiritual ties to the Ottoman caliph
actually, it was Montague who brought up the matter. The Aga Khan then had to pretend that a Sunni Caliph really was the head of his own religion.
– the Aga Khan, Abdullah Yusuf Ali
were Shias. They had no 'spiritual ties' to the Caliph other than those all Muslims have towards each other.
and Sahibzada Aftab Ahmad Khan – were loyal subjects of the British Crown. Several Indian Hindu leaders
the Maharaja of Bikaner & Lord Sinha
joined the meeting, making clear their solidarity with their fellow Indian Muslim brethren and their support for the Ottoman caliphate.
They echoed the line taken by the Government of India. Try to grab Turkey and you may end up losing India. But, if India goes, where are you going to get the troops to garrisson the MENA?
This conversation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 does not reveal a clash between an Islamic world and a Western world.
Yes it does. Lloyd George, Clemenceau & Venizelos & the Italian King all dreamed of succeeding where the Crusaders failed. No doubt, there would be a puppet Caliph and a puppet Shah and a puppet Khedive and so forth. But behind such 'veiled Protectorates', would be Christian Europe re-establishing Crusader States.
That's why first the Turks, then the KMT Chinese & then even the Saudi Arabians, established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. By then, the 'White' counter-revolution had been defeated. Bolshevik Russia was helping Ataturk & Sun Yat Sen who, in 1923, sent Chiang Kai Shek to Moscow to study the Red Army and gain Soviet military assistance.
It reveals one complex and interdependent world.
No. It reveals that, in 1919, three European powers- UK, France & Italy- wanted to take over Muslim countries in a manner which explicitly invoked the spirit of the Crusades. Destroying atheistic Bolshevism, too, was a holy crusade. The India Office had other views but it had little influence. Military defeat and/or financial exhaustion caused the West to give up these schemes by the end of 1922. Egypt & Afghanistan gained Independence. Ataturk retained Asia Minor. Ibn Saud chased away the British backed Hashemite Sharif of Mecca.
Yet, consider Bernard Lewis’s
a British Jew who studied under Massignon. He was at SOAS for many years and absorbed the ICS point of view.
influential essay in The Atlantic magazine, ‘The Roots of the Muslim Rage’ (1990):
Muslims would get angrier and angrier
‘In the classical Islamic view, to which many Muslims are beginning to return, the world and all mankind are divided into two: the House of Islam, where the Muslim law and faith prevail, and the rest, known as the House of Unbelief or the House of War, which it is the duty of Muslims ultimately to bring to Islam.’
This theory was foundational to the Pakistan movement and characterized one school of Muslim thought in India. However, the duty of hijrat (migration) from dar ul harb is no longer maintained. Thus Islamists are under no obligation to give up their American or European Nationalities.
Lewis left little doubt that this alleged ‘duty’ of Muslims meant violent means: ‘The obligation of holy war … begins at home and continues abroad, against the same infidel enemy.’ In spirit and substance, the Indian Muslim leaders meeting with Wilson in 1919 contradicts every single claim by Lewis.
No. The fact that British stooges were British stooges doesn't change the fact that they acted as Muslims by making a demand on behalf of a Muslim potentate.
The Muslims were loyal supporters of the multi-faith British empire,
they were its beneficiaries.
cooperating with Hindus, and had fought against the Muslim soldiers of the Ottoman empire during the First World War.
No. They weren't soldiers. Yusuf Ali had been an ICS officer and had done valuable propaganda work during the Great War. However, what really mattered was getting paid. The Indians in the British Army were mercenaries.
They did not see Westerners as any kind of enemy,
because they were getting paid by them
and made their case for the Ottoman caliphate according to international norms about national self-determination and imperial peace.
How come they mentioned their common religion? Also, why weren't they getting their knickers in a twist about Buddhist Vietnam?
Though he has been influential in US policy circles,
Academic circles- sure. Policy circles were about petro-dollars and arms contracts.
Lewis did not come up with the idea of ‘a Muslim world’ distinct from a Western one.
But he did invent the notion that there was once a guy named Moses who parted the Red Sea- right?
Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Western journalists and radical Islamists popularised the idea.
Very true. Ayatollah Khomeini was a Lesbian Pope. Then Bernard Lewis & some other bloke who wrote for the NYT convinced him that the he was actually a slim Moose or Mooseslim or something of that sort.
In their view, contemporary Pan-Islamism draws on ancient Muslim ideals in pursuit of restoring a pristine religious purity. According to this account, Pan-Islamism is a reactionary movement, in thrall to ancient traditions and classical Islamic law. The peculiarities of Islam, it is always argued, compel Muslims’ religious affiliation to transcend other political affiliations. This Pan-Islamism not only survives but thrives in the contemporary world, and is a civilisational artefact deeply at odds with modern times.
Whereas the truth is, Berard Lewis invented Moses which led to the wholly spurious distinction between Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and Lesbian Popes like Ayatollah Khomeini.
Lewis might not have originated the idea of the Muslim world,
i.e. the 'Saracen' world against which the Crusades were waged.
but he gave it an intellectual polish, and inspired Samuel Huntington’s even more popular work, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996).
Nope. Hundtington had been around for a long time. He reacted to Fukuyama (a Straussian student of Koyeve's) by stating the fucking obvious. After Marx, Muhammad would become the biggest challenger of Western hegemony. What nobody could predict at that time was that the thing was a sideshow. What would marginalize the West was the rise of China.
‘The struggle between these rival systems [of the Islamic world and Christendom],’ wrote Lewis, ‘has now lasted for some 14 centuries. It began with the advent of Islam, in the 7th century, and has continued virtually to the present day. It has consisted of a long series of attacks and counterattacks, jihads and crusades, conquests and reconquests.’
Huntington died in 2008 at the height of the 'War on Terror' which the West lost. Now, Trump says, the question is whether Europe will be internally colonized by second or third generation Muslim immigrants.
Such remains the dominant Western view of Pan-Islamism, expressed in the phrase common to punditry and journalism – ‘the Muslim world’.
Which just means 'Muslim majority plus Muslim ruled countries'.
Yet, contrary to this dominant view of an eternal clash with the Christian West, Pan-Islamism is in fact relatively new, and not so exceptional.
No. The 'Christian West' only clashed with Islam, nothing else. There was no Crusade against Buddhism. Confucians never occupied Andalucia. The Battle of Vienna, in 1683, did not involve the defeat of marauding Hare Krishnas.
Closely related to Pan-Africanism and Pan-Asianism,
neither of which mattered in the slightest
it emerged in the 1880s as a response to the iniquities of European imperialism.
which were less horrible than those of the Turk or Albanian.
Initially, the idea of global Muslim solidarity aimed to give Muslims more rights within European empires,
like being allowed to resume the slave trade?
to respond to ideas of white/Christian supremacy,
by asserting Islamic superiority
and to assert the equality of existing Muslim states in international law.
Why are Muslims not being allowed to slaughter and enslave Kaffirs?
The idea of an ancient clash between the Muslim World and the Christian World is a dangerous and modern myth.
Fair point. Muslims want to kill kaffirs of all descriptions- right?
It relies on fabricated misrepresentations of separate Islamic and Western geopolitical and civilisational unities.
Also, it pretends that men don't have vaginas.
Pan-Africanism and Pan-Asianism
& the Vegetarian & Suffragette & Gay Lib movements
offer a better context for understanding Pan-Islamism. All three emerged in the late 19th century, at the height of the age of empire, and as counters to Anglo-Saxon supremacy and the white man’s civilising mission.
& racist propaganda which denies that a black man like me doesn't have a white vagina.
Pan-Islamists in the age of empire
like the Ottoman Empire?
did not have to convince fellow Muslims about the global unity of their co-religionists.
The Caliph didn't have to convince Kurds to kill Armenians.
By racialising their Muslim subjects with references to their religious identity, colonisers
like the Ottoman Turks?
created the conceptual foundations of modern Muslim unity.
Yet Muslims are stupid enough to think that there was once a guy whose name was Muhammad who lived in Mecca over 14 centuries ago.
At the time, the British, Dutch, French and Russian empires ruled the majority of the world’s Muslims.
Back then, Muslim populations grew more rapidly in places not ruled by Muslims. But it was Kaffirs ruled by Muslims who had it worst.
Like Pan-Africanists and Pan-Asianists, the first Pan-Islamists were intellectuals who wanted to counter the slights, humiliations and exploitation of Western colonial domination.
These were the guys who presided over the massacre of Armenians.
They did not necessarily want to reject the imperial world or the reality of empires. In their sensibilities, the leading Pan-Islamist intellectuals Jamaluddin al-Afghani and Syed Ameer Ali strongly resembled the Pan-Africanist W E B Dubois or the Pan-Asianist Rabindranath Tagore.
They had nothing in common. Tagore was a poet & hereditary leader of a Hindu sect who stood to lose his Estates in the Muslim majorty East Bengal if the Brits fucked off. He had no love for, or trust in, a mainstream Muslim jurist-politicians like Ameer Ali or, the shady journalist/ secret agent, Afghani.
Dubois was a cultured Sociologist with a romantic view of India. He didn't like Garvey type 'back to Africa' demagogues. He knew very well that his father's Haiti was a shithole. He had a low opinion of the Liberian elite who denied the vote to the indigenous people.
Like Pan-Africanists and Pan-Asianists, Pan-Islamists emphasised that European empires discriminated against Africans, Asians and Muslims, both within empires and in international affairs.
This is like saying, Suffragettes emphasized that Jack the Ripper discriminated against working class women in the East End of London.
All three challenged European racism and colonial domination, and promised a better and freer world for the majority of human beings on Earth
A world where elderly black men like me would have a white vagina of our very own.
European colonial officers began to worry about a potential Muslim revolt when they saw how the modern technologies of printing, steamships and the telegraph were creating new links among diverse Muslim populations, helping them to assert a critique of racism and discrimination. Yet there were no Pan-Islamic revolts against colonialism from the 1870s to the 1910s.
There were revolts and those who revolted invoked Islam if those they were fighting weren't Muslim. The Mahdist and second Afghan War certainly had Pan-Islamic features as did some Muslim rebellions in China.
The alleged threat of Pan-Islamism made its first notable appearance in the West during the First World War, in part because
Muslims kept saying it was a major threat.
the Ottoman and German empires promoted it in their war propaganda.
There were Kurdish rebellions against the Ottomans.
Yet there was no Muslim revolt during the First World War when hundreds of thousands of Muslim soldiers served British, French and Russian empires.
The Armenians didn't revolt. That didn't stop the Muslims massacring them.
During the Second World War, Pan-Asianism was
a joke. The Japs were slaughtering the Chinese. Then it was the turn of the Vietnamese, the Malays, the Burmese etc.
associated with the Japanese empire’s promises to liberate the coloured races of Asia from white hegemony. And in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat, the historic decolonising of Africa raised the profile of Pan-Africanism among European concerns.
Nobody gave a fuck about that shite.
By the 1960s, with the fading of the colonial world and its replacement by a world of independent nation-states, the political projects of Pan-Islamism, Pan-Africanism and Pan-Asianism had almost disappeared.
But Pan-Islamism was gaining ground. OPEC and the two oil-shocks were a game-changer. Also, Communism turned out to be totes shitty.
They had, however, won many of the intellectual battles against racism, defeated colonial arguments of white supremacy, and helped to end European imperial rule.
Only in the sense that my farting caused the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Disappointments about the failure of Africa, Asia and the Muslim world to become comparable in equality and freedom to the West also contributed to
emigration to places still ruled by White Christians?
the declining status of the pan-nationalisms. By the 1980s, African and African-American intellectuals grew more pessimistic about
studying worthless shite at Uni.
the key Pan-Africanist dream of gaining racial equality for black people in the modern world,
the author is White. Since he has shit for brains, he does not know darkies like me were and are equal to him.
and making the whole of Africa prosperous and free.
Oh dear. This stupid cunt thinks there is some part of Africa still colonized by an European power.
The Pan-African vision of uniting newly independent, weak African nations to create the necessary synergy of a federative global power and give them both liberty and prosperity has not materialised.
Nor has anything sensible from this Professor's mouth.
Although there is still an international organisation – the African Union – it is ineffective, and far from achieving the goals of Pan-Africanism. The hopes of the Pan-Africanist generation, from Dubois to Frantz Fanon, for a future decolonised Africa remain a lost project for the next generation.
Dubois did give up his American citizenship and take up Ghanaian nationality. Fanon's Martinique had the sense to stick with France.
On the other hand, with multiple great powers such as China, India and Japan, the decolonised Asia of today would have made the early 20th-century Pan-Asianists proud. Yet 20th-century Pan-Asianism took a complex course.
It was and is meaningless drivel.
Japan’s exploitation of Pan-Asianism to rationalise its colonial occupation of China and Korea left many supporters feeling betrayed. Independent India’s foreign policy under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru showed a commitment to some Pan-Asian principles, which retained popular appeal at the Bandung Conference of 1955. This meeting of 29 Asian and African states, comprising more than half the world’s people, was the last major expression of Asian solidarity, and was later subsumed by Cold War rivalries and nation-statebuilding projects.
Bandung was about Nehru launching Chou En Lai. He had met Mao the previous year. Indonesia wasn't happy with the anti-Communist line proposed by the Ceylonese at the Colombo conference the previous year. Nehru fucked himself in the ass by boosting China, which invaded India in 1962, and making much of Sukarno, who sided with Pakistan in the 1965 war.
Pan-Islamism has also proceeded in a series of fits and starts over the past century.
Then, a crazy Australian Christian set fire to the al-Aqsa mosque. This led to the creation of the OIC in 1969 or 1970.
From Turkey and Egypt to Indonesia and Algeria, the idea of Muslim intellectualism and global Muslim solidarity empowered 20th-century nationalist leaders and movements. By the mid-1960s, the majority of the world’s Muslims had gained freedom from European colonial rule.
As had the majority of Christians previously tryannized over by Muslim Colonial rule
The Turkish Parliament had abolished the Ottoman caliphate back in 1924, and by the 1950s that caliphate was almost forgotten.
Arabs had never thought a non-Arab could be Caliph.
Nearly a fifth of the way into the 21st century, however, Pan-Africanism and Pan-Asianism seems to have vanished but Pan-Islamism and the ideal of Muslim world solidarity survives. Why?
Islam started off as Pan-Islamic.
The answer lies in the final stages of the Cold War.
No. It lies in the fact that Military Dictators & Politburos were utterly shite.
It was in the 1980s that a new Muslim internationalism emerged, as part of a rising political Islam. It was not a clash between the primordial civilisational traditions of Islam and the West, or a reassertion of authentic religious values. It wasn’t even a persistence of early 20th-century Pan-Islamism, but rather a new formation of the Cold War. A Saudi-US alliance began promoting the idea of Muslim solidarity in the 1970s as an alternative to the secular Pan-Arabism of the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose country allied with the Soviet Union.
But the Soviets only provided defensive military equipment. The Egyptians got rid of them because they wanted to go on the offensive.
Any ideas of an ‘Islamic’ utopia would have floundered if not for the failures of many post-colonial nation-states and the subsequent public disillusionment of many Muslims.
The Saudis did a great job overseeing the Hajj pilgrimage. Islam, as a religion, has high income elasticity of demand. As people become more affluent they want more and better quality Islamic services. One could say the same about American Evangelical Christianity or popular Hindu religion.
The notion that Pan-Islamism represents authentic, ancient, repressed Muslim political values in revolt against global Westernisation and secularisation was
promoted by Muslims
initially a paranoid obsession of Western colonial officers,
there was a time when British political agents were paranoid about Wahhabis. But that was because they were allied with the Khedive against the Wahhabis in the early nineteenth century.
but recently it comes mainly from Islamists. Western pundits and journalists have erred in accepting at face value Islamist claims about Islam’s essential political values.
This guy, too, is a Muslim. We would err greatly if we accepted anything he said as true or, even, plausible.
The kind of Islamism that’s identified with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood or Ruhollah Khomeini’s Iran did not exist before the 1970s.
Very true. Abduh was actually a Jewish Lesbian. Khomeini was a Confucian scholar who lived in Taiwan.
None of the Indian Muslims meeting Wilson, nor the late Ottoman-era caliphs, were interested in imposing Sharia in their society.
Indian Muslims had Sharia as their personal law unless- like the Ismailis & Bohras they were treated as Hindu for purposes of inheritance.
None of them wanted to veil women.
None objected to the practice as far as the Hanafi majority was concerned.
On the contrary, the first Pan-Islamist generation was highly modernist:
So was the first anti-Islamist generation.
they were proponents of the liberation of women, racial equality and cosmopolitanism.
Yusuf Ali had a White, Christian, wife. The marriage didn't last.
Indian Muslims, for example, were very proud that the Ottoman caliph had Greek and Armenian ministers and ambassadors.
They were even prouder that the Armenians were massacred. They laughed their heads off when the Greeks were expelled from Smyrna.
They also wanted to see the British Crown appointing Hindu and Muslim ministers and high-level officials in their governments. None would have desired or predicted the separation of Turks and Greeks in Ottoman lands, Arabs and Jews in Palestine, and Muslims and Hindus in India.
Aga Khan supported the Pakistan demand. Yusuf Ali didn't but when he died it was the Pakistani High Comission which arranged for his burial.
The fact that both Lewis and Osama bin Laden spoke of an eternal clash between a united Muslim world and a united West does not mean it is a reality.
But the War on Terror meant it was real.
Even at the peak of the idea of global Muslim solidarity in the late 19th century, Muslim societies were divided across political, linguistic and cultural lines. Since the time of prophet Muhammad’s Companions in the seventh century, hundreds of diverse kingdoms, empires and sultanates, some in conflict with each other, ruled over Muslim populations mixed with others. Separating Muslims from their Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and Jewish neighbours, and thinking of their societies in isolation, bears no relationship to the historical experience of human beings. There has never been, and could never be, a separate ‘Muslim world’.
Only in the sense that there never have been, nor could there be, any such thing as a Muslim or a world or 'separation' because all that is is one without possibility of distinction.
All the new fascist Right-wing anti-Muslim groups in Europe and the US obsesses over Ottoman imperial expansion in eastern Europe. They see the Ottoman siege of Vienna of 1683 as the Islamic civilisation’s near-takeover of ‘the West’. But in the Battle of Vienna, Protestant Hungarians allied with the predominantly Muslim Ottoman empire against the Catholic Habsburgs. It was a complex conflict between empires and states, not a clash of civilisations.
Did you know, the Caliph was partly a Catholic Lesbian while the Hapsburg Emperor was partly Jewish and partly a flying horse?
The Hindu nationalism of India’s prime minister Narendra Modi promotes the idea of an alien Mughal empire that invaded India and ruled over Hindus.
Whereas the Mughals were actually a type of Jewish flying horse indigenous to the Doab. Moreover, there were no Hindus in India at that time. The country was entirely populated by Lesbian Rabbis.
But Hindu bureaucrats played a vital role in India’s Mughal empire,
Donald Trump is actually a Nigerian woman. This is proved by the fact that Nigerian women play a viatal role in the country she rules over.
and Mughal emperors were simply empire-builders, not zealots of theocratic rule over different faith communities.
Aurangazeb actually ordered the destruction of a mosque so as to build a Hindu temple. Sadly, some stupid Nigerian Lesbian on his staff got hold of the wrong end of the stick.
There are also Muslims today who look back at the Mughal empire in India as an instance of Muslim domination over Hindus.
But those Muslims are actually Shinto priests because of the vital role Japan plays in today's global economy.
It is notable and important that anti-Muslim Western propaganda and Pan-Islamic narratives of history resemble one another.
It is notable that this cunt writes utter nonsense. Yet, it is David Icke whose books sell like hot cakes.
They both rely on the civilisational narrative of history and a geopolitical division of the world into discrete ahistorical entities such as black Africa,
i.e. sub-Saharan Africa which has been a historical entity for at least 100,000 years
the Muslim world,
1400 years
Asia and the West.
Asia and Europe- a Greek distinction dating back at least 2500 years.
Contemporary Pan-Islamism also idealises a mythical past.
Oh dear. This cunt just called the Prophet a mythical figure.
According to Pan-Islamists, the ummah, or worldwide Muslim community, originated at a time when Muslims were not humiliated by racist white empires or aggressive Western powers.
As monotheists, the Prophet & his followers supported Rome against Persia.
Pan-Islamists want to ‘make the ummah great again’. Yet the notion of a golden age of Muslim political unity and solidarity relies on amnesia about the imperial past.
No. It relies on the pious preservation of great literary works chronicling extraordinary achievements.
Muslim societies were never politically united, and there were never homogeneous Muslim societies in Eurasia.
Only in the sense that Britain was never an Imperial power. Also, no Europeans ever settled in what is now the USA. Donald Trump is a pure-blooded Sioux warrior.
None of the Muslim dynasty-ruled empires aimed to subjugate non-Muslims by pious believers.
The Pope is a nice Jewish lady.
Like the Ottoman, Persian or Egyptian monarchs of the late 19th century, they were multi-ethnic empires, employing thousands of non-Muslim bureaucrats. Muslim populations simply never asked for global ummah solidarity before the late 19th-century moment of racialised European empires.
There were no such empires because non-European bureaucrats existed.
The term ‘the Muslim world’ first appeared in the 1870s.
There were no 1870s because trillions of decades which were not the 1870s propped up that decade from before and after their occurrence.
Initially, it was European missionaries or colonial officers who favoured it as a shorthand to refer to all those between the ‘yellow race’ of East Asia and the black race in Africa.
There were no European missionaries or colonial officers because Christ was non-European. Thus Christian Europe was essentially not European at all.
They also used it to express their fear of a potential Muslim revolt, though Muslim subjects of empire were no more or less rebellious to their empires than Hindu or Buddhist subjects.
No rebellions ever occurred because no rebel was less or more rebellious than people who didn't rebel.
After the great Indian Rebellion of 1857, when both Hindus and Muslims rose up against the British, some British colonial officers blamed Muslims for this uprising. William Wilson Hunter, a British colonial officer, questioned whether Indian Muslims could be loyal to a Christian monarch in his influential book, The Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel Against the Queen? (1871).
There was no such person as William Wilson Hunter. This is proved by the fact that there were millions of bureaucrats who were not named William or Wilson or Hunter and it is a complete and utter myth that anybody is more or less a William Wilson Hunter than people who aren't William Wilson Hunter at all.
In reality, Muslims were not much different from Hindus in terms of their loyalty as well as their critique of the British empire. Elite Indian Muslims, such as the reformist Syed Ahmad Khan, wrote angry rebuttals to Hunter’s allegations.
A High Court Judge was killed in Bengal by a Wahabbi. This provoked Hunter to write his book which focussed on the followers of Sayyid Ahmad of Raebareli . Syed Ahmad Khan, a loyalist, responded by paying tribute to Hunter as a sincere friend of the Indian Muslim but arguing that Hunter's was only speaking of the Bengali Muslim- more particularly the 'Faraizi'- rather than the Indian Muslim in general.
But they also accepted his terms of debate, in which Muslims were a distinct and separate category of Indians.
They wanted separate representation and (later on) separate electorates.
To assert their dignity and equality, Muslim intellectuals emphasised the past glory of ‘the Muslim world’
Whereas the Chinese told everybody that their Mums were whores & their dads were pimps.
The growth of European nationalisms also found a useful enemy in Muslims, specifically the Ottoman sultan. In the late 19th century, Greek, Serbian, Romanian and Bulgarian nationalists all began to depict the Ottoman sultan as a despot.
Similarly, some Jews depicted Adolph Hitler as anti-Semitic.
They appealed to British liberals to break the Ottoman-British alliance on behalf of a global Christian solidarity.
De Gaulle appealed to Churchill & Roosevelt to 'liberate' his country from 'Hitler' even
Anti-Ottoman British liberals such as William Gladstone argued that Christian solidarity should be important for British decisions with regard to the Ottoman empire.
Why did that Christian object to Christians being slaughtered by the Muslims?
It is in that context that the Ottoman sultan referred to his spiritual link with Indian Muslims,
the majority of Indian Muslims were Hanafi just like the Caliph. After Jallianwallah bagh, the Indian Office needed to split the Muslims from Sikhs & Hindus. Could this be done under the rubric of 'Khilafat'? The answer was that Muslis weren't stupid. They would get their pound of flesh one way or another.
to argue for a return to an Ottoman-British alliance thanks to this special connection between these two big Muslim empires.
The Khedive was nominally a Turkish vassal. Thus, it could be beneficial to the 'Veiled Protectorate' to have some cosmetic alliance of this kind.
In his influential book The Future of Islam (1882), the English poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
who was stupid enough to become a British cat's paw enabling the establishment of the Veiled Protectorate
argued that the Ottoman empire would eventually be expelled from Europe, and that Europe’s crusading spirit would turn Istanbul into a Christian city. Blunt also claimed that the British empire, lacking the hatred of Muslims of the Austrians, the Russians or the French, could become the protector of the world’s Muslim populations in Asia. In patronising and imperial ways, Blunt seemed to care about the future of Muslims. He was a supporter and friend of leading Muslim reformists such as Al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh, and served as an intermediary between European intellectual circles and Muslim reformists.
The Syrian journalist, John Sabunji who edited an anti Ottoman journal may also be mentioned. Blunt saw that the British voter could not support Turkey against Christians in the Balkans. But could Turkey reinvigorate its Muslim territories? Was this even desirable from the British point of view?
Around the same time that Blunt was writing, the influential French intellectual Ernest Renan formulated a very negative view of Islam, especially in regard to science and civilisation. Renan saw Islam as a Semitic religion that would impede the development of science and rationality. His ideas symbolised the racialisation of Muslims via their religion. Of course, Renan was making this argument in Paris, which ruled over large parts of Muslim North Africa and West Africa. His ideas helped to rationalise French colonial rule. Al-Afghani and many other Muslim intellectuals wrote rebuttals of Renan’s arguments, while being supported by Blunt. But Renan enjoyed more success in creating a distracting narrative of a separate Islamic civilisation versus a Western, Christian civilisation
Educated Muslims faced the same crisis of faith as educated Christians. The discoveries of Science seemed at odds with the statements of Scripture. Nevertheless, to rise up Muslims needed to come together so as to solve collective action problems. If the Catholic school teaches Science, why should the Madrasa not do so?
European elites’ claims of a Western civilising mission, and the superiority of the Christian-Western civilisation, were important to the colonial projects.
No. Claims don't matter at all. Only money & gun-boats matter.
European intellectuals took up vast projects of classifying humanity into hierarchies of race and religion. It was only in response to this chauvinistic assertion that Muslim intellectuals fashioned a counter-narrative of Islamic civilisation
What was that counter-narrative? Do Muslims claim to have discovered Relativity & Evolution & Quantum Computers?
In an attempt to assert their dignity and equality, they emphasised the past glory, modernity and civility of ‘the Muslim world’.
Some did. Others didn't bother. The question was whether there could be a Pan-Islamism allied to the Kaiser. The answer was no. Arabs would want the Turks to fuck off.
These Muslim opponents of European imperial ideology – of the white race’s civilisational superiority over Muslims and other coloured races – were the first Pan-Islamists.
Everyone thinks their own Mummy is the bestest Mummy & their own civilization is the bestest civilization. Muslim reformers of the late nineteenth century stressed the need for Scientific education & the overcoming of barriers of clan and tribe so that collective action problems could be tackled more efficiently.
During the early 20th century, Muslim reformers began to cultivate a historical narrative that emphasised a shared civilisation, with a golden age in Islamic science and art, and its subsequent decline.
It was true that there had indeed been such a golden age. The West acknowledged this long ago.
This idea of a holistic Muslim history was a novel creation fashioned directly in response to the idea of a Western civilisation and the geopolitical arguments of Western/white racial unity. Like the early generation of Pan-African and Pan-Asian intellectuals, Muslim intellectuals responded to European chauvinism and Western orientalism with their own glorious history and civilisation.
Some African Americans responded by joining the Nation of Islam which holds that Yakub, a black Meccan scientist who lived 6,600 years ago, created the white race. According to the story, following his discovery of the law of attraction and repulsion, he gathered followers and began the creation of the white race through a form of selective breeding referred to as "grafting" on the island of Patmos; Yakub died at the age of 150, but his followers continued the process after his death. According to the NOI, the white race was created with an evil nature, and were destined to rule over black people for a period of 6,000 years through the practice of "tricknology," which ended in 1914.
I suppose the author thinks that Attaturm & Mosaddeq told similar stories.
Throughout the 20th century, the great Muslim leaders such as Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Nasser in Egypt, Iran’s Mohammad Mosaddeq and Indonesia’s Sukarno were all secular nationalists, but all of them needed and used this notion of a glorious history of Muslim civilisation to talk back against ideologies of white supremacy.
Turkey had been a great power till quite recently. Iran, too, had been powerful in the eighteenth century. It was obvious that Indonesia had a rich culture and civilization of its own.
Nationalism eventually triumphed, and during the 1950s and ’60s the idea of Islam as a force in world affairs also faded from Western journalism and scholarship.
Just as the idea of Christianity or European supremacy faded.
Pan-Islamic ideologies did not resurface again until the 1970s and ’80s, and then with a new character and tone. They returned as an expression of discontent with the contemporary world.
Discontent with low oil prices. OPEC's two oil shocks meant there was much more money for the building of mosques all around the world.
After all, gone were the heady days of mid-20th-century optimism about modernisation. The United Nations had failed to solve existential issues. Post-colonial nation-states had not brought liberty and prosperity to most of the world’s Muslims. Meanwhile, Europe, the US and the Soviet Union showed little concern for the suffering of Muslim peoples. Islamist parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan appeared, maintaining that the colonisation of Palestine and the tribulations of poverty required a new form of solidarity.
They wanted power because those with power were getting rich. Also, it would be cool to stone adulterers to death.
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 proved a historic moment. To condemn the status quo, Khomeini appealed to this new form of Pan-Islamism. Yet, his Iran and its regional rival Saudi Arabia both privileged the national interests of their states. So there has never been a viable federative vision of this new Pan-Islamic solidarity. Unlike Pan-Africanism, which idealised black-skinned populations living in solidarity within post-colonial Africa, Pan-Islamism rests on a sense of victimhood without a practical political project.
Pan-Africanism failed by the end of the Sixties when Ugand a started to deport Kenyans and vice versa.
It is less about real plans to establish a Muslim polity than about how to end the oppression and discrimination shared by an imagined global community.
No. It is about stoning people to death while linking your pockets.
The calls for global Muslim solidarity can never be understood by looking at religious texts or Muslim piety.
That is the only way they can be understood.
It is developments in modern intellectual and geopolitical history that have generated and shaped Pan-Islamic views of history and the world. Perhaps their crucial feature is the idea of the West as a place with its own historical narrative and enduring political vision of global hegemony.
Everything is the fault of the West. If it didn't exist, everybody would have at least one penis and one vagina. They could then fuck themselves to death. Evil White Scientists created by Yakub have caused me to have only a penis & no vagina. This makes me so very angry that I've decided to become a jihadi suicide bomber.
The Soviet Union, the US, the EU – all the global Western projects of the 20th century imagine a superior West and its hegemony. Early Pan-Islamic intellectuals developed Muslim narratives of a historical global order as a strategy to combat imperial discourses about their inferiority, which suffused colonial metropoles, orientalist writings and European social sciences. There simply could not be a Pan-Islamic narrative of the global order without its counterpart, the Western narrative of the world, which is equally tendentious as history.
Narratives don't matter. Pan-Islamism has increased because it is a way to gain money and power.
Ideas of Western and Islamic worlds seem like enemies in the mirror. We should not let the colonisers of the late-19th century set the terms of today’s discussion on human rights and good governance.
Also we should all have at least one vagina as well as a penis.
As long as we accept this tendentious opposition between ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslim world’,
which this cretin introduced
we are still captives to colonisation and the failures of decolonisation.
Also we are captives to Yakub, a great Meccan scientist.
In simply recognising and rejecting these terms of discussion, we can be free to move forward, to think about one another and the world in more realistic and humane ways.
Currently, the author thinks of other people in sadistic and unrealistic ways.
Our challenge today is to find a new language of rights and norms that is not captive to the fallacies of Western civilisation or its African, Asian and Muslim alternatives.
Nor should it be captive to Yakub.
Human beings, irrespective of their colour and religion, share a single planet and a connected history, without civilisational borders.
No. Civilizational borders do exist. This is why people speak different languages in different countries.
Any forward path to overcome current injustices and problems must rely on
smart people not shitheads who teach nonsense
our connections and shared values, rather than civilisational tribalism.
or cosmopolitan provincialism or wet dryness.
Cemil Aydin is Turkish. Was it part of the 'West' or did it belong to 'the Muslim World'? It applied to join the EU in 1987 and gained candidate status in 1999. Twenty years ago, many people thought it would become a part of the EU. It wouldn't be considered 'Muslim' any more than France is considered 'Catholic'. Since then, the world has changed. Turkey is part of the Muslim world. It may help create a 'Sunni NATO'. It transacts business with the West and with the Russians and the Chinese and so forth but its Islamic identity is non-negotiable.
It is a different matter that Pan-Islamism- like Pan-Feminism or Internationalist Socialism- might not have very much practical relevance because stupid or poor people in one place have no power over ruling elites in distant countries.
