Islam: Between Religious-Cultural Practice and Identity Politics

Introduction

When discussing the dynamics of the cultures-conflict-globalization triad across the culturally diverse world of ‘Islam’ it is essential to distinguish between ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ rather than use the two notions interchangeably. While there is no scholarly consensus – the terminology is unsettled – the working definition of culture I use in regard to contemporary trends in the Islamic world is the local social production of meaning (Geertz 1973). In contrast, I see ‘civilization’ as a grouping of cultures linked to one another by a ‘family resemblance’ in terms of values and worldviews (Tibi 2001, updated 2005). This understanding applies to Islam as both a social reality and a belief system, shared cross-culturally from Asia through Africa stretching to Europe (which is now home to 20 million Muslim immigrants). While we speak here, in the plural, of many diverse cultures, the collective recourse to Islam and the belief in its imagined cross-cultural umma as a civilizational community have become politicized. This politicization has given rise to a cross-cultural, conflict-saturated discourse of Islamic civilization as a collective reference shared by all Islamic local cultures.

This has led to an Islamic identity politics based on the perception of a cultural threat. In this context, the revival of collective memories of Islamic glory is not just nostalgia (Kelsay 1993: 25) but represents a divergent vision of the world as well as a certain defensiveness (on defensive culture see Tibi 1988: 1–8). This identity politics also involves tensions arising from subdivisions in Islamic identity (e.g. Sunna vs. Shi'a in Iraq, see Jabar, 2003 and Anderson and Stansfield, 2004) as well as from the Arabo-centric interpretation of Islam that plays down the place of non-Arab cultures in Islamic civilization.

The idea of the West (Gress 1998) is related to the cultural claim of universal Westernization (Laue 1987) that historically infringed on and superseded Dar al-lslam through colonial conquest. In the early nineteenth century, Muslims were willing to accommodate to a world dominated by Europe (Abu-Lughod 1963). Islam was separated from politics. In contrast, the contemporary Muslim and Arab revival (Kramer 1996) returns the sacred to politics and not only targets Western hegemony, but also contests so-called ‘cultural globalization’. Cultural Islamization aims to purify through de-Westernization. Indeed, long before the theories of Samuel Huntington, Islamist thinkers and Imams conceptualized Islam as a united umma (the community of Islam) and viewed it as a civilization (Qutb 1983). The fourteenth-century philosopher Ibn Khaldun, the very last great thinker that the Islamic civilization produced before it began to decline, was the first thinker to establish a ‘science of civilization’ (llm al-Umran) (Mahdi 1957).

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