Religious Identities

Religious identities in the age of globalization have persisted and been transformed, although they have not lost touch with their roots in humankind's quest for meaning. Indeed, the rise of global communications and mass migration has meant not the desacralization of society, as some social scientists predicted, but a reinvestment in the meaning of both traditional and new religious identities, many of which are not rooted in any specific time or place. Nor has globalization led to the greater coherence of what Max Weber once called “world religions,” which he characterized as text based and able to gain adherents across many languages and cultures.

Globalization has witnessed and enabled local religious groups to become global. At the same time, it also has allowed global communities to fragment along many different regional, ethnic, and even political lines. For example, global Islam, while connecting Muslims around the world like never before, has also advanced age-old sectarian antagonisms between Sunni and Shī'a, Hamas and Hezbollah, and Wahhabi and Sufi. Although some Muslim leaders like the Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini were able to make use of nascent global print and television media to galvanize support from the diaspora, catapulting himself to leadership in Iran from his base exile in Paris, other Muslim leaders, such as Osama bin Laden, mastered Internet technologies to carry their message of a global jihad around the world. These new transnational or perhaps supranational religious identities have managed to ride the waves of globalization to build religious identities that, although in some cases, like Iran, are rooted in the nation-state or, in others, like al Qaeda, are trying to destroy the nation-state system, nevertheless have developed communities of followers that transcend traditional regional, state, or cultural boundaries.

In an age of global communication, instantaneous connectivity, and rapid mobility, traditional forms of religious identity, rooted in a place and space, endure. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, continues to orchestrate a global religious community from the seat of the Vatican, which is in and of itself a modern nation-state, with a seat of governance, enormous global landholdings and [Page 1466]assets, and a global leader (the pope) recognized by the world's nation-states. Tibetans, by contrast, also have a seat of governance, albeit in exile in Dharamsala, India, and a global leader (the Dalai Lama), who has mobilized tremendous global support and sympathy for their cause of independence from the People's Republic of China.

These ethnopolitical religious identities often have wide support from famous public believers who, through global media and financial support, participate prominently as members of a religious community, despite having no physical, ethnic, or historic ties to the region. This, of course, raises the question of global religious identities and citizenship, the participation of individuals in both religious identities that are increasingly transnational and national religious communities that are less flexibly bound by borders, regulation, and registration.

Religiously based identities and groups have challenged the nation-state system like never before. Not only have recidivist and separatist groups who seek to establish their own nation-state from the base of another, such as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka and India, managed to use globalization as a means of support, but also the rise of global religious identities, such as Sufi organizations that have no state ties and no perceivable political agenda, challenge the very role of the modern nation-state. The Universal Sufi Movement, somewhat loosely based in London and influenced by South Asian Chishti Sufism, believes in the unity of all people and religions, not requiring its adherents to participate in any specific religious tradition, such as Islam. Founded by Hazrat Inayat Khan while traveling in the West, this was one of the most successful efforts to extend Islam-inspired teachings to non-Muslim communities. Other Sufi scholars, such as Idries Shah, have argued that Sufism is a pre-Islamic mystical tradition that is not necessarily connected to Islamic dictates, but it is based on universal principles of love, shared by all great religious traditions. The “religious identity” of Sufi, therefore, does not necessarily imply membership in any recognized religious community. These nondenominational Sufi movements have experienced rapid growth during the last few decades among largely Western-educated, Muslim and non-Muslim adherents who wish a more pure and direct connection with the divine.

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