Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Indian Muslims must stop being delusional about the Global Ummah

The recent events in Gaza and Iran have exposed the hollowness of the idea of Global Islam.

Muslim unity is a dream — and a nightmare, too. It’s as much desired by many Muslims as feared by non-Muslims. Desired, not because it promises universal brotherhood, but because it imagines a united army to fight the kufr. Non-Muslims fear it for the same reason.

So, whenever a Muslim country goes to war with a non-Muslim one, many ordinary Muslims hope that all other Muslim countries would jump into the fray. When events don’t turn out as desired, there is a palpable despair in the Muslim camp, and a sigh of relief in the opposition. There is a rush to theorise that Muslim unity is a chimera; and, thank God, there will never be a united Ummah army to turn a routine geopolitical conflict into an apocalyptic war.

Muslim thought-leaders, particularly in India, have trained the Muslim mind to regard the realpolitik decisions of Muslim countries as betrayal of the grand Islamic ideal. Though such unity never materialises, the ideal is not abandoned, and the hope is kept alive. Every unity has a counterpoint — that against which it’s organised. Clearly, the idea of Muslim unity is a confrontational concept, underlining a war mentality.

Theologically speaking, the most famous hadith about Islamic unity is actually about its opposite. The Prophet is reported to have said: “The Jews split into seventy-one sects, and the Christians split into seventy-two sects. My Ummah will split into seventy-three sects; all of them will be in the Fire except one.”

And thus it has been since the inception of Islam. The pristine Muslim community — the ideal exemplars for all ages — split into two the day the Prophet died, as the partisans of Ali contested the selection of Abu Bakr as the caliph. The dissension that began with the question of the rightful inheritance of political authority from the Prophet went on to develop into full-fledged theological schools destined to spawn scores of sects throughout history. In religion, every dispute becomes religious; nothing remains just political.

In an article titled ‘Against Muslim unity’, Oxford historian Faisal Devji calls the idea of unifying Islam a recent invention—and a bad one.

“Posturing about an illusory ‘Muslim unity’ tends only to alienate Muslims from the political world of nation-states that govern their societies. From this perspective, Muslim militancy, too, is actually a consequence of de-politicisation and not, as is commonly presumed, the reverse,” he writes.

Devji places the blame for Muslim militancy on the deracination of Muslim societies from their respective national cultures — which, in turn, follows from self-alienation from the nation-states to which they belong.

Nowhere has this process been more stark than in India.

Also Read: Indian Muslims must face the truth—Muslim countries don’t care about them

Muslim unity as a political weapon

 Pan-Islamism, the utopian vision of worldwide Muslim unity, took shape as the decline of Muslim power accelerated toward total dissolution in the late 19th century. While the Mughals reigned, Indian Muslims showed scant regard for the Ottoman caliphate. It was only with the termination of Mughal rule — actually, only after the death of Bahadur Shah Zafar, in 1862, at Rangoon — that they started swearing fealty to the Khalifa in Turkey even as they lived under British sovereignty.

While their heads bowed to the........

© ThePrint