Professor Cemil Aydin asks, “If the American government had instituted a Muslim ban 120 years ago, which countries’ passports would it ban? It would actually be the British Empire, which was the greatest Muslim Empire; forty percent of the world’s Muslims were ruled by Britain before World War I.” Aydin interrogates the historical process of racialization of the Muslim identity and world in The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Harvard University Press, 2017). The book spans a period of 150 years and asks readers to think about how that racialization changed in character, but also persisted and survived through decolonization and the Cold War.
Aydin’s new work was inspired by his first book, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (Columbia University Press, 2007), which was a comparative history of Pan-Islamism and Pan-Asianism. He tried to make sense of the fact that ideas of Asian or Muslim solidarity emerged at the peak of Western hegemony. This led Aydin to recognize that the ideas of Asia, Africa, and the Islamic world did not pre-exist and respond to European colonization. “They actually co-constituted themselves,” Aydin explained. “They emerged in conversation through the contradictions of the legitimacy of empire.”
As Aydin started thinking about his new project, he began by looking at the afterlife of Pan-Islamism, Pan-Asianism, and Pan-Africanism in the Cold War. “I faced this puzzle among the three pan-nationalist ideologies,” Aydin said. While Pan-Asianism and Pan-Africanism largely faded away, Pan-Islamism did not. “It re-emerged in the form of political Islam and ideologies that say Muslims should follow neither the capitalist West nor the socialist East–that they should create their own modern path.” But, as Aydin notes, “It also emerged because it was inspired by the re-racialization of Muslims on a global scale–in Europe and America.” While there was the initial phase of racializing Muslims through religion from the 1870s to 1930s, Aydin explained that with decolonization one might assume that racialization would disappear. However, the racialization of Muslims picked up steam in the late 1970s, 80s, and 90s, “and that’s the moment we are living with right now,” Aydin said.
These historical observations led Aydin to ask, “How did the Muslim religion become a race again?” The Idea of the Muslim World works through this question by looking at how the racialization of Islam was quite different under imperial rule because it was racialization within the empire. He explains why categories of racialization that emerged in the age of empire persisted, albeit in different forms, throughout the Cold War. By looking to geopolitical diplomacy, Aydin is able to analyze the intricacies of global politics. He finds continuity and change over the 150-year period he studies. For instance, Aydin see parallels between the Ottoman-British alliance before WWI, and the Saudi-American alliance in the Cold War. The US encouraged the development of a Pan-Islamic identity as a counterweight to Soviet influence in the Middle East. However, Aydin notes, “As the Ottoman-British alliance turns anti-British in World War I, this time Saudi-American Pan-Islamism turns anti-American in the 1980s.”
Aydin hopes his book will encourage readers to reflect on how racialization by religion can take different forms, with a particular set of assumptions attached to each. One of the biggest challenges Aydin encountered in writing The Idea of the Muslim World was contesting the narrative that Islam and Christianity have been at war with each other since day one. “It helped me to think about the narratives we live with and how we can work together with colleagues and other intellectuals to offer a different narrative,” Aydin reflected. Teaching and speaking with audiences about his work has cultivated a sense of professional and civic duty. “We have to think about our mission and public engagement more broadly and not see universities as isolated from the wider political and social forces of society.” Aydin hopes his book will reach a general audience.
Aydin is insistent that he wants to empower his audience. For readers in Europe and America, he hopes “this will make them understand that they are complicit in producing some of the things they think they are fighting against.” And for readers in the Middle East and elsewhere, Aydin wants them to recognize that political Islam and Pan-Islamic internationalism were not inherited from early Islamic history, but were a product of the imperial and decolonization experiences. “In a way, history will empower them to express and formulate their quest for justice in languages that will not trap them with the categories that racialize them in the first instance.”
–Danielle Balderas