The ummah as nation: a reappraisal in the wake of the ‘Cartoons Affair’†

ABSTRACT. In the wake of the 2006 ‘Cartoons Affair’ which saw international protests by Muslims against the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, it is clear that identity based on membership in the Islamic ummah goes far beyond simple religious affiliation. This essay presents a novel argument for treating the ummah (the transnational community of Muslim believers) as a nation. I begin with a theoretical treatment of the ummah as nation which employs historic and current interpretations of what constitutes nationhood. I then turn to the current state of the ummah; my findings present a potent nexus of information and communications technology (ICT), emergent elites, and Muslim migration to the West that has facilitated a hitherto impossible reification of the ummah. I also discuss how globalisation, Western media practices, and the nature of European society allow ‘ummahist’ elites to marginalise other voices in the transnational Muslim community. Based on the global events surrounding the Danish cartoons controversy of 2005–06, I conclude that there is need to recognise ummah‐based identity as more than just a profession of faith – it represents a new form of postnational, political identity which is as profound as any extant nationalism.     

The Demographics of Dystopia: The Muslim City in Asia’s Future

This essay argues that UN projected population growth will not only lead to more Muslims in Asia’s cities in a purely numerical sense, but also to more Muslim cities in a proportional and cultural sense through the continuation of existing trajectories of ‘de-cosmopolitanization’. Urban life will be deeply affected by this increasing shift from cities that are not merely majority Muslim, but are also increasingly Muslim in moral, social or political terms. Inevitably such changes will affect the lives of urban citizens, none more so than women. The essay then asks whether population growth will allow these cities to maintain their ‘globalizing’ trajectory of increasing interconnection. Having framed its analysis around the ‘hard’ outcomes of demographic change, the analysis then turns to ‘soft’ outcomes by tackling the question of the likely contours of the increasingly divergent versions of Islam produced by the competitive religious economies of the modern Asian city.     

Getting comfortable to feel at home: clothing practices of black muslim women in Britain

This article explores the role of comfort as an affective encounter across bodies, objects (namely clothing) and spaces. I focus on how bodies that are marked as strange and a source of society’s discomfort negotiate this positioning through the presentation of one’s body. What does it mean for these bodies to be comfortable or uncomfortable? This question is answered through work done with Black Muslim women in Britain. By exploring how comfort is felt in relation to racially marked bodies, this article develops work on emotional geographies. Comfort is understood as both an emotional product and process that changes as bodies move across different spaces. In noting this movement, I also explore how boundaries around the body (enacted through e.g. the multi-dimensional hijab) presents a particular form of territorialisation that facilitates comfort as we present our bodies across different spaces. These boundaries can be both a source of comfort and discomfort through their positioning as deviant from social norms. In understanding the different roles of boundaries, I explore the social processes that construct comfort (or discomfort) as we move through different spaces. This is intertwined with furthering work on Muslim geographies by challenging the overwhelming focus placed on ‘public’ facing garments like the headscarf and abaya. Such a focus limits an understanding of the fluidity of Black Muslim women’s identities, and how these changes in our clothing practices affect and are affected by the relationships built across spaces.     

Embodying Islam and laïcité: young French Muslim women at work

In this article, I consider how the racialisation of Muslim identities in the French context affects the education and employment trajectories of six young French Muslim women with post-secondary education, living and working in Paris. I call attention to the pernicious effects of the intersection of three sets of governing discourses: laïcité, post-feminism and neoliberalism. These discourses obscure the way state-endorsed racialisation intersects with class and gender relations to erect barriers to Muslim women's employment opportunities. I examine the complex discursive and performative work Muslim women engage in, to inhabit, reproduce, reject or contest various interpretations of pious feminine Muslim and of French secular republican subjecthood. Work sites become important places where both pious and laïque subjectivities are often simultaneously produced and negotiated through performance and corporeality. In this way, the women's narratives challenge the discursive construction of the incompatibility of pious and secular subjectivities. Participants disrupted their racialisation as oppressed women who embody Muslimness by emphasising their individual and conscious choice to practise their religion. Yet, in doing so, and in the light of the challenges finding work for those wearing the headscarf, they were inadvertently rendered the agents of the discriminatory treatment that disadvantaged them in the labour market. The rational, free-choosing, neoliberal ‘self’ that they construct must then take individual responsibility for the negative consequences on their lives of broader collective racialising discourses.     

The Book of Marriage: Histories of Muslim Women in Twentieth‐Century Australia

From 1860 to the 1920s, Muslim merchants and workers from across British India and Afghanistan travelled to Australian shores to work in the extensive camel transportation network that underpinned the growth of capitalism in the Australian interior. Through marriage, South Asian women in addition to white women and Aboriginal women became part of families spanning the Indian Ocean. Yet, the life‐worlds of these women are absent from Australian historiography and the field of Indian Ocean studies alike. When women do appear in Australian histories of Muslim communities, the orientalist accounts work to condemn Muslim men rather than shed light on women's lives. Leading scholars of Indian Ocean mobilities on the other hand, have tended to equate masculinity with motion and femininity with stasis, omitting analyses of women's life‐trajectories across the Indian Ocean arena. In this article, I rethink the definitions of ‘motion’ that underpin Indian Ocean histories by reading marriage records as an archive of women's motion. Using family archives spanning from Australia to South Asia, this article examines five women's marriages to South Asian men in Australia. Challenging the racist accounts of gender relations that currently structure histories of Muslims in Australia, I turn to the intellectual traditions of colonised peoples in search of alternatives to orientalist narratives. Redeploying the Muslim narrative tradition of Kitab al‐Nikah (Book of Marriage) to write feminist history, this article proposes a new framework to house histories of Muslim women.     

Two forms of Catholicism in twenty-first-century Italian public debate: an analysis of positions on same-sex marriage and Muslim dress codes

There is a peculiar relationship between religion and the political system in twenty-first-century Italy. In particular, the collapse of the Democrazia Cristiana party has favored the rise of new political entrepreneurs eager to exploit religion as a legitimacy factor, while the Catholic Church has attempted to influence politics without the mediation of any specific political party. New debates involving religious values have therefore developed. This article analyzes the positions taken and the frames proposed by Italy’s Catholic political actors in relation to two particularly telling issues, that of same-sex marriage and that of the Muslim dress codes. Its most striking finding is the presence in the Italian political system of two distinct forms of Catholicism in politics. One, promoted by the Catholic Church and followed by most centrist Catholics, is quite tolerant in terms of social and religious pluralism and supportive of human rights and social justice, but it emphasizes the ‘traditional’ heterosexual family as the cornerstone of society. The other, ‘civilizational’ form, promoted by the Lega Nord and some other center-right representatives and intellectuals, is based on an idea of Italian citizenship articulated in religious, cultural, and ethnic terms, and thus excluding those who are not members of this community. Here Christian identity is not defined by the Church’s teachings, but rather represents a marker of Western civilization in opposition to Muslim civilization.     

Transnational Muslim solidarities and everyday life

ABSTRACT. Discussions of globalisation and identity have focused on the renewed relevance of various post‐national frameworks of belonging, including the Muslim umma. This article argues against the idea that the umma has come to constitute a primary referent in contemporary Muslim debates about identity or a form of globalised political consciousness. Furthermore, the advent of ‘post‐Islamism’ means that Islamic political mobilisation rarely seeks to establish alternative political orders within the container of the nation‐state. However, this does not mean that we are seeing a reaffirmation of the nation in Muslim contexts today. Rather, transnational Muslim solidarities represent an intermediate space of affiliation and socio‐political mobilisation that exists alongside and in an ambivalent relationship with the nation‐state. I point to two different socio‐religious movements that, without positing the primacy or exclusivity of the umma/Islamic identity, express discrepant visions of the relationship between Islam and the nation: (1) the Fethullah Gülen movement, which serves simultaneously as the vehicle for a particular vision of neo‐Ottoman Turkish nationalism and a critique of the Kemalist national order; and (2) the neo‐Salafist movement, read here as an effort to embed conceptions of public morality and accountability within the discursive tradition of orthodox Islam rather than the institutional framework of modern polity.     

Indifference towards national identity: what young adults think about being English and British*

ABSTRACT. National identity should be sharply distinguished from nationalism. People speak by reference to a general and assumed membership of a country, and routine markers of behaviour and style may exhibit this sense of membership. This matter‐of‐fact acceptance of ‘national’ membership does not guarantee enthusiasm for the ‘nation’ and it cannot be taken as a signal of nationalism, banal or otherwise. While theoretical statements and assumptions often suggest that national identity is fundamental to individuals in contemporary societies, empirical investigation of people talking about national identity uncovers some broad strands of indifference and hostility towards national identity in general, and towards British and English identities in particular. This may reflect young adults' wish not to appear ‘nationalist’ just as many would wish not to appear racist. But the level of apathy and antagonism towards national identity among young adults suggests that we ought to reconsider any assumption that national identity is ‘normally’ a powerful and important marker, embraced with enthusiasm.     

Hybrid identities: American Muslim women speak

Drawing upon postcolonial theorizing on diasporic positionalities and Homi Bhabha's theorization on ‘third space’ and hybridity, this study shows how young American Muslim women engage in their own interpretations of Islam based on their individual needs and situations. Individual in-depth interviews were conducted with 26 respondents in Ohio and Texas in order to gain insights into the identities of American Muslim women with immigrant backgrounds. Respondents emphasized their own ‘research’ on Islam as an important foundation of their faith. The narratives of the American Muslim women showed that they subverted and transgressed dominant meanings, while negotiating new ones through their everyday lived experiences. However, without indulging in an uncritical celebration of interstitial spaces, this study also strives to highlight the power relations implicit in the performances of complex, hybrid identities in the post-9/11 American context.     

The rise of Islamic finance: post‐colonial market‐building in central Asia and Russia

Islamic finance signifies more than a projection of religious affiliation. The importance of Islamic finance is increasing in central Asia, both as a source of capital and as a form of post‐colonial market‐building. In central Asia, it is an important facet of the new phenomena of ‘nation‐branding’ and a means of reinvigorating the economy. In identity politics, Islamic finance projects an attitude of religious tolerance allowing states in the region to reposition their geopolitical identity relative to the Islamic community. This creates a ‘performance’ of Islamic finance that facilitates the creation of legitimacy for the state. Adopting Islamic finance projects images of the state's religious tolerance and diversity without changing the underlying structures; it suggests an ‘Islamicness’ that is useful to the development and post‐colonial goals of the state. As such, it creates opportunities for geopolitical alliances with Muslim countries. Economically, it appeals to rising financial‐industrial elites seeking new investment‐opportunities, which reduces pressure on the state to democratize. Meanwhile, in Russia, Islamic finance is an alternative source of capital for the sanctions‐hit state and a useful identity marker with which to connect to the increasingly wary Caucuses and Commonwealth of Independent States countries, lending it a wider significance across Eurasia.     

Maltese ‘gallarija’: a gender and space perspective

In Malta, there are hundreds of balconies, especially in Valletta. However, the most fascinating ones are boxed-balconies known as ‘Gallarijia’ in Maltese. The Knights, an ultra religious Roman Catholic military Order who ruled Malta for over 260 years, adopted covered-balconies designed and used in Muslim countries; in the hope that it would ensure their segregated life style as well as; concealing their illicit sexual activities with Maltese women. The Grand Master de la Cassiere built the first covered-balcony in his palace in Valletta; soon it found affinity with the Maltese well-to-do families who called it their own. Although, cultural and technological transfers between Muslim and Christian worlds have always been a way of life in the Mediterranean region, successfully adopting an innovation from another culture requires suitable social, economic and cultural environment in the host country. The objective of this article is to explain how and why a Christian military order has successfully adopted a Muslim inspired design for their balconies. We suggest the key to understand this phenomenon and the paradox it poses is the status of women in Malta during the Knights' rule.     

The ‘Turkish’ Minority in Cyprus: An artificial identity?

Traditionally, the development of a secular identity within the Muslim minority on Cyprus has been attributed to the British administration as part of a ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.^{11 Pollis, ‘Intergroup Conflict’, 581; Choisi, ‘The Turkish Cypriot Elite’, 12. See also ?ahin, ‘Open Borders, Closed Minds’, 584.} Those who accept this argument have implied that Turkish-Cypriot nationalism is to some extent less genuine than Greek-Cypriot nationalism, an artificial identity imposed by an external source. Yet not only does this ignore the nature of national identity, which has been overlooked in the discussion of nationalist development on Cyprus, it also seems to credit the British with too much foresight and control. This article questions whether the development of a Turkish identity within the Muslim population was primarily based on British encouragement. It also argues that Turkish-Cypriot nationalism, rather than being ‘late’ or ‘imposed’, emerged similarly to other national identities. As the 1950–1951 attempt to appoint a mufti demonstrates, Turkish-Cypriot leadership appeared in spite of rather than because of the colonial administration. Indeed, the incident shows how British officials misunderstood the desires and concerns of the Turkish Cypriots just as much as they did Greek-Cypriot feelings regarding Enosis.     

Gender Justice and (In)security in Pakistan and Afghanistan†

ABSTRACT

This article argues that gender justice becomes a politicised issue in counterproductive ways in conflict zones. Despite claims of following democratic principles, cultural norms have often taken precedence over ensuring gender-sensitive security practices on the ground. The rightness of the ‘war on terror’ justified by evoking fear and enforced through colonial methods of surveillance, torture, and repression in counter-terrorism measures, reproduces colonial strategies of governance. In the current context, the postcolonial sovereign state with its colonial memories and structures of violence attempts to control women’s identities. This article analyses some of these debates within the context of Pakistan’s and Afghanistan’s security dynamics. It begins with the premise that a deliberate focus on the exclusion and limitation of women in Muslim and traditional societies sustains and reinforces the stereotypes of women as silent and silenced actors only. However, while the control of women within and beyond the nexus of patriarchal family'society'state is central to extremist ideologies and institutionalisation practices, women’s vulnerabilities and insecurities increase in times of conflict not only because of the action of religious forces, but also because of ‘progressive’, ‘secular’, ‘humanitarian’ interventions.     

Feeling at home in public: diasporic Moroccan women negotiating leisure in Morocco and the Netherlands

Muslim women are often cited as subject to restriction in their mobility through public space, especially in European contexts, in comparison with non-Muslim community members. Yet any woman might face restriction in her access to leisure outside the home through geographies of risk and fear, as well as geographies of care and responsibility. In this article, we describe the ways in which Moroccan Muslim women resident in Europe negotiate access to leisure outside the home, in both Europe and Morocco, demonstrating that they practice mobilities framed by safety, risk and responsibility combined with individual volition to be participants in public spaces. Using examples from interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, we discuss a notion of ‘viscosity’ as safe public space that acts as an extension of the home, where women feel comfortable enacting their daily lives and engaging in leisure practices. By comparing data from the Netherlands and Morocco, we highlight the role of Muslim-dominant and Christian-dominant public spheres in these negotiations of leisure. The ways women inhabit such spaces reflect individual concerns about personal safety, as well as maintaining respectful relations with family and being protected from unknown dangers, in ways that reflect not only religious beliefs but also geographies of risk related to other factors. Inhabiting such spaces implicates how they become part of the community at large, as visibly present participants, by negotiating many factors beyond religious beliefs as part of their access to public leisure spaces.     

The cloak,the cage and the fog of sanctity: the Zionist mission and the role of religion among Arab Jews*

Abstract. This paper examines the Zionist national mission to mobilise Jewish ethnic communities in Arab countries, in the period preceding the establishment of the state of Israel. It draws on archival texts to trace a phenomenon known in Jewish historiography as ‘Shadarut’; a voluntary religious practice of fundraising which was widespread in the Jewish world for hundreds of years. The paper shows how this pre‐national religious practice (to be labelled ‘the cloak’) was adopted and incorporated into the Zionist national project (‘the cage’), first generating tension between the Jewish religious establishment and the Zionist ‘secular’ movement, and then blurring the distinction between Judaism as a religion and Judaism as a national identity. The paper shows how secular emissaries of European origin arrived in Arab countries as religious emissaries (‘shadarim’) and aspired to discover a strong religious fervour among members of the Jewish communities there. This is because in the eyes of the Zionist (ostensibly secular) movement, being religious Jews in Islamic countries was a criterion that demarcated them from their Arab neighbours. This analysis entails two main conclusions: (a) that contrary to the experience of the European Zionist national movement in which secularism and the revolt against the Jewish religion played a central role, in Islamic countries it was particularly the Jewish religion, and not secular nationalism that was used to mobilise the Jewish community into the Jewish national movement; (b) that the ‘shadarut’ practice refuses to yield to the epistemological imperatives and the common divisions that arise from the binary distinction between ‘religiousness’ and ‘secularity’, particularly in the Middle East. Some implications for contemporary Israeli society are discussed.     

Imagining the Turkish nation through ‘othering’ Armenians*

Abstract. National identities are socially constructed and inherently relational, such that collective imagination depends on a dialectical opposition to another identity. The ontology of otherness becomes the necessary basis of social imagination. National identity can hardly be imagined without a narrative of myths, and the Turkish nation is no exception. This article argues that the Turkish nation was imagined as a modern nation with territorial sovereignty after the erosion of traditional Ottoman umma (religious community) identity. During the process of this imagination, the Armenians became the first ‘others’, whose claims over eastern Anatolia were perceived as a real threat to Turkish territoriality and identity. Based on the analysis of modernist theories of nationalism, the methodological concern of this study is twofold: to explore the causal link between the policies of Ottoman modernisation and the emergence of Turkish nationalism; and to incorporate the self and other nexus into the relationship between the emergence of Turkish nationalism and the process of ‘othering’ the Armenians.     

Emotional geographies of veiling: the meanings of the hijab for five Palestinian American Muslim women

This article explores experiential and emotional dimensions of veiling practices, the ‘emotional geographies of veiling,’ in relation to Muslim women's community activism. By approaching the hijab as a symbol with both discursive effects and personal meaning – a psycho-social space – this article offers important insights into the intertwined, complex processes of internal embodiments and public manifestations of Muslim female identities. Based on the analysis of life narratives of five Palestinian American Muslim women in Milwaukee, a medium-sized city in the American Midwest, this article comes to the conclusion that public visibility through veiling entails both socio-spatial and emotional/internal processes. The analysis of these women's narratives explores how veiling practices can guide personal piety and self-transformation, and contributes to the solidification of a politically and religiously identifiable community.     

Ladies who Lounge: Class,Religion and Social Interaction in Seventeenth‐Century Isfahan

Western society appears inordinately keen on outdated and stereotypical tropes of Islamic architecture, talking of a ‘hidden world’ of Islam in which women are seen and not heard as they live their lives incarcerated in the harem. This trope of Western Orientalism has become entrenched in our culture through travel accounts, the writings of historical voyeurs such as Sir Richard Burton and the romantic/erotic imagery of nineteenth‐century Orientalist painters. This paper aims to dispel many of the preconceptions that are held regarding the Iranian harem and the role of women in Safavid society by addressing the status of elite Iranian women, but also placing them in the wider context and considering the evidence for lower‐class women who could simply not afford to live a cloistered life. There is also the case of non‐Muslim women whose religions forbade polygamy and who were therefore immediately placed outside the harem and, although Safavid Iran included significant numbers of Zoroastrians and Jews as well a handful of Hindus, this paper will concentrate on one particular religious minority; the Caucasian Christians who were such an integral part of Abbas’ great project that they were awarded a particular status in the city of Isfahan.     

Local Histories in Global Perspective: A Local Elite Fellowship in the Port City of Quanzhou in Seventeenth-Century China

The Great Mosque of Quanzhou, as a distinctive community center, bound its residents through religious, professional, and educational ties; it also linked the mosque community to other communities with bonds of shared Muslim identity and minority status. The Great Mosque was rebuilt in 1609 under the supervision of the Confucian scholar Li Guangjin. This significant event is evidence of a local elite fellowship in seventeenth-century Quanzhou consisting of three well-known Confucian scholars—Li Zhi, Li Guangjin, and He Qiaoyuan—who had close ties to their Muslim neighbors. They left meticulous records of merchants, particularly Muslim traders. This paper focuses on the fellowship among the three men in order to investigate Quanzhou’s connections to the broader world of global commercial and religious networks and to look more closely at local community life.     

Eliza’s Babes: Poetry ‘Proceeding from Divinity’ in Seventeenth–Century England

This article examines the poetry and prose meditations in the anonymous 1652 volume Eliza’s Babes: or The Virgins–offering. The article begins by reconsidering Liam Semler’s recent assertion that Eliza was a Parliamentarian and religiously radical, arguing instead that she was a centrist, loyalist Protestant. The article then examines the handbooks to devotion and meditation from this loyalist tradition that helped define Eliza’s understanding of public and private and how these concepts were gendered. In keeping with writers such as Joseph Hall and Daniel Featly, Eliza views her private devotion as on a continuum which leads to public worship, or ‘thanks’ as she terms it. Eliza uses this paradigm of public and private to justify both the printing of her poems and her very unusual theology of marriage, in which she considers Christ her only true husband. The final section of the article considers whether Eliza’s understanding of public and private offers her more ‘freedom’ than other women writers, and concludes that any judgement of her freedom must be carefully calibrated to the religious and political contexts of her book.