“Muslim Identity” (Part 2)

Last updated on: September 5, 2018 at 9:52 am by Dan Peterson

“Muslim Identity” (Part 2) 2018-09-05T09:52:58-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The British Columbia Parliament Buildings, located within easy walking distance of where I’m currently writing. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Here’s a second selection from an article that I wrote for Richard C. Martin, et al., eds. Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2004), on the subject of “Muslim Identity”:

But there also existed from the start a sense of distinct Islamic peoplehood, beyond ethnicity. It was compounded of both genuine reality and idealistic aspiration. “Let there be from among you,” says the Qur’an, “an umma summoning to good and forbidding evil” (3:104; compare 3:110, also 2:143)). The term umma is used several times in the Qur’an to refer to ordinary ethnic groupings, both past and present. In certain passages, however, it plainly characterizes the body of Muslim believers as a new kind of supertribe, transcending family, clan, and ethnic affiliation. “This your umma is one umma,” says the Qur’an (21:92).

Even in the days of the Prophet and his immediate successors, however, old tribal and other affiliations proved resilient, as appears in early tensions between the muhajirun—the “emigrants” who, like Muhammad himself, had sought refuge in Medina—and the ansar or “helpers” who took them in. Longstanding tribal rivalries continued to be a factor in the early days of the Arab conquests. And even as Arabian tribal divisions decreased in importance, other ethnic rivalries—e.g., between Arabs and non-Arabs (particularly Persians)—came to the fore in such movements as the so-called shu‘ubiyya. Moreover, the question of precisely what constituted one a believer, and of what caused one to forfeit that status, was a matter of significant controversy in the first period of Islamic thought.

The survival and even flourishing of non-Muslims within areas of Islamic rule also helped adherents of Islam to refine and sharpen their own sense of identity. Central to this was the Qur’anic Arabic term milla (Turkish millet). In the Qur’an, the word milla is essentially equivalent to “religion,” and it came, with the passage of time, to signify a “religious community,” especially the Islamic community. Opposed to the community of Muslims, according to a popular tradition rather dubiously ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad, was the community of unbelievers—undifferentiated because their differences, like those among believers, were unimportant: “Unbelief is one milla,” the Prophet is reported to have said. Nonetheless, by the time of the Ottomans in the fourteenth century, the term millet also signified non-Muslim communities, legally recognized to be plural and varied.

From at least the fifteenth century, Muslim rulers (particularly among the Ottomans) managed religious diversity in their domains through a system based on the millets. A quite complex structure of semi-autonomous communities, whose religious leaders had formal relations, as such, with their Muslim overlords both promoted peaceful coexistence and minority representation at court. In the nineteenth century, however, under the influence of European nationalism and with grave implications for traditional arrangements, millet came to mean “nation” as well as “religious community.”

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