“Muslim Identity” (Part 6)

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

“Muslim Identity” (Part 6) 2018-09-05T09:52:57-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Cairo at twilight (Wikimedia Commons public domain)

This is the sixth installment of 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”:

Among the Arabs

The Young Ottoman thinker Namik Kemal argued that separatist movements would not arise among the empire’s diverse ethnic groups because they were too intermingled to be able to form viable states. The only possible exception to this, he felt, was the Arabs. However, he reasoned, Arabs were bound to the Ottoman state not only by their loyalty to the sultan but by their sense of Islamic brotherhood with the empire. And, in fact, al-Afghani’s great Egyptian disciple Muhammad ‘Abduh (d. 1905) opposed local patriotism or nationalism as a threat to Islamic unity. Race and nation, in his view, were unimportant accidents, irrelevant to one’s fundamental identity as a member of the Islamic umma.

Still, Kemal was wrong. Arab nationalism—the idea that Arabic speakers form a single nation with legitimate aspirations to separate statehood—seems to have been born among the Christian Arab elite of Lebanon, perhaps under the influence of their European fellow believers. They, of course, felt no religious loyalty to the sultan, but deeply prized the language and culture they shared with their Muslim fellow-Arabs. In 1860, the Christian journalist Butrus al-Bustani founded “The Patriotic School” (al-madrasa al-wataniyya); by 1870, the motto “love of country is part of the faith” appeared on the masthead of the magazine he edited. The watan of which he spoke, however, was not the Ottoman empire. His “country” was Syria, an Arabic-speaking land.

Graduates of newly founded schools in Syria and Iraq were likewise infected with nationalism and political consciousness, but their pride too was in Arabic language and Arabic history. They called first for decentralization, then independence. The Arab revolt of 1916 resulted in the eventual creation of at least nominally independent states in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan after the interwar British and French mandates ended. These were constructed essentially on the European model that had been invoked previously by the Young Turks.

***

The survey results mentioned here are scarcely surprising. They are, in fact, exactly what I would have expected. And the same general pattern holds true with respect to Latter-days Saints, as well. People who actually know Mormons as individuals — excepting me, of course — think more highly of Mormons and Mormonism than people who don’t:

“In Western Europe, familiarity with Muslims is linked to positive views of Muslims and Islam”

As a general rule, it’s far easier to fear, to hate, and/or to demonize groups of people whom we don’t know. Granted, there are groups that really are fearsome, and some that are very nearly demonic. But they’re few and far between. And, on the whole, Muslims are certainly not among them.

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