Scan barcode
abdelrahmanm93's review against another edition
4.0
In brief, the book tackles and problematizes the notion of the Muslim world, its emergence, entanglement with contemporary intellectual and political developments, demise, and continual resurgence over a period of 150 years. His contention that Pan-islamism and islamic nationalism survived the caliphate in part because they addressed continuing problems encapsulates the gist of his overall argument.
Overall, his well-argued position decidedly debunks the historical myth that the late 19th and early 20th idea of Caliphate was categorically anti-colonial. By situating Muslim intellectual debates and disparate ideologies into their proper historical context, Aydin provides us a better reading and rethinking of the role of those international movements with an Islamic/Muslim signature, and how their ideologies influenced and were fed by the late Ottoman imperial practices and Cold War dynamics, later.
There are indeed a number of commendable aspects about the argumentative structure and scope of research that underlie this book. For instance, the marked distinction between inter-war pan-islamist thinking and its cold-war era counterpart attests all the more to the pressing need to see the consecutive Muslim World(s) in their pertinent contexts. It persuasively argues that the idea of a united muslim world was first and foremost rooted in the modernist struggle against european hegemony and international world order shaped by racial and ethnic categorization. It also deals a big blow to de-colonial and colonial histories that exaggerate the narrative of the colonized and relentlessly oppressed. self-determination efforts were worked out through the mechanisms laid down by imperial structures and networks.
Moreover, its argumentative framework is bold, divergent and wide in scope, for it doesn’t lazily adopt a Saidian model to explain and elucidate such a central notion to Said’s polemical works, namely, political categorization and cultural representation.
However, right from the start, you are put at unease with the argument that certain key notions such as the universality of the religion was a completely nouveau polemic used by the anti-imperialist. surely the ontological content of such a concept had metamorphosed in the face of peculiar 19th-century challenges, but they have also sprung from an intellectual and long imperial tradition in the Muslim world(s). Further, his unfettered desire to phrase the discourse of and about the Muslim world during the early 20th century as that of a categorically imaginary entity has to be qualified given the counter-evidences he presents throughout the book. Or at least he should make the differentiation between the imaginary and spiritual more subtle.
Another cogent point made by Aydin is the accommodative nature of the nation-state model to the trans-regional and trans-cultural identities of Muslims around the world. The assumption that the nature of imperial rule and the norms of political organization throughout the past millennium were not brought to an abrupt halt in the Muslim world as people throughout found new ways to express their Muslimness in a miscellany of different manners and ideologies. And this, he maintains, proves that the disruption brought about by the advent of the Muslim majority nation state model did not lie in its political or ontological nature. While this seems like an intuitive position to take, its reductionist approach to identity explains its appeal. While its true that even under the modern nation-states, Muslims were the same heterogeneous group they were before for hundreds for years, nationalism imbued local and regional identities with a new sense of entitlement and belonging that Empires could not bother with
Another confusing pitfall is his assertion, on p 213, that “The Ottoman Empire, and later the Re- public of Turkey, instrumentalized the notions of caliphate and Muslim world to serve their interests and eventually abandoned both” seems more of a polemical point than a solid argument to be made. While it is true, and he shows aspects of that earlier in the book, that the Caliphate was far from being an ideal ideology that the late Ottoman Empire subscribed to, it is unfortunate, that for the sake of comparison, such a conclusion is emphasized. Which brings us to a more methodological question of how far our comparative outlook can seriously undercut the sort of intellectual history that we are studying and presenting to, I assume in this case, a wider audience. A presumption that makes itself clear in his concluding paragraphs as he rightly maintains that “Countering essentialism demands engagement with history.”
Overall, his well-argued position decidedly debunks the historical myth that the late 19th and early 20th idea of Caliphate was categorically anti-colonial. By situating Muslim intellectual debates and disparate ideologies into their proper historical context, Aydin provides us a better reading and rethinking of the role of those international movements with an Islamic/Muslim signature, and how their ideologies influenced and were fed by the late Ottoman imperial practices and Cold War dynamics, later.
There are indeed a number of commendable aspects about the argumentative structure and scope of research that underlie this book. For instance, the marked distinction between inter-war pan-islamist thinking and its cold-war era counterpart attests all the more to the pressing need to see the consecutive Muslim World(s) in their pertinent contexts. It persuasively argues that the idea of a united muslim world was first and foremost rooted in the modernist struggle against european hegemony and international world order shaped by racial and ethnic categorization. It also deals a big blow to de-colonial and colonial histories that exaggerate the narrative of the colonized and relentlessly oppressed. self-determination efforts were worked out through the mechanisms laid down by imperial structures and networks.
Moreover, its argumentative framework is bold, divergent and wide in scope, for it doesn’t lazily adopt a Saidian model to explain and elucidate such a central notion to Said’s polemical works, namely, political categorization and cultural representation.
However, right from the start, you are put at unease with the argument that certain key notions such as the universality of the religion was a completely nouveau polemic used by the anti-imperialist. surely the ontological content of such a concept had metamorphosed in the face of peculiar 19th-century challenges, but they have also sprung from an intellectual and long imperial tradition in the Muslim world(s). Further, his unfettered desire to phrase the discourse of and about the Muslim world during the early 20th century as that of a categorically imaginary entity has to be qualified given the counter-evidences he presents throughout the book. Or at least he should make the differentiation between the imaginary and spiritual more subtle.
Another cogent point made by Aydin is the accommodative nature of the nation-state model to the trans-regional and trans-cultural identities of Muslims around the world. The assumption that the nature of imperial rule and the norms of political organization throughout the past millennium were not brought to an abrupt halt in the Muslim world as people throughout found new ways to express their Muslimness in a miscellany of different manners and ideologies. And this, he maintains, proves that the disruption brought about by the advent of the Muslim majority nation state model did not lie in its political or ontological nature. While this seems like an intuitive position to take, its reductionist approach to identity explains its appeal. While its true that even under the modern nation-states, Muslims were the same heterogeneous group they were before for hundreds for years, nationalism imbued local and regional identities with a new sense of entitlement and belonging that Empires could not bother with
Another confusing pitfall is his assertion, on p 213, that “The Ottoman Empire, and later the Re- public of Turkey, instrumentalized the notions of caliphate and Muslim world to serve their interests and eventually abandoned both” seems more of a polemical point than a solid argument to be made. While it is true, and he shows aspects of that earlier in the book, that the Caliphate was far from being an ideal ideology that the late Ottoman Empire subscribed to, it is unfortunate, that for the sake of comparison, such a conclusion is emphasized. Which brings us to a more methodological question of how far our comparative outlook can seriously undercut the sort of intellectual history that we are studying and presenting to, I assume in this case, a wider audience. A presumption that makes itself clear in his concluding paragraphs as he rightly maintains that “Countering essentialism demands engagement with history.”
More...