THE CRESCENT AND THE GLOBE
A nuanced grand narrative of Islam and its unique impact on the world
You may not care about Islam, but Islam cares about you. I say this not because Islam is a religion of universal salvation but because there are 57 member states in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and over 1.5 billion Muslims. Islam is the fastest growing of the major world religions. Whether you accept the religion of Islam as true or not, the sheer number of Muslims in the world means that Islam will impact you.
Islam’s position within South Asia was arguably the question of the 20th century in the subcontinent, and it may be the question of the 21st. In the Middle East, post-colonial nationalism gave way to Islamism in the last decades of the 20th century. In the Western world, Islam has become the second religion of Europe.
Into this rich, multi-textured bramble of religion and politics steps Shadi Hamid’s Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle over Islam Is Reshaping the World. Hamid’s contribution is worthy of attention because of its disciplinary breadth. Ranging from theology and history, to political science and ethnography, he presents the thesis that Islam is structurally distinctive in the modern world, and that it entails a fusion of religion, society and state.
At the most general level, this is not an original thesis. The argument is that Muhammed was his own Constantine, and this fact implies an insuperable connection between faith and polity, in strong contrast to Christianity, which renders unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s.
Hamid adds two notable dimensions to this thesis. As a believing Muslim, and an American, his simultaneous outsider/insider status allows for a constant jumping back and forth in perspective across the narrative, which adds greater depth. Second, due to his Egyptian background, his ethnography of the Arab Spring exhibits a level of cultural awareness, which adds a richness and descriptive thickness to the book.
On the more scholarly side, Hamid draws upon Michael Cook’s Ancient Religions, Modern Politics, to argue that the specific beliefs of a faith shape its expression in history. This is in contrast to the classical Marxist view that religious ideologies are secondary glosses over material motivations. In other words, Hamid takes seriously the thesis that the early histories of Christianity and Islam are relevant to understanding alternative responses toward secularisation. He argues that the beliefs of Christians and Muslims have implications for how they operate within the world, that they are not just consequences of the world.
Islam began as a total worldview, with the Prophet as the first prince. Christianity’s first centuries were incubated within the body of pagan Rome, where it operated as an apolitical social movement. The later integration of Christianity with the Roman polity in the 4th century was the assimilation of the religion into Romanitas, as much as it was the conquest of Rome by Christianity.
The privatisation of religious faith in the West, then, is a reversion to its ‘natural’ state, while a similar attempt in the Islamic world is a more difficult task because social, historical and ideological factors all militate against political secularisation. Note that I say the Islamic world, but not Christendom. Christendom is no more, but the Dar-ulIslam persists in the form of the OIC.
Ultimately the general thesis of Islamic Exceptionalism, that Islam is exceptional in an essentialist sense, will not persuade everyone. Marxists and their fellow travellers, for whom religious belief and practice are simply epiphenomena upon the waves of history driven by other forces, will not be convinced. Those who take religion’s causal role in history for granted will find much in the book persuasive. The question whether the hypothesis is true will not rest on one book by one author, but is a larger discussion that will continue over decades.
But the specific ethnographic detail in Islamic Exceptionalism is both timely and relevant. Whatever the deeper underlying causes, and whether they are historically inevitable or not, Hamid clearly exposes some of the underlying social and religious forces that allow us to make sense of why Islamism is such a powerful force across the Middle East, and why liberal democracy has not ended history in this region of the world.
ISLAM’S POSITION IN SOUTH ASIA WAS ARGUABLY THE QUESTION OF THE 20TH CENTURY, AND IT MAY BE THAT OF THE 21ST TOO