"It wasn't an identity I chose," a young Canadian woman told the scholar Amarnath Amarasingam recently. She had simply wanted to be known as a Canadian or a student – or maybe just a person. But in the midst of political debates in Quebec about her clothing, in the media about her family's national and ethnic roots and in the United States about efforts to ban the entry of people of her background, she came to realize that she's now known mainly as a Muslim – regardless of whether she has any religious beliefs or affinities.
"I'm not sure when this happened," she said. "I never agreed to it. I never signed up to be part of some movement – I was just going to school."
As she discovered, Muslim has become a race. To have Islamic faith, or even to be descended from people who once did, is in the eyes of many people today to be seen primarily as part of a global, homogeneous so-called Muslim world. It's an identity people have no choice over, one that doesn't exist in nature – a racial identity.
That was recognized by two U.S. federal judges this week when they struck down President Donald Trump's fourth and latest attempt to impose what has been called a travel ban on several countries. The judges concluded, based on his statements, that this was yet another attempt to impose Mr. Trump's promised "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" – and was therefore unlawful. That's because the President's definition of Muslim is racial – that is, it is applied to people of certain backgrounds regardless of their individual beliefs, practices or actions.
It's not just Mr. Trump and other supporters of racially intolerant politics who see millions of individuals as agents of a uniform Muslim world. It has also become popular among a good number of Muslims of recent generations, who have come to see Muslim as a collective identity that links them to a wider world – much to the chagrin of many more Muslims who'd prefer their religious faith be a private and incidental part of their complex individual identity.
The idea that Muslims are a united and ideologically consistent world is often seen as an ancient tenet of their faith. In fact, the notion of Islamic unity is a very recent idea, one that was created mostly by Christian racists.
That becomes startlingly clear in one of this year's most important works of historical scholarship, U.S. historian Cemil Aydin's book The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History. Dr. Aydin, in tracing the thinking of Islamic clerics, leaders and writers back centuries, finds that the concept didn't exist in classical Islamic thought or in the original caliphates of the Ottoman or Mughal empires. The idea of the ummah, the Islamic religious community, meant little more than "congregation" – it wasn't an identity group; Muslim unity was "not an outgrowth of shared history or immutable ideology within Muslim societies."
Rather, he finds, the idea of a Muslim world arrived only after those empires collapsed and were enveloped by European ones – a moment, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, when Europeans invented the idea of "race" as a defining and restricting human identity. During that period, he writes, both Islamophobes and early Islamic extremists "used the assumption, ideal, and threat of Muslim unity to advance political agendas … they created the Muslim world for their own strategic purposes and positioned it in everlasting conflict with the West."
After having become a motivating idea during the First World War, the idea was slow to find footing. During the 1950s and 1960s, the "Muslim world" concept all but vanished, among both Westerners and Muslims, who preferred to see themselves according to national (Egyptian, Pakistani) or ethnic (Arab, Indian) identities. As Dr. Aydin notes, during this period "few journalists and scholars referred to Islam as an explanatory factor in world politics."
It was the post-Cold War, postcolonial world of the 1990s that turned Muslim into an identity again – one embraced by Eastern extremists and Western racists alike. "The idea of the Muslim world," Dr. Aydin concludes, "is inseparable from the claim that Muslims constitute a race."
As with all concepts of racial identity, this one was a fiction created to subjugate and divide. We have entered a dangerous era in which far too many people are unquestioningly willing to embrace such dangerous fictions.
Doug Saunders