"The Islamic World"

Matthew Yglesias, who is now accepting advertising, has a post that would make my advisor proud:

"Speaking of which 'Islamic world' is, in my opinion, a really poor way to denote that swathe of the world the majority of whose inhabitants are at least nominally Muslim. That locutions been critiqued often -- by, mostly I think, intellectuals from the region in question -- and on solid grounds. Nevertheless, it does seem to be the sort of entity to which one needs to refer at times. Something better would be . . . ?"

Ahh, yes. I think we've discussed this in every graduate seminar I've taken. In order to understand why "Islamic world" has more currency than "Christian world," you have to look at the history of the field. As described by Albert Hourani in "Islam in European Thought," back in the 1800's, scholars believed each civilization had certain core characteristics that made it great. The greatness of the medieval Middle East was in religion, or so they thought, and since the term "Islamic civilization" stuck.

This fell out of favor in the late 20th century. Classical orientalism tended to reify and essentialize its subject, so that Islam became perceived as some vast timeless whole with all the parts having "Islam" as their most important characteristic. For example, when A.S. Tritton went to study religious minorities in the Islamic world, he started off looking at some medieval texts, then moved on to descriptions of random events continually talking about how "the Muslim spirit" was causing this, that, and the other thing. Especially after the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, however, scholars challenged these approaches, and under the influence of all the much-maligned "theory" of the 1970's and later, came to see texts as social products affected by economics, politics, and other factors.

Terms like "Islamic world" then fell out of favor as reminiscent of the old approach of seeing Islam as the major explanatory factor. Instead, we saw scholars focusing more clearly on, say, 13th century Egypt, or 20th century Iran, and not seeking to generalize to a broader framework. In my master's thesis, I looked specifically at relations between Copts and Muslims in early 13th century Egypt, and found lots of social, economic, and political causes for things even when they were described in religious terms. Those who continued to generalize, such as Bernard Lewis, were seen as old-fashioned, and even then it is instructive that in the early 1980's he wrote The Jews of Islam, but in the early 1990's it was Race and Slavery in the Middle East.

Now, however, we're seeing a resurgence of the term "Islamic world" mainly by scholars who wish to look at phenomena related to global Islam. Dale Eickelman perhaps fits into this category - his book Muslim Politics includes Muslims from Nigeria to Iran to Britain, but his The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach includes Islam as only one topic discussed among such things as family and tribal organization. Finding another term is difficult - Marshall Hodgson suggested "Islamicate" and "Islamdom," but these never really caught on. Really, the only commonality among Indonesia, Senegal, and Chechnya is religion, and the fact that people in both Mali and Malaysia want to study at Al-Azhar in Egypt shows that this in fact a tie. Robbed of its essentializing qualities, I don't see a problem with "Islamic world" in certain contexts, as long as people remain on guard that there are a large number of other factors at work throughout it.

(Note: Larger-scale works such as Lewis's The Middle East or Hourani's A History of the Arab Peoples certainly remain useful. What I'm referring to in the penultimate paragraph is mainly a style of analysis.)