A congregational mosque in Herat, Afghanistan
(Wikimedia Commons public domain)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
I close this little series with the tenth and final installment of an article that I originally wrote for\u00a0Richard C. Martin, et al., eds., \u00a0Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World<\/em>, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2004), on the subject of \u201cMuslim Identity\u201d:<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Persistence of Islamic Identity<\/b><\/span><\/p>\nThrough the ideological turbulence of the past two centuries, the fundamental self-understanding of Muslims as Muslims remained intact, though sometimes tacit.\u00a0 The first Arab rebellion against Ottoman Turkish rule came with the rise of Wahhabism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and its attempt to repair, Islamically, what it perceived as serious defects in Muslim society.\u00a0 Although that irruption was contained and reversed, Wahhabism again came to power, this time more lastingly, with the Saudi conquest of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in 1925, and the discovery of Arabian petroleum in the 1930s has made advocates of this brand of militantly Islamic self-identification both wealthy and influential.<\/span><\/p>\nResistance to European imperialism has been most effectively captained, in many instances, not by political or military officials but by popular religious figures.\u00a0 For example, Ahmad Brelwi, who was both an initiate of the Naqshbandi order and a Wahhabi, led armed resistance between 1826 and 1831 both to perceived encroachments of the Sikhs and to the rising menace of British power in northern India.\u00a0 Slightly later, from 1830 to 1859, Shamil of Daghistan, another Naqshbandi, led similar resistance against the infidel Russians, and, between 1832 and 1847, \u2018Abd al-Qadir, a chief of the Qadiriyya dervish order, fought the infidel French in North Africa.\u00a0 Likewise, the struggle of the Sanusi order in Libya against the Ottomans and, later, the Italians, and the revolt of the Sudanese Mahdi, were explicitly conducted in the name of Islam, not local patriotism.<\/span><\/p>\nThe Young Turk revolution faced a short-lived mutiny in 1909 when members of a pan-Islamic group calling itself the \u201cMuhammadan Union\u201d joined with the First Army Corps to demand imposition of the shari\u2018a<\/i>.\u00a0 Later, the Young Turks themselves flirted with pan-Islamism (at least for propaganda purposes) with Enver Pasha\u2019s 1918 launch of the \u201cArmy of Islam,\u201d designed to liberate the Muslims of Russia.\u00a0 The previous year, the grand vizier Mehmed Said Halim Pasha had delivered a classic statement of pan-Islamic belief, declaring that \u201cthe fatherland of a Muslim is wherever the shari\u2018a<\/i> prevails.\u201d\u00a0 Even the communists, jockeying for power in the months after the fall of the Ottoman empire, found themselves constrained to invoke Islamic solidarity rather than class struggle.<\/span><\/p>\nThe Muslim masses have continued to see the chief threat to them not in foreigners but in infidels.\u00a0 (That the two were often identical obscures but does not remove the distinction.)\u00a0 When, for example, on 2 November 1945, Egypt\u2019s political leaders invited protests to mark the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, resulting demonstrations turned into anti-Jewish riots and then into attacks on Catholic, Armenian, and Greek Orthodox churches.\u00a0 In January 1952, anti-British demonstrators in Suez, angry at the British, killed several Coptic Christians\u2014arguably Egypt\u2019s most Egyptian residents\u2014and looted and burned a Coptic church.\u00a0 Many hundreds of miles away, meanwhile, the Algerian response to the French slogan of \u201cAlg\u00e9rie fran\u00e7aise\u201d was neither \u201cAlg\u00e9rie arabe\u201d nor \u201cAlg\u00e9rie alg\u00e9rienne,\u201d but \u201cAlg\u00e9rie musulmane\u201d (\u201cMuslim Algeria\u201d).\u00a0 During the Lebanese civil war, when civil government lost effective authority over the country, residents reverted to their essential identities as Maronite Christians, Druze, and Sunni and Shi\u2018i Muslims.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Posted from Fairfax, Virginia<\/p>\n
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\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 I close this little series with the tenth and final installment of an article that I originally wrote for\u00a0Richard C. Martin, et al., eds., \u00a0Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2004), on the subject of \u201cMuslim Identity\u201d: \u00a0 The Persistence of Islamic Identity Through the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"Afghan](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2018\/07\/Friday_Mosque_in_Herat_Afghanistan.jpg\")
<\/a>