Past Read: Transnational Muslim Politics: Reimagining the Umma

Mandaville, Peter. Transnational Muslim Politics: Reimagining the Umma. (New York: Routledge, 2003)
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Peter Mandaville opens Transnational Muslim Politics (2003) with two statements of purpose. First he explains that the book arose out of his own experience of living in the Gulf  for two decades - which, curiously, he calls the "Arab Gulf," unlike most who eschew any reference to ethnic claims to that body of water out of a desire for political neutrality. Then, he explains, he relocated to the UK, and quickly discovered the wide disparity between the collection of identities, behaviors, practices, and beliefs that is labeled and discussed as "Islam" in the West and that which he experienced in day-to-day life in the Gulf. He acknowledges however, that this is a rather tired topic, overplayed and overpublished in the academy, though the constant conversation never seems to seep down into quotidian, popular media discourse. (Islamophobia, complete with its absurdist and reactionary claims, is sadly not only alive and well, but burgeoning in the United States and Europe, and this in spite of the constant corrective drumbeat from the academy.) Mandaville makes the common plea to look at Islam in terms of individual or community praxis rather than as a totalizing system. His second statement of purpose - far more compelling though perhaps more difficult to accomplish in a slim volume - is to look at Muslim concepts of the ummah (worldwide Islamic community) in terms of his disciplinary home, International Relations.

Mandaville acknowledges at the outset that his topic is so broad that it requires significant topical, temporal, and geographic omissions to make it manageable. He opens his introduction with an intriguing story:

In the early 1990s, a group of distinguished Muslim scholars met at Chateau Chinon in France to consider the problems faced by Muslim communities in Europe. They decided that Islamic political theory could no longer classify non-Muslim states as dar al-harb (the domain of war); instead, the West was the be considered dar al-'ahd (the domain of treaty), signifying a willingness to engage in dialogue. (1)

Discussions of this level of negotiation are notably absent from even academic halls. Yet Muslims just as much as other population groups are participants in transnational flows of information, migration, and economic and cultural exchange, and "the networks and circuits in which transnational migrants and refugees are implicated constitute fluidly bounded transnational or globalized social spaces in which new transnational forms of political organization, mobilization, and practice are coming into being" (1). In other words, as we contemplate contemporary globalization, we must also examine new and different - i.e. non-state bounded - ways of defining the political. Mandaville sets out to do this by looking at Muslim political identities in these global and transnational terms; and intra-Muslim political contestations and negotiations, the latter largely ignored in the flood of texts analyzing the dialogue between "the West" and "Islam" (2).