Claiming and Making Muslim Worlds

Abstract

The contributions to this volume examine different ways in which Muslims have laid claim to, and shaped their worlds in the 20 and 21 centuries. While the negotiation of identities and the ordering and reordering of societies is a common process, why do we choose ‘Muslims’ as a ‘field’ of enquiry? Would we ask similar questions about Christians or Buddhists? Thus, the very choice of the field of research raises a number of fundamental questions which arose in the very particular historical context of the first two decades of the 21 century, when the devastating and highly symbolic attacks on the World Trade Centre by the Islamist organisation al-Qaʿida in September 2001 triggered what was termed the ‘Global War on Terror’. Of course, the identification of Muslims as the Christian (and Western) ‘Other’ goes back almost to the inception of Islam. The long history of mutual relations and perceptions underwent many permutations, which need not be rehearsed here. Suffice it to say that the Age of Imperialism, where this book takes its starting point, coincided with an often violent reconfiguration of these relations. While the 20 century itself witnessed multiple shifts, which we reflect on below, at the time of planning the research on which the book is based, mutual perceptions had taken another distinct turn for the worse. Since the end of the Cold War, some political scientists and area studies specialists have become adherents of a school of thought that promotes the notion of a ‘Clash of Civilizations’. With the