Muslim Movements & the Rise of a New World Order

In the middle years of the interwar period, from 1928-1930, three Muslim movements emerged that would garner mass followings: Jamā’at al-Ikhwan al-Muslimīn (The Order of Muslim Brothers), founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna in Isma’īlia, Egypt; Jamā’at al-Fayḍah (The Order of the Divine Flood), a Tijanī Sufi order founded in 1929 by Ibrāhīm Niasse outside Kaolak, Senegal; and the Nation of Islam (NOI), founded in 1930 by Wallace Fard Muhammad in Detroit, Michigan. Each of these movements led large-scale social mobilization efforts, published considerable amounts of literature, and attempted participation in local politics. All three challenged the societies in which they functioned, as well as the twin pillars of the emerging postwar world order: secularization and political liberalism. All three movements sought to reinvent their communities by religious means, politically empowering dispossessed people through theological convictions and salvation narratives. There is no indication of any significant or sustained interaction between the movements’ founders or early leadership, yet due to exilic persecution (Muslim Brothers), migration (Divine Flood), and organizational dispersal (NOI), all three movements would eventually meet in the urban centers of the United States in the 1970s.

While the three groups overlap ostensibly in their connections to Islam and Africa, they intersect more substantially in their relationship to a shared geopolitical context as well as in their strong religious orientations, structured group formations, explicit political activity, and appeal to revival narratives. These movements are often differentiated from one another through their respective classifications as Islamist and Arab (Muslim Brothers), Sufi and African (Divine Flood), and Black Nationalist and American (NOI), but I argue that these designations can obscure more than they reveal. Appearing in three consecutive years, all three groups are self-avowedly Muslim, modern, and revivalist, holding visions of a utopian transnational community of adherents and allies. In a mid-century setting when alliances among global powers were being torn apart and reassembled toward variant grand visions of how the world ought to be arranged within an emerging liberal world order, the significance of these groups’ intersecting qualities, their attempts to fashion assemblies and visions of their own, and the responses they generated from both colonialist states and anti-colonialists opponents are worth exploring.

Scholarship on Islamic revivalism has acquired greater empirical substance and analytical depth since the early 2000s’ war-on-terror rhetoric, moving away from essentialist cultural and religious explanations toward more nuanced political and historical explanations. Current works such as Carrie Rosefsky Wickham’s on the Muslim Brothers (2013), Zachary Wright’s on the Divine Flood (2015), and Garrett Felber’s on the NOI (2020) propel the conversation forward by considering Muslim revivalist movements in relation to nationalist and internationalist struggle and resistance. My paper builds on these important works to incorporate a question that thus far remains unanswered in the literature: How does theology factor in? And it situates this question about revivalist theology in relation to pressing debates about postcolonial nation-building.

The current scholarship on postcolonial nation-building as represented by Adom Getachew (2019) and Darryl Li (2019) has altered how the field understands anticolonial aspirations for nation-building, internationalism, and/or universalism in two significant ways: (1) by rejecting the idea that they constituted a mere mimicry of the Western liberal model; and (2) by considering them as active practices rather than ideologies (ex: practices of worldmaking, practices of universalism, etc.). These works have been profoundly helpful in demonstrating how the postwar liberal order operates on a racialized hierarchy of sovereignty in which Europe (and the United States) sits at the top and others are doomed to hold unequal status on the world stage. This paper goes one step further to demonstrate that religiously-motivated decolonial/resistance movements are twice removed in this process: once as non-European and twice as non-secular. Thus, they are not even allowed onto the stage as their projects are deemed ontologically and epistemically disqualified from the start.  It also fills in the gap left by the absence of religion in Getachew’s now-popular argument on worldmaking. If decolonial movements are to be read as worldmaking projects, then we must take into account those decolonial actors who do not conceive of the world in entirely political terms and whose practice of worldmaking may not be limited to this world.

The paper surveys the history of the three movements over a 50-year period (1925-1975), which covers their founding, growth, formative events, and the deaths of their leading figures. For the Muslim Brothers this includes the deaths of founder Hassan al-Banna (d. 1949), prominent member Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), and al-Banna’s successor Hassan al-Hudaybi (d. 1973). For the Divine Flood this includes the death of founder Ibrahīm Niasse (d. 1975). For the Nation of Islam this includes the disappearance of founder Wallace Fard Muhammad (1934), and deaths of prominent member Malcolm X (d. 1965) and leader Elijah Muhammad (d. 1975). This paper also engages the revival narratives of all three groups, highlighting the internal tensions embedded in “modern revival.”