A Contested and Imagined Muslim World: Twentieth Century Islamic Revival Movements

Cemil Aydin, the respondent and presider for this proposed panel, put forth the theory in his book, The Idea of the Muslim World that the notion of a Muslim world is relatively recent and has a specific history. Before the nineteenth century notions of ummah were deterritorialized. Aydin explains that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century poor colonial conditions led Muslims to theorize their own decline and subsequently, antidotes to this perceived decline, including notions of pan-Islamic solidarity and the invocation of an imagined Muslim world, a world beyond the borders and dictates of nation-states. Islamic revival movements flourished in this period, as Muslims used Islam to articulate resistance to systems of domination, from British colonial rule in India, to Jim Crow in the United States.

The four papers in this session explore a theologically and geographically diverse set of twentieth century Islamic revival movements. The first paper considers the multiple diasporas that convened to create the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community and the Moorish Science Temple of America, namely migration from South Asia and the Great Migration within the United States. In the first half of the twentieth century both the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community and the Moorish Science Temple of America repeatedly sacralized a diverse set of locaitons through their newspapers and periodicals, including cities such as Chicago, countries such as India, and continents such as Africa. Together these diverse locations were stitched into an assemblage that formed an imagined Muslim world. The second paper considers how contemporary fundamentalist movements in Eastern Africa are rooted in Islamic revival movements in the twentieth century, which connected Muslims across East Africa through diasporic educational networks in the Middle East. The third paper also considers multi-locational networks, tracking connections between the Muslim Brothers in Egypt; the Tijani Fayḍah in Senegal; and the Nation of Islam in the United States.

The last paper looks at the Darul Islam Movement, Sunni revival movement in the United States in the late twentieth century, which drew on the work of Islamic reformists in both South Asian and the Middle East including Abul A'la al-Maududi, Hassan Al-Banna, and Sayyid Qutb. The paper explains that the vision of Islamic Internationalism invoked by the Darul Islam Movement appropriated and contributed to global Islamist discourses while also contending with the ideals of Black self-determination, Black nationalism, and working-class consciousness that animated radical organizing in the urban U.S.

Together these papers present a complex portrait of Islamic twentieth century revival movements, which were both intensely local in their stakes and articulation, but also connected to larger global networks and trends. The twentieth century was a time of vast diversity in Islamic theological expression, both in the United States and globally. At the same time as these distinct movements proliferated, appeals to an imagined, unified Muslim world and an idealized, all-encompassing Muslim identity increased.