نوع مقاله : مقاله پژوهشی
نویسنده
پژوهشگاه علوم و فرهنگ اسلامی
چکیده
کلیدواژهها
عنوان مقاله [English]
نویسنده [English]
This article analyzes and critiques the reductionist perspective presented in Cemil Aydin’s book, The Idea of the Muslim World. Aydin argues that the concept of the “Muslim World,” as a unified political and civilizational entity, is a modern phenomenon—a 19th-century political construct that emerged in reaction to Western imperialism and Orientalist discourses. From his viewpoint, the absence of political unity among pre-modern Muslim empires and their prioritization of geopolitical interests serve as evidence for the non-existence of an all-encompassing collective identity. Aydin thereby challenges the grand narrative of “Islamic Civilization,” viewing it more as a product of Pan-Islamist political projects and Islamophobic imaginaries than as a deep-rooted historical reality.
In contrast to this approach, which focuses on the “modern rupture” and a “top-down” political historiography, this article contends that Aydin’s analysis is reductionist and overlooks the profound cultural, epistemological, and faith-based bonds that had forged the collective identity of Muslims for centuries prior to modernity. This study employs the conceptual dualism of “civilizational truth” and “political reality” to draw a fundamental distinction between the “Ummah as an existential truth and a community of faith” and the “Muslim World as a political crystallization.” The “truth of the Ummah” is rooted in the ontological foundations of the Holy Qur’an (such as the concepts of a single nation (Ummah Wahidah), brotherhood (ukhuwwah), and the “Rope of God” (Habl-Allah)), the Prophetic Sunnah, the transnational networks of scholars (ulama), shared rituals (like the Hajj), and a common intellectual heritage, which together have created a “great cultural whole” (in the words of Franklin Le Van Baumer) and a shared way of life (as described by Marshall Hodgson).
The article demonstrates that the weak or absent emergence and manifestation of this unity in the political arena does not negate its foundational “truth.” The primary problem lies in the conflation of these two levels of analysis. Ultimately, the paper addresses the key question of why this deep-rooted truth does not manifest into effective collective action on critical contemporary issues, such as the Palestinian cause. The answer is sought not in a lack of identity, but in structural and psychological impediments: first, the imposition of the “nation-state” structure, which has substituted the logic of “national interest” for the “welfare of the Ummah” (maslahat al-Ummah); and second, two internal “weaknesses” (wahn) that have appeared in the form of “fear of our own incapacity” and “fear of the enemy’s might,” paralyzing the collective will of the Ummah. Therefore, the path forward lies not in “constructing” a new identity, but in “existential recovery” and “removing the obstacles to the reconstruction of the new Islamic Ummah” by returning to the Qur’an and activating the Ummah’s internal capacities.
کلیدواژهها [English]
)