Transnational conceptions of Islamic community: national and religious subjectivities

A conversation with a friend in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in 2007 evoked how much the idea of globalisation has permeated ideas of legitimacy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Almost sharply, this friend said, ‘Don’t forget, the Prophet imagined Islam as global long before anyone was talking about globalisation.’ If being global has become the currency of neoliberal respect, then scholarship on the multiple and frequently religious ways of claiming cosmopolitaneity remains scant. This collection of articles puts transnational conceptions of Islamic community, often referred to as the umma, into conversation with literatures on globalisation and the nation. By attending to the histories, stakes and subjects of claims to national or transnational forms of Islamic identity, we argue that discourses of religious community are constituted by the forms they appear to subvert, particularly the nation-state. This collection showcases case studies from outside Europe, where secular nationalism remains dominant, and from outside the Middle East, where Islam was historically rooted and remains authoritative, potentially decoupling naturalised claims of secularism and nationalism. The study of formerly colonised, globally marginal and/or majority-Muslim contexts suggests that religion, nation and state are not always in dichotomised tension. The idea of a globalised community of economic and cultural exchange, an image that haunts references to globalisation, is itself an invitation to believe, or an act of faith. Jacques Derrida has called this the fiduciary faith of ‘globalatinisation’ (Derrida 1998: 53), the political project of borderless expansion that is constitutively Christian in its imagination of a sphere of ‘‘religion’’, from which all other secular political projects are supposed to separate themselves, while at the same time covertly underpinning them. The imagination involved in the very discourse of globalisation requires envisioning a globe in which national borders enforced by states no longer hold the power they once did. Similarly, appeals to alternative, yet equally global, communities, such as apparently universal religious communities, rest on parallel foundations. However, as scholars of globalisation have argued, no terrain is free of political histories of inequality and imperial exclusions (Appadurai 1996). For many Muslims round the world, an idealised image of Nations and Nationalism 17 (1), 2011, 2–6.