Compared to other communities, Muslims, including those from Pakistan, who live abroad don’t “assimilate” and therefore feel alienated. Francis Fukuyama, writing in Identity: The Demand for Dignity and Politics of Resentment (2019): “Modern Islamism needs to be seen through a lens of modernization and identity. Both nationalism and Islamism are rooted in modernization.”
Millions of Muslims experienced modernization after migrating to Europe or other Western countries in search of better lives, settling in Marseille or Rotterdam or Bradford and confronting there an alien culture. In other cases, the modern world came to them in their villages via satellite TV from stations such as Al Jazeera or CNN International. People living in traditional villages with limited choices are suddenly confronted with a pluralistic world with very different ways of life in which their traditional norms are not respected.
Identity as push-back to new environment
Under these circumstances, confusion about identity while living abroad becomes acute, just as it was for newly urbanized Europeans in 19th century. For some Muslims today, the answer to this confusion has not been membership in a nation, but membership in a larger religious group—an umma, or community of believers, represented by a political party such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood or Turkey’s Justice and Development Party or Tunisia’s Ennahda. Like classic nationalists, contemporary Islamists have both a diagnosis of the problem and a clear solution: you are part of a proud and ancient community; the outer world doesn’t respect you as a Muslim; we offer you a way to connect to your true brothers and sisters, where you will be member of a great community of believers that stretches across the world.
Assertion of pride in one’s identity might explain the cultural shifts that have been taking place across the Muslim world over the past generation. After a prolonged period in which it was fashionable for educated people from the Middle East to adopt Western customs and garb, a large number of young Muslim women in Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, and other Middle Eastern countries have started to wear the hijab or headscarf; some have taken to even more restrictive forms of female dress such as the full-face veil, or niqab. Many of these women are indeed pious Muslims, but others are not particularly religious; wearing the hijab is rather a signal of identity, a marker that they are proud of their culture and not afraid to be publicly identified as a Muslim.
Suspicion of the secular host
This trend narrowed towards the new inclination to go along while challenging the secular order in democratic politics and winning victories at the polls and running governments. Their secular opponents often remain highly suspicious of their long-term agenda. The same could be said about nationalists in the 19th century or today: they often play by democratic rules, but harbor potentially illiberal tendencies due to their longings for unity and community. This was the case with nationalism, more extreme versions of politicized religion have been proffered by ideologists such as Osama bin Laden or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder of the Islamic State. Their narrative is far more focused on victimization by the United States, Israel, the Assad regime in Syria, and they advocate an even tighter community bound by commitment to violence and direct political action.
The French Middle Eastern scholar Olivier Roy has pointed out that many recent terrorists, such as those who staged attacks in Paris in 2015 are second-generation European Muslims who have rejected the Islam of their parents. Yet many failed to do regular jobs and began a descent into petty crime. They lived at the margins of their own cities, with no history of great piety or interest in religion, until they were suddenly “born-again” by watching videos of radical imams or being converted by a prison-preacher when they showed up in Syria with a long beard and toting a C-47 or staged a murderous attack on their fellow European. Their families always professed surprise and incomprehension of the transformation. Roy has described this not as the radicalization of Islam, but the Islamization of radicalism—that is, a process that draws from the same alienation that drove earlier generations of extremists, whether nationalists such as Paul de Lagarde or Communists such as Leon Trotsky.
Radical Islam the host for expats
Radical Islam by contrast offers them community, acceptance, and dignity. Olivier Roy argues that the number of Muslims who become terrorists or suicide bombers is minuscule compared to the total global population of over a billion Muslims. Poverty and deprivation, or simple anger over American foreign policy, does not inevitably lead people to extremism. Many terrorists have come from comfortable middle-class backgrounds, and many were apolitical and unconcerned with global politics for most of their lives. Neither these issues nor any kind of genuine religiosity drove them so much as the need for a clear identity, meaning, and a sense of pride. They realized that they had an inner, unrecognized self that the outside world was trying to suppress.
The expat Muslim suffers from identity problems common to all migrants but is moved towards alienation by his firm adherence to an “eternal” and “unchanging” faith. Does it apply to all expats? Observing the behavior of Hindu migrants to the U.K. it appears that the expat Muslims from all over the world feel a loss of identity—or simply an emphasis on old identity—much more than an Indian Hindu migrant. The Roy-Kepel debate centers around a critical question: Is the rise of Islamist radicalism in the early 21st century just understood as an identity problem, or is it at base a genuinely religious phenomenon?
Journey toward a hard identity
Pakistani anthropologist Akbar Ahmed found the rise of identity politics in Europe interesting enough for him to undertake a journey to Europe to experimentally see if his earlier theses on the subject jibe with what is happening now. His monumental Journey into Europe: Islam, Immigration and Identity is a kind of culmination to his three earlier examinations of “tribal” identity.
Ahmed cannot be partisan in any sense because his discipline does not permit it. As he surveys the identity-seeking Muslims in Europe, he is reminded of the “inclusive” state of Abdur Rahman in Cordova in al-Andalus (Iberia) in the 8th century AD. It was remembered for its “Convivencia” or living together of different identities which Islam has forsaken today. Rahman was an Umayyad prince from a Berber mother in Syria and was a descendant of the founder of the dynasty who had married a Christian woman thus indicating the source of his Convivencia in al-Andalus between Muslims, Christians and Jews tolerating multiple identities.
Lost: living together in Convivencia
But this Convivencia in a Europe of today busy forsaking Enlightenment and seeking “identity” did not last, and Akbar Ahmed points it out, likening it to what is happening today among nations. One is reminded of early Muslim reformer Jamaluddin Afghani who opposed Syed Ahmad Khan—an ancestor of Akbar Ahmed—in India but proposed acceptance of Islam in Europe. Afghani, praised by Pakistan’s national poet Allama Iqbal in his famous lectures, was a bit of a soldier of fortune, with a lot of traditional learning that eased his entry into the Muslim societies of Turkey, India, Iran and Egypt. But he got his comeuppance in France where orientalist Ernest Renan, a much greater mind, told him prophetically that his claim that Muslims would ultimately turn to reason and modernity will never be proved right as the Muslims will defeat his thinking just as they had rejected Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in the 12th century for having learned too much of Aristotle. Author Ahmed too refers to the unfortunate end of Ibn Rushd in his book.
The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, and the faltering of the national economies, to say nothing of the “inequality” of incomes and unemployment under capitalism, caused negative attention to turn on the asylum-seeking Muslim immigrants. Roman historian Tacitus in his thesis “Germania”, focuses on the identity that caused exclusion and violence among nations like England, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries.
The lesson of Unity-Faith-Discipline
Reading Akbar Ahmed, one is reminded of the motto the founding fathers fashioned for Pakistan: Unity, Faith, Discipline, putting unity first to obfuscate the clashing identities of the various communities living in Pakistan. As the state moved away from Raj-enforced Enlightenment to an Islamist military dominance, the motto came to be rewritten as Faith, Unity, and Discipline, putting faith first and thus clearly embracing identity that divides in place of the intended “assimilation” of all identities in Pakistan.
Similarly, the Urdu “grammatical rule” of writing “marhoom” (blessed) only after the name of the Muslim dead and disallowing it after the name of a non-Muslim Pakistani citizen, sought exclusion rather than inclusion. In India, a constitution put together by an untouchable leader Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar charted the assimilation of all identities in secular integration; but today the new consensus reflected in the victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) seeks to follow the path traced by the state of Pakistan. Outside Hindutva, all identities are “impure,” just as the non-Muslims of Pakistan have to live under laws that victimize them.