| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Discussions of globalisation and identity have focused on the renewed relevance of various post-national frameworks of belonging, including the Muslim umma. This article argues against the idea that the umma has come to constitute a primary referent in contemporary Muslim debates about identity or a form of globalised political consciousness. Furthermore, the advent of 'post-Islamism' means that Islamic political mobilisation rarely seeks to establish alternative political orders within the container of the nation-state. However, this does not mean that we are seeing a reaffirmation of the nation in Muslim contexts today. Rather, transnational Muslim solidarities represent an intermediate space of affiliation and socio-political mobilisation that exists alongside and in an ambivalent relationship with the nation-state. I point to two different socio-religious movements that, without positing the primacy or exclusivity of the umma/Islamic identity, express discrepant visions of the relationship between Islam and the nation: (1) the Fethullah Gülen movement, which serves simultaneously as the vehicle for a particular vision of neo-Ottoman Turkish nationalism and a critique of the Kemalist national order; and (2) the neo-Salafist movement, read here as an effort to embed conceptions of public morality and accountability within the discursive tradition of orthodox Islam rather than the institutional framework of modern polity.
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