PETER MANDAVILLE
This chapter provides an overview of Islamic transnationalism in the twen tieth and early twenty first centuries. Its primary concerns are to provide the reader with a typology of the various sorts of Islamic actors whose activities and world views seek to transcend state boundaries, while also identifying the wider significance of these movements for the historical study of the modern Muslim world. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which global isation processes especially the dramatic increase in communication and the flow of peoples across borders have interacted with historical practices and concepts in the Islamic world to give rise to what might be understood as a new Muslim transnationalism.
It would perhaps be worthwhile at the outset to say something about the analytical distinction between 'transnational’ and 'international’ two terms that in the minds of many readers will be largely synonymous and inter changeable. In conventional academic usage, the term 'international’ connotes the idea of relations between formally sovereign entities (e. g. bilateral diplo macy). The notion of transnationalism, on the other hand, seeks to downplay the importance of the state as the 'official’ embodiment of the nation in favour of an emphasis on non governmental actors that work across sovereign boundaries but whose activities do not involve or perhaps even seek to challenge the formal state. As the processes of globalisation evolve and deepen, some scholars have suggested that 'transnationalism’ serves as a better description of world politics conducted by an increasingly wide range of non governmental social forces organised across sovereign boundaries.1 To emphasise the transnational, then, is to move away from an exclusive focus on state actors so as to include newly emerging (or, as we will see, pre existing)
Thomas Risse Kappen, Bringing transnational relations back in: Non state actors, domestic structures and international institutions (Cambridge, 1995).
Various forms of nationalism continue to animate global affairs.
This chapter wdl begin by providing a brief history of Islamic transnation alism and then move on to outline a typology of contemporary transnational Islam. It wdl identify the major categories of Muslim actors whose work and activities transcend national boundaries including intergovernmental and state sponsored organisations, educational institutions, intellectual and schol arly networks, non governmental organisations (NGOs), political parties, radical groups, pietistic and mystical brotherhoods and key individual person alities (intellectuals, ideologues and activists). The latter part of the chapter wdl briefly explain the significance of contemporary Muslim transnationalism for wider Islamic history by identifying several key themes around Muslim identity, the reconfiguration of religious authority and Islamic alternatives to globalisation.
World History
