A Common Word

17Oct07

If the unprecedented global protests over insulting depictions of the Prophet Mohammed in a book, newspaper or a papal speech tell us anything, it is that Muslims around the world can act in concert without following a leader or sharing an ideology. While such demonstrations might possess a local politics, in other words, they are shaped by global movements that lack traditional political meaning, not least by sidelining leaders and institutions for popular action in the name of a worldwide Muslim community as seen on television. The same holds true for Muslim support of global militancy, whose televised icons are capable of attracting a following without the help of local institutions or leaders.The new global arena that such movements bring to light, then, presents a threat to politics conventionally conceived. This is a threat that Muslim liberals are trying to address by promoting the cause of dialogue and debate on a global scale; the most recent manifestation of this trend was the letter sent on 13 October 2007 in the name of 138 Muslim “scholars, clerics and intellectuals” to “the leaders of all the world’s churches, and indeed to all Christians everywhere.”

In engaging in this effort, though, Muslim liberals also risk moving beyond the political structures of liberalism: chief among them the nation-state and its representative institutions. There is nevertheless a great deal of funding available for such efforts today, mostly from western governments interested in promoting “moderate” Islam internationally; and it is not difficult to mount a critique of the way in which Muslim liberals are enticed into supporting the particular projects of such states by accepting this funding.

But even at their most genuine, such projects to support liberals tend to be counterproductive in the long run, having in the past done little more than create dependent and thoroughly compromised Muslim elites in Asia and Africa whose liberalism never became a living factor in their societies. I do not however intend to pursue this easy line of criticism here; instead I focus on the more general difficulties of dialogue and so of the limits of liberalism itself in a global arena lacking political institutions of its own.

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