For our collection to tackle Islamophobia

Source: Huffington Post

By Tithi Bhattacharya; who  is a professor of South Asian History at Purdue University. She writes extensively on modern Indian history, Hindutva, gender and the politics of Islamophobia.

As we watch the presidential debates unfold, one could be excused for thinking that there was an imminent threat of an Islamic takeover of the United States.

According to NPR, at a New Hampshire rally, Donald Trump followed up his proposed ban on all Muslims entering the country with the comment that “there’s something going on” with Muslims and “their culture.”

Another Republican hopeful, the retired neurosurgeon, Ben Carson told NBC: “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.”

And it is not just the Republicans.

While Hilary Clinton has rightly criticized Trump’s alarming Islmophobic comments, she herself has the dubious distinction of being one of the chief architects of the “war on terror” — which institutionalized Islamophobia at policy and programmatic levels. Clinton’s personal record similarly does not bear too much scrutiny. As candidate for U.S. Senate seat in New York in 2000, she returned all campaign donation checks from Muslim organizations, totaling $50,000.

Moreover, one of Clinton’s vocal allies, the retired General Wesley Clark, has recently called for “disloyal” and “radicalized” Americans to be put in internment camps similar to those which held Japanese-Americans during World War II. Several progressive organizations called for Clinton to disassociate her campaign from such dangerous remarks “at a time when American Muslims are facing a surge in violent hate crimes.” That response is yet to come.

Meanwhile, CNN reports that 2015 has been one of “the most intensely anti-Muslim periods in American history.” According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), American mosques and Islamic centers have been the victims of vandalism, harassment and anti-Muslim bigotry at least 63 times this year, the highest number since the Muslim civil rights group started tracking such things in 2009 and a threefold increase over the last year alone.

But if the mainstream politicians of all shades are unified in their anxiety over this apparently homogenous social group of “the Muslims,” terrorist outfits like ISIL also appeal to a similarly imagined homogenous group of “Muslims” for their own political ends.

After the devastating attacks in Beirut and Paris, British investigative journalist, Nafeez Ahmed, wrote a deeply intuitive piece about ISIS. Daesh’s goal, Ahmed rightly argued, was not simply to use spectacular violence to create widespread panic and terror, but to craft a fundamentally new political project: that of drawing “the western world into an apocalyptic civilizational Armageddon with ‘Islam.'”

While it seems that both Donald Trump and ISIS agree that there is this preexisting unified group of people called “the Muslims,” I would like to spend some time in this column talking about the immense diversity and heterogeneity of Islam and Muslims. How there never was any unitary “thing” called “Islam” in global history, and one can only talk about Islam in its historic specificity. We can talk about, say the Sunni clerics in Ottoman Turkey in the 15th. century, or Sunni women in the Maldives in the 16th. century, or converted Sufi peasants in Bengal in the 17th and eighteenth centuries. But we must also talk about how they all saw themselves as “Muslim” but could not be more different from each other.

In reformatting the smooth narrative about homogenous Muslims as one of bumpy, uneven variegation, I want to retrieve from our global forgetting the story of Islam as a rich palimpsest: how Islam integrated, modified and rewrote local histories and in doing so modified and rewrote itself.

Ibn Battuta and his Dar-Al Islam: Singular or Plural?
Between 1325 and 1354, in a world without the steam engine or air travel, the North African Muslim scholar Ibn Battuta traveled by land and sea from his place of birth, Morocco, all the way to China and back. By the time he was done, he had visited an equivalent of 44 modern nations and travelled a distance of 73,000 miles.

It has been Ibn Battuta’s fate to be referred to by Western writers as the “Marco Polo of the East” even though Battuta had traveled much further than the Venetian and to far more places. But, as scholars have pointed out, where Battuta differed most from Marco Polo was in the fact that the Italian was a stranger to the lands he visited, while Ibn Battuta traveled through a “single cultural universe”, that of Dar al-Islam, or the lands where Muslims were a majority, or was ruled by a Muslim king.

So everywhere Battuta went as a Muslim scholar he was received into a familiar world of Muslim merchants, scholars and Princes with whom he could converse in Arabic on issues ranging from theology and jurisprudence to politics and science.

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