Interstate Society and Reconfiguring the Ummah:
Pilgrimage, Nationalism and Imagination in Barry
Buzan’s ‘Three Traditions’∗
Neil F. Ketchley
MSc Candidate - Department of International Relations
London School of Economics and Political Science
[email protected]
“My pilgrimage broadened my scope. It blessed me with a new insight. In two
weeks in the Holy Land, I saw what I never had seen in thirty-nine years in
America. I saw all races, all colours – blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned
Africans – in true brotherhood! In unity! Living as one! Worshipping as one!”
Malcolm X (1992: 362)
“Pilgrimages have never been immune from the influences exerted by…modes
of thought and politics, patterns of trade, military developments, and the
ecological changes brought about by these and other forces”
Victor & Edith Turner (1978: 19)
Introduction
For the last fourteen hundred years, Muslims have uprooted themselves from their
everyday lives and made the pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj); retracing the steps of the
Prophet before them and reminding themselves of their bonds with others Muslims
around the world. The modern hajj reveals much about the spatial rhythm of panreligious imagination over a period that sees imperialism, nationalism and an emerging
state-system radically transforming the Islamic world.
In this paper, I draw on Barry Buzan’s (2004) recent work From International to World
Society? English School Theory and the Social Structures of Globalisation (FIWS?) to
explore how colonialism and nation-state formation have determined patterns of Islamic
worship, learning and pilgrimage. In FIWS?, Buzan looks to expand the theoretical
landscape of the English School, presenting a new social structural triad of interstate,
∗
Draft version; not for citation.
interhuman and transnational to replace the three classical traditions of international
system, international society and world society1.
A core research question thrown up by Buzan’s revised triad is: how do these three
domains interact and how do leading elements in one domain (the vanguard) reconstitute
the social structures in the others? In classical English School accounts (Wight, 1991;
Watson, 1992) this has often been posed in terms of the emergence of a sub-global
interstate society in Europe that spreads, principally through colonialism, and re-orders
the rest of the world upon Westphalian lines. What this leaves unanswered is the
interplay across domains during that expansion, i.e. how the expansion and later global
adoption of interstate society reconfigured the social structures of other cultures and
civilisations it came into contact with.
Told through the unfolding changes in the organisation and experience of the hajj over
the past one hundred and fifty years, I interrogate how interstate society and its primary
institutions have shaped both the opportunities and difficulties in imagining the ummah
(community of believers) - or in clunky FIWS? terms: a sub-global, Islamic interhuman
society. As I show, the legacy of European expansion into the Islamic world is one that
inescapably revolves around nationalism2. Nationalism as a primary institution of
1
This has not gone without contestation. For Dunne (2005: 159), so radical is Buzan’s departure from
classical English School thinking that the measure of its success must be a transformation of the English
School comparable to Waltz’s (1979) transformation of realism. Adler’s (2005) contribution to the
Millennium forum on FIWS? takes on Buzan’s revised triad from a constructivist position, noting Buzan’s
use of Wendtian (1999) constructivism is one founded on subjective, rather than intersubjective
understandings. In this setup, “social structures…are based on ideas, but not ‘all the way down’; the
material world also counts” (Adler, 2005: 173). FIWS? is then exemplar of what more radical constructivist
epistemologies have decried as ‘orthodox’ applications of constructivism (Kratochwil, 2000). This paper
may also fall short of more radical constructivist expectations, as I follow Max Weber, who, when
discussing ‘religion’ confined himself, as I do, to studying the “conditions and effects of a particular type of
social action” (1978: 399). When applied to Islam, we must conclude that, “the practice and significance of
the Islamic faith in any given historical setting cannot be readily predicted from first principles of dogma
and belief” (Eickelman & Piscatori, 1990: 18). Instead, the “subjective experiences, ideas and purposes of
the individuals concerned” (Weber, 1978: 399) must form the basis of our enquiry. Here an individual’s
participation in the hajj is to say, “I am a Muslim” and so is deeply connected with the collective
experience of not only what it is to be Islamic, but is itself constitutive of Islamic imagination.
2
Fred Halliday (2000: 31) quips that only a fool tries to discuss nationalism and the Middle East. That my
net is cast considerably wider (i.e. the Islamic universe) is good reason to limit my response to the
unfolding changes in the pilgrimage.
-1-
interstate society has been well covered by Mayall (1990). In that account, Mayall shows
how the introduction of nationalism into European interstate society redefined other
primary institutions; most obviously sovereignty, dynasticism and colonialism. I take this
analysis one step further by exploring the mutual constitution of nationalism as a primary
institution in European, and later global interstate society, and the primary institutions of
Islam in the interhuman domain. In doing so, I take up Buzan’s (2004: 258) call for a
detailed case study that explores the interplay between social structures in the interstate
and interhuman domains.
Like Buzan, I take my lead from Weller’s (2000) discussion on the role of social
geography in the stability and instability of social structures. In many ways, this can be
read as a re-run of Benedict Anderson’s (2006 [1983]) seminal account of the origins and
spread of nationalism (that I go on to discuss later). In that account, Anderson argues that
the social structures that enable Islamic imagination (and pan-religious imaginaries more
broadly) become overshadowed and ultimately superseded by secular alternatives. For
Anderson, this is one chapter in a broader story in which revolutions in print capitalism
and the empowerment of vernacular languages spawned new forms of national
imagination that ultimately spelled the demise of pan-religious consciousness. The ‘takehome’ message from both Anderson and Weller is that social space that contains both
societal (contractual and thus ‘limited’) and communal identities, undermines more fluid,
ostensibly less fixed ones; which is why nation-states have proved so enduring. They
bring the key variables of geography, society and community into line (Weller, 2000: 58;
64-68)3.
That Islamic imaginaries still endure attests to the post-colonial legacy of an expanding
European interstate society, which then declined and reconstituted domestic and
international politics along European (Westphalian) lines. Shallow cultural and political
roots with arbitrary borders have left weak states in much of the Islamic world, in which
geography, society and community have not lined up organically, but have been imposed
3
A point echoed by Ernest Gellner who defines nationalism as a “political principle which holds that the
political and the national unit should be congruent” (1983: 1).
-2-
by colonial powers or through internal partition (Buzan & Wæver, 2003: 216-217)4. The
payoff is incomplete nationalisation and disjunctures between the interstate and
interhuman domain that reflect the lack of shared culture in the initial expansion and that
subsequently crystallises into a source of tension5.
What I am interested in exploring here is not viewing this as an inevitable ‘clash’ (contra,
Huntington, 1996) or as a repression of the interhuman domain by national consciousness
(contra, Anderson, 2006 [1983]), but instead, how a dominant interstate domain has
reconfigured (albeit partially) the primary institutions of Islam in the interhuman domain.
To illustrate this, I employ an ideal-typical account of an Islamic imagined community in
the interhuman domain, whose principal institutions (pilgrimage, mass-ritual and
scholasticism) act as transmission networks. In this stylised portrayal, I pose the hajj as a
‘journey of the imagination’ in which pilgrims, news, theological and political currents
circulate both on the hajj itself and the interweaving pilgrimage routes. I then show how
these journeys have become increasingly nationalised and subject to state administration.
I argue that this has important implications for the sociology of Islamic imaginaries, as
the ummah is paradoxically realised in increasingly more national contexts. As such, far
from being a free-floating, hermetically-sealed identity - articulations of pan-Islamic
imagination have become increasingly wedded to a system of nation-states - a reflection
of the change in social geography brought about by a new dominant unit type (Buzan &
Little, 2000).
I build my case in three steps. First, I take a close reading of Buzan’s three traditions,
surveying the limitations we inherit from classical English School theory, and exploring
the analytical and conceptual space Buzan carves out for sub-global, non-liberal world
societies. Second, I follow Buzan in ‘bringing geography back in’ by considering the
social geography of an Islamic imagined community and its primary institutions. Here, I
4
Or to play on Tilly’s (1990) point, they have often been denied the dynamic interaction between war and
state-building.
5
These manifest most obviously in the Muslim world in episodic calls of pan-Islamism (and pan-Arabism
in the Middle East) that further drains legitimacy away from already fragile states. These ‘cultures of
insecurity’ reflect both the legacy of an initial lack of shared culture during initial expansion and the
memory of that incongruence when outside powers continue to penetrate regional sub-systems (Niva,
1999).
-3-
take imagined community as an ideal type and use pilgrimage, ritual and scholasticism to
illustrate how a disparate social geography was brought together through intellectual
hubs, trade routes and travel. I then give a historical sociological account of the modern
pilgrimage, in which an expanding colonial apparatus, revolutions in transportation and
the emerging system of nation-states lead on the one hand to greater participation, but on
the other, to less inclusive, more nationalised experiences, as opportunities to interact
with other Muslims become limited and the traditions of scholasticism and cultural
transmission are disrupted by sovereignty and borders. I conclude by applying my
findings to elements in Buzan’s third domain: transnational Islamism. This speaks to the
potential of Buzan’s revised triad in capturing the development of Islam in international
politics as a complex interplay between state and non-state actors, mediated by primary
institutions in the interhuman domain.
The Promise of Barry Buzan’s ‘Three Traditions’
The English School’s lasting relevance to International Relations (IR) owes much to its
ability to ‘shift gears’ in response to changes in international politics. Contemporary reworkings of classical English School theory, i.e. the shifting emphasis from order despite
competing views of justice (pluralism) to justice underpinning order (solidarism) are
exemplar of a conceptual flexibility that allows for changing empirical judgements about
the world (see Linklater & Suganami, 2006: 60)6. As Epp (1998: 63) has argued, it is this
inbuilt flexibility that renders the English School neither a sterile nor a homogenous
regime; hence its invulnerability to the end of the Cold War and interpretive challenges to
positivism.
Buzan’s FIWS? can be understood within this wider intellectual development of English
School theory as a gear change that brings the English School up to speed with an
increasingly globalised world7. If the changing terrain of international politics controls
6
This can be seen most obviously in John Vincent’s earlier (1974) work on non-intervention and his later
(1986) reappraisal.
7
Of course the irony for my endeavour is that instead of theory responding to developments in international
politics and adapting accordingly, many of the important moves in FIWS? that I use are ‘rear view mirror’
-4-
the gear stick, the ‘gears’ are the ‘three traditions’ or ‘three pillars’ – the idea that
international system, international society and world society are all simultaneously in
play, both as tools for the analyst, and as social structures in international politics8. What
this brings to the table is a “theoretically pluralist formation [that] takes the focus away
from the oppositional either/or approaches of much of IR theory (interparadigm debate,
realism-idealism, rationalist-reflectivist, etc.) and moves it towards a holistic,
synthesising approach that features the patterns of strength and interplay amongst all
three pillars” (2004: 10). This ontological pluralism is complemented by a commitment
to methodological pluralism (Little, 1998; 2000). Taken together, we are left with a rather
nice quality of ‘everything is the English School’.
Figure 1. The classical three traditions of the English School
Note: Titles in ( ) are Wight’s, title’s in [ ] are the analytical titles;
titles along the border zones are where the traditions blend into each other
(all from Buzan, 2004: 9)
ones to explain changes in the structure of the international system that often pre-date the creation of the
English School.
8
See Figure.1. As will become apparent there is a problem of language. Buzan’s revision of the ‘three
traditions’ of the English School suffers from a lack of interoperability with the classical tradition, for
obvious reasons both analytical and normative. That we still cling to the old is in part a reflection of the
short time FIWS? has been around but is also perhaps due to elements within the School being less than
thrilled at Buzan’s sidelining of the pluralist/solidarist debate in his reformulated triad (see especially,
Dunne, 2005: 166-168). I will try and remain loyal to the language of FIWS?’s revised ‘three traditions’ but
will occasionally slip into the old lexicon to give fluidity, especially around quotations from the classical
literature.
-5-
One world, many levels
The elephant in the room is world society. In Buzan’s (1999; 2001: 476) call for a
renaissance in the English School he acknowledges that world society is the least
developed of English School concepts; one neither clearly nor systematically articulated.
Instead, world society has often played a role akin to the unit level in neorealism – an
intellectual black box into which you put things you don’t want to discuss (Keohane &
Nye, 1987; Buzan, 2004: 28). A corollary of this neglect is that whilst flagship concepts
like international society have generated a wealth of literature and insight, this in turn has
compromised how we think about world society and its wider role in interacting with the
two other pillars. Further, as Buzan (2004: 27-62) lays out, a number of theoretical and
normative positions that we have inherited from, inter alia, Manning, Bull, Vincent and
Wight, have served to hold back the concept’s development.
The most significant normative and analytical hang-up for this paper is a privileging of
the global level. During the Cold War, the bi-polar conflict permeated all other levels to
the extent of rendering them analytically irrelevant. However, with the decline of the
Cold War, sub-global societies, most evident in regional interstate societies, have become
increasingly salient (Buzan & Wæver, 2003). We also find in this period the reemergence of broad collective identities such as pan-Islamism9. This suggests an identity
embedded within the wider global conflict that is freed with the Cold War’s decline, and
thus manifests itself at the sub-global level. However, classical English School theory
offers little explanatory help here because many of its normative predispositions are
contrived to focus solely on the global level10. Take Bull’s conception of world society:
9
I go on to discuss this phase of transnational Islamist mobilisation later in my conclusion.
That such a commitment to universalism dominated traditional English School thought was in part a
hangover from a normative conception that painted world society as the embodiment of Kantian
cosmopolitan thinking, and in part because sub-global developments of international or world society were
painted as corrosive to the order of global international society (see, Bull, 2002 [1977]: 279-81; Vincent,
1986: 101, 105). This latter concern with order created two additional spillovers. The first, and especially in
pluralist thought: a hardwired presumption that the relationship between international and world society
was one of opposition (Wæver, 1992: 104-7) – something I obviously look to challenge. The second, a
tendency to approach Islam as an object of interest only in regards to its potential to subvert international
order (see Piscatori in Bull & Watson, 1992).
10
-6-
“By a world society we understand not merely a degree of interaction linking all
parts of the community to one another, but a sense of common interest and
common values, on the basis of which common rules and institutions may be
built. The concept of a world society, in this sense, stands to the totality of global
social interaction” (2005: 269).
Seeing world society as compromising the sum of humankind is not so problematic when
discussing universal human rights. The limitations for my discussion are, though,
glaringly obvious, because no large-scale religious or culturally specific identity has ever
achieved universal status (although not for lack of trying). Buzan’s (2004) intervention
that I go on to discuss below, can then be welcomed as a remedial step to address this
blinkeredness to the sub-global, as in Buzan’s words, “there is not much to be gained, and
quite a lot to be lost analytically, from simply using world society as a label for the
totality of human interaction in all forms and at all levels” (2).
Buzan (2004: 11-15, 90-108) then poses FIWS? as a taxonomical overhaul of English
School thought in which he explicitly looks to ‘pull away’ from the English School’s
founding fathers. And whilst Buzan keeps the scaffolding of three pillars, he goes about
some major renovation work in the process. Working through the three traditions in four
revisions, Buzan (2004: 98, 109, 133, 159) comes out the other end with a new structural
trilogy of: interstate, inter-human and transnational domains11.
11
See figure. 2
-7-
Figure 2. Buzan’s (2004: 159) reformulated ‘three traditions’
Into his reformulated inter-state pillar, Buzan (2004:158-160) places six ideal types:
asocial, power political, coexistence, cooperative, convergence, and confederative.
Within this spectrum, interstate societies can move from pluralist to solidarist or back
again, as imperatives or regimes evolve and institutions develop or decay.
By locating solidarism within the interstate domain, Buzan (2004: 90) creates the room to
place state and non-state actors in distinct social domains. World society gets deliberalised - with Kantianism and coercive universalism moved out of world society, with
the Kantianism placed within solidarist conceptions of international society. By doing
this, Buzan (208) transcends the normative conception of world society and opens up new
-8-
analytical ground for non-liberal world societies. Further, heavily influenced by Wendt
(1999), Buzan abandons the international system boundary on constructivist grounds12.
The knife continues to be wielded with the separation of world society into two domains:
transnational and interhuman. The interhuman domain is populated by “social structures
based on interactions amongst individual human beings…referred to as first-order
societies, and mainly manifested as large-scale patterns of identity” (emphasis in original,
Buzan, 2004: xvii). Into the transnational domain is placed “social structures composed
of non-state collective actors” (xviii). What holds the social structures together in each
domain is a mixture of coercion, calculation and belief (130). With this move Buzan
subsumes society/calculation (Gesellschaft) and community/belief (Gemeinschaft) into
the how/why elevation (110-118). When finished, we are left with the conceptual and
analytical space for sub-global, religious imagined communities in the interhuman pillar,
something English School theory was always suited to cater for (Buzan & Little, 2000:
207), but which was previously unrealisable due to the analytical and normative hang-ups
discussed above. This in itself is testimony to the long overdue nature of FIWS? and the
potential provided by the revised triad.
Islam and English School theory
Having surveyed Buzan’s ‘three traditions’, the next question seems to me to be: how
might we apply the moves made in FIWS? in understanding the interplay between
interstate society and Islamic, pan-religious imagination? Without too much difficultly
here, we can look to use the core English School strength of understanding this interplay
as being mediated by institutions. My first move then is perhaps the easiest: exploring
the ideal type of imagined community and applying it to an Islamic interhuman society,
at the sub-global level. My next moves are, though, not altogether obvious. English
School theory remains in practice most developed to discuss the interstate domain. There
12
In Wendtian construction, this boundary was shown to be a false one, as: “[the system boundary] treats
shared ideas as a distinct ‘sector’ of the international system (the ‘societal sector’), where cooperation rules
and an idealist analysis may be appropriate, and leave[s] the more conflictual, economic, political and
strategic sectors to materialists” (1999: 253). The problem with this occurs when materialist theories of
society can explain cooperation; equally, as Price & Tannenwald (1996) demonstrate, norms can explain
war and the dynamics of conflict.
-9-
being, ostensibly, little guidance as to how we think about the institutions of Islam in the
interhuman domain and how these interact with the social structures across pillars. What
empirical work has been done using Buzan’s revised triad has approached Islam through
a region - the Middle East – and not as a sub-global society (Buzan & Gonzalez-Peleaz,
forthcoming).
It is worth then taking a step back and thinking about how we understand the balance
between the three domains and how developments in one shape developments in the
social structures of the others. Buzan lays out the relationship between the three domains,
thus:
“The three domains are now separated by the hard boundaries resulting from
defining them in terms of different types of constitutive unit…the key English
School idea that the three traditions are understood to be simultaneously in play
is preserved, but now on the grounds that social formations involving the three
types of unit are always expected to be present in international systems to some
degree. At a minimum, each domain in the triad constitutes part of the operating
environment for the other two. At a maximum, conditions in one domain may
determine what options are possible in the others” (2004: 133-34).
If we assume that the interstate domain contains the leading elements (vanguard) because
states remain the dominant actors during the expansion and later adoption of interstate
society in the Muslim world, we should expect the mix of coercion, calculation and belief
that holds together the social structures and institutions of Islam in the interhuman
domain, to reflect and reproduce this. Furthermore, as Buzan argues,
“While interstate society is regarded as relatively fluid, and capable of expanding
or contracting quite easily, the social structures in the interhuman domain are
regarded as relatively static and fixed. If this is true, then expansions of interstate
society will inescapably be challenged by disjunctures in the interhuman domain.
Thinking in this way marginalises the possibility that expansions in the interstate
society are in themselves part of the mechanism by which social structures in the
interhuman domain are created…Putting this idea in play casts the problem of
- 10 -
expansion of interstate/international society into a different light. The question
then becomes one not of an inevitable, existential, contradiction between the two
domains, but a much more dynamic one about how quickly and how effectively
the interstate society can remake the social structures of the interhuman domain
on which it rests”(emphasis added, Buzan, 2004: 258).
Looking for the social structures of an Islamic imagined community raises some
interesting questions. If we follow Buzan (2004: 138; Buzan & Little, 2000), preexpansion of nation-states, we should probably be looking for ‘like units’ in the Muslim
world (for example, Abbasid or Ottoman Empires) in promoting and supporting Islam as
a large-scale imagined community. I choose not to take this route for two reasons.
First, as Bulliet (1994: 11; 21) argues, telling the story of Islamic imagination through the
rise and fall of the caliphates/Abbasid/Ottoman Empires (or the ‘view from the centre’) is
a problematic one that fails to explain why Islam has perpetuated in the social structures
of the Middle East and parts of Africa and Asia during the protracted periods of imperial
decline and up to the present day. Moreover, it leaves untold the development of complex
circuitries forged through trade and pilgrimage that see the emergence and
institutionalisation of the ulama (learned scholars), augmented with the impact of a
corpus of uniform and authoritative texts that bred conformity in Islamic belief and
practices across the vast Muslim geography.
This feeds into the second point. Given the degree of ambiguity in how we approach the
social structures in the interhuman domain, there exists an opportunity to start up a multidisciplinary conversation. Here I draw on a wealth of academic literature from across
political sociology, social anthropology and area studies that invite the establishment of
pilgrimage as a primary institution in an Islamic interhuman society. This also provides
an opportunity to test English School theory on a case study that might otherwise be
overlooked for more traditional IR staple13.
13
Conversely, looking at pilgrimage is not completely without precedent in the English School. Martin
Wight saw religious sites and ‘festivals’ as master institutions of interstate society, although these are
dismissed by Buzan (2004: 184) as only having historical relevance in the contemporary interstate domain.
- 11 -
So it is here, in the transmission networks, centres of learning and intellectual hubs that I
explore the rich and curious interplay between a sub-global, Islamic interhuman society
that developed through, and often beneath, European and later global interstate society –
an interplay that plays to the best traditions of the English School in marrying IR theory
with world history14.
Pilgrimage, Nationalism and Imagination
Imagined communities are rooted not only in time, but also in social and geographical
space (Andersen, 2006). Muslim communities are no different. “Their boundaries”, note
Eickleman and Piscatori, “are shifted by, and shift, the political, economic, and social
contexts in which [their] participants find themselves” (1990: 4).
The physical geography of the contemporary Islamic universe runs from Nigeria to the
Sulu Archipelago, but once extended further north into Southern Europe and the Balkans.
As Richard Bulliet (1994) argues, this disparate social expanse is best understood as a
dynamic between an Islamic ‘edge’ and its ‘centre’15. Islam’s ‘centre’ is typically
understood as the Middle East which contains not one centre, but a number of shifting
geographic ‘centres’, plural – best demonstrated in the evolution of hadith16 (Senturk,
2005: 206-207). These centres traditionally provided forums for cultural and scholastic
transmission – linking one geographic space with another’s ideas and vice versa. The
importance of epistemic communities in the sociology of Islam is reflected in the role of
the ulama as a source of social authority. And, so, whilst Islam lacks a central institution
14
In a self-reflective moment, Buzan (2004: 15) asks of FIWS?: ‘is this still English School theory’? I
might very well ask the same question of my own endeavour. Buzan can answer for the both of us – this is
English School theory, but not as we have previously known it.
15
The ‘edge’ in this sense is not necessarily geographical (although it often is) but rather where the borders
of the Islamic world blur with other civilisations. Instead of a core/periphery model which would expect
developments in the centre breeding conformity at the edge, Bulliet (1994) argues that it is at the edge that
we find the most interesting and important developments in contemporary Islam.
16
A hadith is a brief narrative about the life of the Prophet Muhammad transmitted orally and in writing
across the generations by a chain of narrators. It is the longest social network known to sociologists and
historians.
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like the Vatican, we find instead multiple forms and sources of authority, i.e. the
Companions of the Prophet, the ulama, the Sufi Saints, etc (Bulliet, 1994; Senturk, 2005:
9).
Pilgrimage as an institution of Islamic imagination
The hajj played a pivotal role in the early development and dispersion of these centres.
The caravan trains that brought pilgrims to Mecca took in the great learning centres,
Cairo, Baghdad, Bukhara, and Damascus, attracting students and trade and in the process
laying a cultural infrastructure through which merchants, intellectuals and ideas could
flow17. Take Makdisi’s conjured traveller:
“In the Middle Ages, an imaginary intellectual from the world of Islam, say
Baghdad…would have already met many of his Muslim brethren from the
Muslim West, natives and residents of Spain, Sicily, Southern Italy and Southern
France, who had come for pilgrimage and the pursuit of knowledge. He would
have seen the steady stream of pilgrim scholars seeking the centres of Muslim
culture: Baghdad, from which radiated the new studies and the scholastic
method; and Damascus and Cairo, in which the foundation of colleges, after
Baghdad, was developing at galloping speed…[O]ur imaginary visitor, had he
been endowed with a lifespan of a couple of centuries, could have witnessed the
development of Muslim education from its centre in his home-town of Baghdad
in a westward more to Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and on to Spain…it moved
with the moving scholars, pilgrims, crusaders, merchants and travellers; it moved
with them by word of mouth, as well in the massive amount of books” (1981:
238-9).
It is no coincidence that the trading stations that served as pick-up points for pilgrims on
the way to Mecca, and the great silk and spice routes as well as the transnational routes of
hadith narrative, line up (Senturk, 2005: 248; Gellens, 1990: 50-56). This is because after
the initial imperial phase under the Abbasids, Islam was spread primarily through trade
17
This circulation also provided unintended forms of population transfer as unsuccessful pilgrims were
deposited in otherwise unrelated locals (see the Nigerian communities in the Sudan in Birks, 1978: 62-68;
Yamba, 1995).
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diasporas (Buzan & Little, 2000: 224). Islam in this sense was unusual in the ancient and
classical worlds, because it became highly mobile as a merchant religion, with local
populations often adopting Islam voluntarily throughout Africa, South India, South-East
Asia and East Africa (Hodgson, 1993: 97-125; Buzan & Little, 2000: 214, 224). This is
reflected in the secular as well as spiritual advantages to the pilgrimage – a point echoed
in a number of accounts in which we find a conjunction between the development of the
hajj and the development of trade routes (Al-Munir, 1971; Faroqhi, 1994: 2; Nikolaisen,
2004: 93; Bose, 2006).
The role of pilgrimage as an institution of Islamic imagination is rooted in the
significance of travel in Islam as a form of social and political action (Eickleman &
Piscatori, 1990). “For Muslims” writes Werbner, “a complex geography of sacred
knowledge-places…has been propagated since medieval times. The believed location of
different forms of Islamic knowledge and spiritual blessing has impelled Muslims to
travel in search of these elusive truths to key places in the Islamic world” (2003: 56).
That Muslims are compelled to travel: for the hajj (pilgrimage)18, hijra (emigration),
rihla (travel for learning and other purposes) and ziyara (visits to shrines) underlines the
centrality of ‘journeys of the imagination’ in the sociology of Islam as a broad collective
identity. “In a pre-print age” Anderson notes, “the reality of the imagined religious
community depended profoundly on countless, ceaseless travels” (2006: 54). As the
Muslim world has expanded and contracted, these transmission networks allow for a
geographically fragmented ummah, in which travel like the hajj serves as a globalising
force; integrating Muslims into a wider Islamic world. This a position supported by
Clingingsmith et al:
18
There are, of course, other pilgrimages Muslims may take, to places like Tanta, Ajmer, Touba, and
Karbala. But each models itself on the hajj network. As the fifth pillar of Islam, every Muslim
economically and physically capable must make the journey at least once in their lifetime. The reason that
the hajj is often the most evoked example is that the pilgrimage is undoubtedly the most difficult of the five
pillars. Eickleman and Piscatori (1990: 5) also relate the centrality of the pilgrimage in Islamic imagination
to the migration of the Prophet and his followers from Mecca and Medina in Islamic political thought, a
role comparable to that of the Exodus in Western political thought. For more on travel, pilgrimages, and
journeys, see Coleman & Eade (2004).
- 14 -
“Over time, religions with far-flung adherents tend to evolve separate strands
which may eventually break away into different religions. Our analysis suggests
that the hajj may reduce dissent and splits in Islam by moving hajjis toward a
common set of practices, making them more tolerant of differences among
Muslims, and by creating a stronger shared identity. This may be particularly
significant for a religion, such as Islam, without a centralised hierarchy that can
enforce common practices and beliefs and promote unity among followers”
(2008: 5).
As well as linking the numerous centres of learning via pilgrimage routes, the hajj itself
has its own focal point: the Hijaz19. As Azra (2004:6) asserts the special places of Mecca
and Medina in Islamic religious imagination are understandable not only in their religious
and symbolic importance, but also as intellectual hubs in which pilgrims could become
better educated in their religion and return home to become instructors of their
neighbours20. Azra writes of the hajj’s role in the development of Indonesian Islamic
thought, “It is well known from the early history of Islam in the Archipelago, especially
from the sixteenth century onwards, [that] the pilgrimage had been an effective means of
transmission of not only Islamic ideas, but also of a large amount of literature from the
Middle East to the region” (2006: 144). This is a story that plays out across the edge. For
Chinese Muslims, the best occasion to discover the wider Muslim world was through
travel and pilgrimage, or if that was not possible, direct contact with those that had made
the journey (Aubin, 2006: 263). Of course, those that successfully made the journey to
the Hijaz would be exposed not just to the intellectual and theological currents of the day,
but also to their fellow Muslims. It is this strange, physical juxtaposition of Muslims from
various parts of the world that gives membership of a broader religious community real,
ontological existence. Anderson captures this well when he writes:
“The Berber encountering the Malay before the Kaaba must, as it were, ask
himself: ‘Why is this man doing what I am doing, uttering the same words that I
19
The Hijaz is the western region of modern day Saudi Arabia that contains Mecca and Medina.
Bulliet (1994: 177) traces this back to the demise of the Abbasid Caliphate with Mecca and Medina
replacing Baghdad as one of the main intellectual and cultural centres of Islam. For a broader discussion
on the role of the pilgrimage in cementing the importance of Mecca in Islamic imagination through trade
and transnational scholasticism, see Bamyeh (1999: 11, 33).
20
- 15 -
am uttering, even though we can not talk to each other?’ There is only one
answer, once one has learnt it: ‘Because we…are Muslims’” (emphasis in
original, Anderson. 2006 [1983]: 54).
It is impossible to discuss the importance of travel, ritual and pilgrimage in Islamic
imagination without considering the work of social anthropologist Victor Turner. For
Turner (1969), social life is defined by two binary modes of social organisation - one of
structure and one of anti-structure or ‘communitas’. Turner observes that participants in
ritual ceremony gain a heightened sense of community through religious practices that
demand equality and fraternity. It is this sense of communal existence that takes the
participant out of stratified and structured society and elevates them into, “[the]
undifferentiated, egalitarian, direct, extant, nonrational, existential” bonds of communitas
(1974: 274). For Turner, pilgrimage is exemplar of communitas - it is the “release from
mundane structure; homogenisation of status; [and] simplicity of dress and behaviour”
(Turner & Turner, 1978: 253). And whilst Turner mainly discussed pilgrimages in
Mexico and Zambia, the hajj is an excellent example of communitas with its mass-shared
rituals, generic clothing and emphasis on equal participation (Laffan, 2003: 33).
Central to the realisation of communitas is Turner’s (1974: 65) conception of ‘liminality’
- meaning the journey a practitioner takes from the structure of everyday life to the ‘antistructure’ of religious experience. This is, as the etymology would suggest, a threshold
state. Liminality describes the condition of ritual participants as they symbolically exit
one social space and enter a new one. And it is liminality that generates communitas, “a
relational quality of full unmediated communication, even communion…which combines
the qualities of lowliness, sacredness, homogeneity and comradeship (Turner & Turner,
1978: 250).
Turner’s idea of communitas is then a transformative one, one where a participant’s
community is not only imagined, but actually experienced through ritual. Importantly,
liminality and communitas are historically contingent. Liminality, the suspension of the
participant through ritual, occurs at the edges and the interstices of structure.
- 16 -
Accordingly, changes in structure determine the possibilities and avenues for
communitas21. A criticism of Turner is that he bases his work on pre-capitalist/prenationalist case studies. Thus, the ‘anti-structure’ of communitas is increasingly
unrealisable in the modern hajj (that I explore later). This is both contested and supported
in ethnographic work that suggests a struggle between capital, class and nationalisation of
the hajj on the one hand (see, McDonnell, 1990; Abdurrahman, 1996: 119; O’Brian,
1999) and depth of sentiment and inclusiveness on the other (see, Malcolm X, 1992: 362;
Hammoudi, 2005).
For my discussion, what we can take from Turner is the important point that changes in
the structure of the international system could/can affect the opportunities in realising
Islamic communitas. It also puts question marks over the continuing relevance of the hajj
in any Islamic interhuman society. Taking these two points together invites revisiting
Benedict Anderson’s (2006 [1983]) thesis on the challenge brought by nationalism to
pan-religious consciousness.
Nationalism and the territorialisation of Islamic communitas
In Anderson’s (2006 [1983]: 53-56) account of the origins and spread of nationalism,
Anderson argues that secular pilgrimages, often serving some colonial administrative
function, but later also educational, sowed the seeds for national consciousness by
creating patterns of circulation between remote and otherwise unrelated localities, via
provincial cities and colonial capitals. These functionary flows allowed for new forms of
secular, national consciousness. Anderson then, like Turner, sees pilgrimages as a
synergy between time, statuses and places that engender meaning-creating experiences.
However, Anderson argues, with expansive colonial apparatuses, markets, educational
institutions and revolutions in transport infrastructure, secular ‘modest’ pilgrimages come
to supersede the ‘grandiose’, religious pilgrimages of the pre-nationalist era.
21
This in itself is a neat way of summing up the overall discussion of the relationship between interstate
society and the institutions of Islamic interhuman society.
- 17 -
This has not been the case for the hajj22. Entertaining Anderson’s (2006 [1983]) thesis
then, the continuing growth of the hajj suggests an incomplete project of nationalisation.
Told in terms of English School institutions, what we find instead is a process of mutual
constitution across domains. This mutual constitution is a complex interplay between the
primary institutions of initially European, later global interstate society and the primary
institutions of an Islamic imagined community that is at points both mutually supporting
and in tension.
The introduction of nationalism into interstate society had by the early twentieth century
reconfigured conceptions of sovereignty (self-determination) and territoriality (by
limiting space), whilst undermining colonialism (legitimacy) in the interstate domain
(Mayall, 1990; 2000: 84). The result was a strengthening of the interstate domain in the
Islamic world, with the proliferation of a new dominant unit - nation-states – that, by the
mid-twentieth century, radically transformed Islam’s social geography (Buzan & Little,
2000).
As such, whereas before, the limits of the Islamic world were relatively amorphous, i.e.
an edge and a number of shifting cultural centres, with the formation of nation-states, this
imagined community becomes increasingly territorialized – determined by sovereignty
and borders. However, given nationalism’s close relationship to European colonialism in
Islamic interstate society, a post-colonial legacy has resulted in incongruous relationships
between geographic space, society and community, characterised by: strong nationalism;
weak Islam; weak nationalism; strong Islam23. It is this later formulation that throws up
curious examples of post-colonial states, like Pakistan, compensating for a lack ‘national
imagination’ by drawing on ‘Muslim nationalism’ and in effect marrying a seemingly
discordant relationship between geography, society and a community that exists far
beyond that geographical space (Oldenburg, 1985; Gilmartin, 1998). So in the absence of
22
Participation has steadily increased since the formation of nation-states in the Islamic world with 100,000
pilgrims making the hajj in 1880, rising to 225,000 in 1955 and 1,500,000 in 2005 (Bianchi, 2005: 50).
23
The phrase is John Sidel’s.
- 18 -
total nationalism, we find the interhuman domain supplementing the communal identity:
not nationalism; Muslim nationalism; not nation-states; Islamic states24.
The important point here is that nationalism as an institution of interstate society
effectively becomes a competing source of authority and power to the ummah (Mayall,
1990: 14). If we think of this through Buzan’s (2004: 159) three analytical categories of
coercion, calculation and belief, we find the mix in social structures changing. In my
ideal-typical account of an Islamic imagined community, coercion is at a minimum (early
Abbasid period), with a greater role played by calculation (trade) and belief (sharedritual). With the expansion of European, later global interstate society, we find increasing
coercion (colonialism and then nation-state formation) and calculation (penetration of
world capitalist economy). As a result, we see the mode/depth of internalisation
transformed, as Islamic imagination moves from belief/calculation (deep) to
calculation/coercion (shallow) with the creation of new identities and actors that better
territorialise social space, i.e. nation-states (Weller, 2000).
The unfolding changes to the modern hajj and its surrounding social structures in many
ways reflect this. With European colonialism ulama overwhelmingly turned to the
nationalist/anti-colonial and later state agenda, and the networks that traditionally brought
Muslim traders, travellers, and seekers of knowledge together, fall under the sway of first
colonialism and then the state-system (Schulze, 2000: 44; Cooke & Lawrence, 2005: 3).
This leads on the one hand to increasing levels of participation in mass-ritual practices
and pilgrimage, but on the other, less inclusive, more nationalised experiences, as
opportunities to interact with other Muslims become limited, and the traditions of
scholasticism and cultural transmission are put to work for the ends of states.
24
This is a good way of explaining the posturing of states like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and to some extents
Iran who articulate their claims on behalf of the Muslim community broadly imagined at large. It also
explains the centrality of the ulama as a source of social authority in dynastic states like Saudi Arabia, i.e.
to compensate, in Andersonian terms, for the absence of ‘imagined nationhood’. For a good discussion on
Muslim nationalism, see Nasr’s (2001) work on the Islamisation of Malaysia and Pakistan.
- 19 -
Developments in the modern Hajj
By the mid-19th century, the hajj had come to loom large in the European colonial vision.
British steam-powered imperialism was opening up the Red Sea area to the capitalist
world economy, facilitated greatly by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. However,
as Low (2008: 274) notes, these revolutionary forms of maritime transportation spawned
a number of unintended consequences for European involvement in the pilgrimage. With
safer and quicker sea travel to supplant the overland caravans from Cairo and Damascus,
ocean-going pilgrim traffic, especially from the British and Dutch colonies, grew
exponentially25. As participation increased, so interest from the European colonial powers
grew.
The cholera epidemic of 1865 that ravaged Europe and its colonial territories was to
prove the catalyst for greater colonial involvement (Low, 2008: 270). With the outbreak
traced back to the Hijaz, the pilgrimage’s transmission networks were to gain increasing
attention not just for what they carried to Mecca, but what they brought back with them.
It is around this time that we find increasing references to the hajj supporting an
international web of nationalist and anti-colonial activism. Hence the pilgrimage became
known in colonial circles as a source of ‘twin infection’ – reflecting European concerns
over both sanitation and security (Roff, 1982).
Under pressure from the European colonial powers to gain greater control of the
pilgrimage, the Ottoman Sultan took steps to improve its administration, requiring by
1880 that all pilgrims carry a visa and a passport (Peters, 1994: 266-283). That the
Europeans could interfere in what was, ostensibly, the most Islamic of events, reflected
the broader shift in the balance of power in interstate society as the Europeans
increasingly expanded into the heart of the Muslim world (Low, 2008: 274). And so
25
By the mid-nineteenth century, the trip from Suez to Jidda that had taken thirty to forty days by sail was
slashed to a mere three with steamships. The British and the Dutch competed bitterly over who controlled
this lucrative business with the British handing a monopoly for ferrying Indian pilgrims to the Hijaz to
Thomas Cook & Son with the Dutch close behind in looking to profit from the increasing numbers of
pilgrims from Java (Peters, 1994: 283; Laffan, 2003: 104)
- 20 -
whilst the Ottoman Empire kept physical control of the Hijaz until its fragmentation,
post-World War I, European colonial (mainly commercial) interest in the Red Sea and the
increasing number of pilgrims from the Dutch East Indies, British-controlled South Asia,
French West Africa and the Muslim-populated areas of Russia’s near abroad, brought the
hajj increasingly under the influence of the European powers.
The level of European intrigue in the pilgrimage can be found in the well documented
accounts of spying carried out by some of the leading European Orientalists of the day.
Sir Richard Francis Burton (1963), Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (2007) and the
Frenchman, Alfred Le Chatelier (Knysh, 2005:111) all articulate in various ways the
hajj’s role as a forum for cultural, political and scholastic transmission. These accounts
often reflected European paranoia that colonial subjects were becoming radicalised (often
by the much demonised Sufi Brotherhoods) against their colonial metropole. Indeed, it
was first suggested by Snouck Hurgronje that the hajj was an ‘inherently manageable’
process through which mass-articulations of religious solidarity could be disciplined and
policed (Low, 2008: 285). Colonial disruption of these transmission networks and the
hajj more broadly took the form of restricted travel across colonial territory and the
creation of hygiene administration in the form of registrations and quarantine islands
(Snouck Hurgronje, 2007: 234). This was to hold back the true potential for participation
in the hajj well into the twentieth century, ending only with decolonisation (Bianchi,
2005: 49).
Into the early twentieth century we find fluctuating levels of hajj traffic corresponding to
events in international politics, with deep troughs caused by the Great Depression and the
two World Wars. It is here we also find the most important developments in the hajj’s
unfolding organisation. Up until the 1920s, pilgrims would stay on average in Mecca for
about six months, with it quite common for pilgrims to reside permanently in Mecca after
retirement (McDonnell, 1990: 116). This would bring pilgrims into contact with fellow
Muslims from across the Islamic world, exposing them to the intellectual and political
currents of the day. Whilst the colonial powers had sought to limit this, problems of
coordination between colonial powers and intra-colonial competition over who controlled
- 21 -
the lucrative steamship monopolies that ferried pilgrims to the Hijaz kept disruption of
the transmission functions of the hajj to a minimum26.
Nation-state formation and the hajj
This was radically to change with the formation of a state-system in the Middle East and
the fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Under the Ottomans the
Hijaz was governed by a local vassal – the Sharif of Mecca - who enjoyed significant
patronage and autonomy in how the pilgrimage and holy cities were run (Ochsenwald,
1984). And whilst nominally under control of the Ottomans, the two Holy Cities were
widely seen as being the common heritage of all Muslims. However, with the initial
conquering of the Hijaz in 1926 by Abd al-Aziz, and later consolidation in the nascent
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932, the pilgrimage became increasingly dominated by
state-based politics and interference. Far from doing away with the political controls
established by the colonial powers, Saudi Arabia with the cooperation of newly emerging
Muslim states, went on to create additional layers of political control and state
administration.
As Bianchi (2005: 51-2; 70) chronicles, the hallmark of the modern hajj is now as an
affair of state. Every dimension of the journey, from the point of demarcation to the
rituals themselves, has increasingly fallen under the ambit of government regulation and
planning. This is in part a response to the impact of inexpensive and state-subsidised air
travel. With cheap air travel, the modern hajj has grown, becoming more
internationalised with greater participation from African and Asian pilgrims, making the
pilgrimage larger and more diverse. However, whereas before, the overland pilgrimage
networks allowed for the incorporation of otherwise unconnected Muslims as routes
traversed colonial boundaries, stopping at way-stations and taking on fresh pilgrims; air
travel severs these potential meeting points. This aspect of the hajj as a transmission belt,
promoting links between Muslims from disparate parts of the Islamic world, in many
ways disappears.
26
This is best demonstrated in the thriving mutual transmission of anti-colonial/nationalist literature and
strands of Islamic reformist thought that spread from Mecca to Indonesia, via Cairo and back again during
the period (Azra, 2005: 144).
- 22 -
An especially significant development has been the establishment of an international
‘Hajj regime’. With increased traffic year on year, the Saudis looked to tame the
pilgrimage through the establishment of an elaborate system of national quotas27. Whilst
initially unpopular (and to a point remaining so), the Saudis used the hajj as a platform
from which to promote the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and thus
harness the cooperation of Muslim states28. As a result, growth in hajj traffic has levelled
off since 1988, when the OIC introduced a quota system that pegged a country’s per
capita pilgrimage at 1,000 pilgrims per million Muslims in that country (Bianchi, 2005:
52).
The creation of national quotas has led to a bureaucratisation of the hajj – a point that
features often in many contemporary accounts (Hammoudi, 2005; Trojanow, 2007).
Writing of his recent pilgrimage, the anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi describes his
experience of the hajj administration:
“It is well known that from early in the history of Islam, pilgrims dealt with
multiple power centers. Nothing in the chronicles or travel literature suggests that
people had emotional qualms or crises of conscience because of this division of
the ummah, the community of the Muslim faithful…Still, as the administration of
the pilgrimage has developed steadily since the nineteenth century, the pilgrims’
autonomy and room for manoeuvre has shrunk…A new reality became clearer by
27
The quotas were introduced to curtail two dangers: one political; one safety-orientated. Safety fears were
becoming increasingly salient as greater participation led to more crushes. The political aspect stemmed
from Iranian-led calls for Saudi sovereignty over the Hijaz and control of the pilgrimage to be replaced by
an international regime run by all Islamic countries. The centrality of cultural transmission in shaping
Islamic imagination has not been lost on the principle managers of the hajj. The Saudis control a complex
constellation of mosques, madrassas and charities through which to peddle their own religious-political
discourse and through which they compete with regional neighbours (especially Iran) for the mantle of
‘most Islamic’ state (Burr & Collins, 2006; Al-Rasheed, 2007: 105). Iranian contestation here was a
response to exactly this Saudi stagecraft that employs their exclusive control over the Hijaz as symbolic
assets or ‘Guardians of the two Holy Cities’. In response, Iran alternated between boycotting the pilgrimage
completely or by having its pilgrims stage (often-violent) protests against Saudi control and perceived
Saudi complicity with the United States.
28
Here we could put for evidence of a mutually constituting relationship between the interstate and
interhuman domain, as the interhuman domain spawns secondary institutions in interstate society, and
marks out a coexisting, sub-global Islamic interstate society. For a full discussion on the OIC, see Khan
(2001). On the hajj as an institution unto itself in Islamic interstate society, see Bianchi (2005: 253-73).
- 23 -
the day: I was becoming the unwitting subject of a hajj government. Unlike other
governments, this one was present at every border, mobilising the machinery of
many nation-states to define a religious identity that none of them could control –
an identity situated not on a territory but in a holy land” (emphasis added, 2005:
19-20).
With more Muslims making the journey and greater state interference, pilgrims have
found that the length of the hajj has become shorter, not just in the time it takes to reach
the Hijaz, but in the time they are allowed to stay after the formal rituals have finished.
Travel within Saudi Arabia itself has become circumscribed. The intellectual
communities that resided permanently in Mecca have not been sustained as new arrivals
are forced to comply with strict Saudi immigration restrictions29. In her account of the
changing experiences of Malay pilgrims, McDonnell (1990: 117; 144) notes this decline
in contact and exposure to alien experiences, as the hajj becomes a four-week packaged
journey. For Malays, most pilgrims now travel by national airline, under the watchful eye
of Malay officials throughout the journey, and are returned home in less than a month.
Thinking back to the pilgrimage Makdisi’s (1981: 238-9) imagined traveller would have
taken in the middle ages, the characteristics of the journey, i.e. one of personal privation
and risk, would have been familiar to a pilgrim even into the late nineteenth century, as
immortalised in Joseph Conrad’s (2002 [1899]) ‘Lord Jim’. Into the twentieth century,
the hardships one had to endure decline. We find the rise of the ‘Hajj-plus’; Muslim
urban elites use the hajj to display their social capital. They fly business class, stay in airconditioned hotels and have specially catered national food (Abdurrahman, 1996). The
egalitarianism that had previously been such a hallmark of the hajj has been replaced by
exclusive billion-dollar housing complexes that overlook the Grand Mosque
(International Herald Tribune, March 8th, 2007). In this sense, the hajj has fallen victim to
another form of colonisation sweeping across the Muslim world: the mass-production of
Islam, manifest in the semiotics of cultural materialism (Starrett, 1995).
29
See especially the Jawah discussed by Snouck Hurgronje (2007).
- 24 -
The contrast with my earlier ideal-typical account of the pilgrimage is a striking one.
There I established the hajj as an institution of Islamic interhuman society that in many
ways was the physical embodiment of the ummah. Travellers, intellectuals and traders
took the journey in loose, linguistic/ethno-cultural/geographical groups. On these
‘journeys of imagination’, pilgrims would traverse colonial boundaries, stopping off at
the many nodes that made up a constellation of diasporic meeting points. Whilst difficult
to quantify piety, given their small numbers (a reflection of the hardship of the journey)
pilgrims were often direct agents of Islamic imagination, returning home to teach the
latest theological and political currents. With nation-state formation, the introduction of
national quotas and subsidised air travel, these meeting points disappeared and pilgrims
have become increasingly defined by their country of origin. On the modern hajj,
Muslims take the pilgrimage most obviously as citizens or subjects of states.
Conclusion
In this paper I have taken on a complex story: the interplay between nationalism as an
institution of interstate society and the institutions of an Islamic interhuman society.
Telling that story through the trajectory of the modern hajj, I have shown, in the Turnian
sense, an increasing nationalisation of Islamic communitas. Liminality has become more
elusive and has, in many ways, been redefined, as we see a decline in the links and
connections between pilgrims as they are placed into national quotas, divided by social
status and nationality during the journey itself, and having otherwise unrelated
experiences. In turn, the social reproduction of the ummah through cultural transmission
and diasporic meeting places have been supplanted by scholastic and ritual practices that
revolve around states and nationality. It is in this sense, that the hajj is a refraction of
wider developments of Islam in international politics, as pan-Islamic identity is rendered
a plural reality, as it competes with national difference and national interests (Piscatori,
1986: 149).
Looking at the development of the modern hajj through Buzan’s (2004) ‘three traditions’,
invites further discussion on the role and location of Islam in international politics. Given
- 25 -
the English School position that all three domains of interhuman/interstate/transnational
are simultaneously in play, then as the institutions of Islam in the interhuman domain
have been reconfigured by the institutions of interstate society we can start to cast light
on elements in the third pillar: transnational Islamism.
During the twentieth century we see two cycles of rapid mobilisation followed by
demobilisation in transnational Islamist groups. The first wave during the interwar years
saw unprecedented, modern forms of mass-mobilisation and collective action in the name
of Islam after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the abolishment of the Caliphate.
Importantly, this occurred often at the edge – in India with the Khilafat Movement and the
Indonesian Sarekat Islam – but also in the centre with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt
(see Noer, 1973; Minault, 1982; Lia, 1998). But with post-World War II decolonisation,
these pan-Islamic imaginings became side shows to the emerging nationalist movements
that locked Islam into a largely dormant, supporting role.
The second wave of mobilisation is much more a story of the centre, namely the Iranian
revolution of 1979. This second wave also underlines the continuing importance of
scholasticism and centres of learning in international Islam. With urbanisation and rising
literacy rates and access to higher education across the Muslim world, we see the
formation of new political constituencies in university campuses and madrassas that
articulated their claims around ‘Islam as the solution’ (see, Eickleman, 1992; Nasr, 2000).
It is during this period that the Muslim Brotherhood becomes increasingly influential in
its branches across the Middle East, in Jordan, Kuwait and the West Bank. We also see
the Jama’at-i Islami gain increasing influence in South Asia including considerable
success in Pakistan and the rise to prominence of the Groupe Islamique Armée (GIA) and
Front Islamique de Salut (FIS) in Algeria as well as various other groups in Tunisia,
Sudan and Morroco. Like the first wave, the second wave was marked by international
events external to Islam, i.e. the Cold War. In many ways, ‘Islam as the solution’ was
epiphenomenal – a secondary reaction to the failures of communism, market capitalism,
third worldism, etc. That this second wave stretches from the 1970-1990s, suggests a
- 26 -
continuing sub-global, Islamic interhuman society that was embedded within the wider
Cold War conflict, which declined, freeing that identity and spawning a fascinating
interplay between the interstate, transnational and interhuman domains; the legacy of
which continues to dominate the world’s political agenda. Importantly, Olivier Roy
(1998; 2003) convincingly argues, this second wave was born from the failure to provide
an adequate blueprint for the Islamic state30. As Hefner (2000: 220) shows, where
Islamists have been successful in constructing a union of Islam and the state, the result is
a subordination of Islam to the state.
Looking at both these waves, we could perhaps then posit a shared trajectory whereby
Islamist articulations of the ummah are couched in the terms of a social geography
marked not by an amorphous vision of a free-floating ‘Muslim world’, but rather by a
social geography of sovereignty and borders – rather like the unfolding experience of the
modern hajj. That transnational Islamism is bound to fail attests to the impossibility of
implementing a political programme in terms of that otherwise fragmented, and
profoundly nationalised social geography (Roy, 1998: 71). In effect, this ‘golden age’ or
reified notion of the ummah, resembles my ideal-typical account of an Islamic imagined
community; leaving untold the impact of interstate society and specifically, nationalism.
To bring all the threads together: in this paper I have taken English School theory to new
empirical ground. As posited above, Buzan’s triad can be employed to capture the
evolving role of Islam in international politics as interplay between elements in the
interstate and transnational domains, mediated by the primary institutions of a sub-global,
Islamic interhuman society. To this end, I have attempted to demystify the social
structures of Islam in the interhuman domain, by retelling the central English School
narrative (the evolution of interstate society) through developments in the modern hajj31.
30
This is particularly well illustrated in Lybarger’s (2007) account of Palestinian Islamist groups who
increasingly frame their political claims in the language of national liberation to gain legitimacy and
support.
31
Here, I have taken-up Buzan’s (2004: 258) call for a case study on the relationship between social
structures in the interstate and interhuman domains.
- 27 -
By giving an ideal-typical account of Islamic imagined community, I have shown how
the expansion of interstate society into the Muslim world, has led to the mutual
constitution of social structures across both domains. Whilst the interstate domain
remains dominant, incomplete nationalisation has allowed for continuing, pan-Islamic
imagination. However, the introduction of a new dominant unit has, in turn, led to a
partial reconfiguring of the primary institutions of Islamic interhuman society. This is
both reflected and reproduced in the modern hajj, as colonialism, nationalism and the
radical changes in social geography brought about by nation-state formation determine
cultural transmission, and the possibilities of Islamic imagination.
- 28 -
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