7 - The new transnationalism: globalising Islamic movements

Summary

This chapter provides an overview of Islamic transnationalism in the twentieth 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 globalisation 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 interchangeable. In conventional academic usage, the term ‘international’ connotes the idea of relations between formally sovereign entities (e.g. bilateral diplomacy). 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.