Ask a British citizen (with a British passport) of Pakistani origin in Manchester or Leeds about his identity and he is most likely to say: “I am a Muslim; I am a Pakistani; I am British.” Ask the same person on a PIA flight from London to Lahore to fill out the immigration entry form in Urdu and the chances are that he may note his Quamiyat (nationality) as “Islam” rather than “Pakistani” or British. Ask the same question of a British citizen (with a British passport) of Indian origin and Hindu faith and he is most likely to say: “I am British; I am Indian”. Full stop. There is no reference to “religion” in anchoring nationality or identity. Instead the reference is primarily to the sovereign nation-state of current or original origin. Much the same response is likely to come from British citizens of Chinese origin and Confucian faith or British citizens of any other national origin and Christian faith. What does this mean?
It suggests that expatriate Pakistanis, wherever they may be, are increasingly inclined in the new globalizing world to contextualize their identity within an Islamic framework while citizens of other countries and faiths are moving in the opposite direction. In other words, while globalization and freer movement and settlement of people across national boundaries is increasing, the concomitant process of a multiple layering of identities sits uneasily on expatriate Pakistani shoulders even as non-Muslim non-Pakistanis are quite comfortable with it. What does this signify?
The theory of “clash of civilizations” is essentially predicated on the incompatibility of the expansive forces of globalization (the need for multiple identities in a competitive but secular mode) with the pan-Islamic movement for core identity and exclusive representation. Thus its premise is that while both globalization and pan-Islamism seek to transcend territoriality, or both are involved in de-territorialisation, the former seeks to do this in a secular mode while the latter is by definition in religious mode. On the face of it, therefore, expatriate Muslims living and working in Western societies are primed to fit the theory of “clash of civilizations”. Certainly, recent events in Britain bear this out where British Muslim citizens of non-British origin sought to bomb fellow citizens for a pan-Islamic ideological cause.
But there is another and more positive way of looking at the problem. The increasing deterritorialisation of Islam as culture is, in fact, a result of globalization and westernization and has little to do with Islam as religion. It is, in fact, through an increase in migration whereby, according to one estimate, one third of the world’s Muslims now live in non-Muslim societies as minorities. But, as the French scholar Olivier Roy has pointed out, these new minorities are different from the old minorities in one crucial way. The old Muslim minorities like the Tartars, Indian Muslims, China’s Hui etc had slow historical time in which to build their own culture or to share the dominant culture. The new minorities, however, are enveloped in rapid globalization-time in which they have to reinvent their sense of being Muslim by a mere reference to Islam without any common cultural or linguistic heritage. Hence the Muslim ummah is thought of in abstract or imagined rather than real terms.
The net effect of this is not a clash of civilizations through any “Islamic revival” demonstrated by an increase in hijab, veiled women, beards or references to sharia etc but a sign of attempts to “Islamise modernity” by avoiding the religious-tradition vs secular-modernity problematic and by subscribing to the view that Islam is not what the Quran says it is but what we as Muslims say the Quran says. This is embodied in everyday compromises, personal attitudes to material and moral issues, casual reference to different levels and types of identity like Asian, South Asian, African, Arab, etc, ad hoc quotations from the Hadith or the Quran for or against everyday practices, dogmatic or liberal post hoc rationalizations to intellectual challenges from non-Muslim colleagues, etc. In short, demonstration of a very wide and flexible range of attitudes and opinions. That is why there is no serious contradiction between the Muslims’ “hatred of the West” and their long queues in front of Western embassies for visas and immigration rights.
In the case of working class Pakistanis settled in Britain, the process of “Islamising modernity” was disrupted by the British state’s policy of multi-culturalism which degenerated into ghettoism because of the inability of the state to educate, employ and absorb second generation British Muslims into the mainstream. This coincided with a Western-state onslaught against Islamic peoples and lands, creating the sufficient conditions for an outgrowth of “Islamic counter-terror”.
The new realities need to be recognized by all sides. Globalisation, for good or bad, better or worse, is unstoppable. It will inevitably lead to a process of “religousising modernity” all round and cultures will compete and overlap, rather than clash, in the long run. Al Qaeda and jihad will peter out, just as Western occupation of Islamic lands that provokes a desperate reaction will not endure, and non-state militant actors in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran that sustain reaction will be eliminated from the reckoning.