How the Muslim World Was Invented

Trump's push for the so-called Muslim ban provoked intense controversy. Yet its subtext—that there exists some uniform, foreign community of the planet's Muslims—is a longstanding construct, as the historian Cemil Aydin shows in his timely book, The Idea of the Muslim World. The notion of a “Muslim world” is not a result of Islamic “theological requirements or a uniquely high level of Muslim piety,” Aydin writes. It is a product of the West's historical “imperial racialization of Muslimness,” on the one hand, and of “Muslim resistance to this racialized identity,” on the other. This process of exchange, concentrated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, made meaningful the idea of a Muslim world for those beyond and within it. The term refers not to a place but to a series of narratives developed by Muslims and non-Muslims to navigate racialized notions of faith, foreignness, and modernity.