NATIONS AND NATIONALISM

Nations and Nationalism 17 (1), 2011, 724.

J O U R N A L O F T H E A S S O C I AT I O N FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY A N D N AT I O N A L I S M

AS EN

Transnational Muslim solidarities and everyday life

PETER MANDAVILLE
Center for Global Studies, George Mason University, USA

ABSTRACT. Discussions of globalisation and identity have focused on the renewed relevance of various post-national frameworks of belonging, including the Muslim umma. This article argues against the idea that the umma has come to constitute a primary referent in contemporary Muslim debates about identity or a form of globalised political consciousness. Furthermore, the advent of post-Islamism means that Islamic political mobilisation rarely seeks to establish alternative political orders within the container of the nation-state. However, this does not mean that we are seeing a reafrmation of the nation in Muslim contexts today. Rather, transnational Muslim solidarities represent an intermediate space of afliation and socio-political mobilisation that exists alongside and in an ambivalent relationship with the nationstate. I point to two different socio-religious movements that, without positing the primacy or exclusivity of the umma/Islamic identity, express discrepant visions of the relationship between Islam and the nation: (1) the Fethullah Gu len movement, which serves simultaneously as the vehicle for a particular vision of neo-Ottoman Turkish nationalism and a critique of the Kemalist national order; and (2) the neo-Salast movement, read here as an effort to embed conceptions of public morality and accountability within the discursive tradition of orthodox Islam rather than the institutional framework of modern polity. KEY WORDS: Gu len movement; religion and nationalism; transnational Islam; umma

Introduction In this article, I seek to interrogate the relationship between globalisation and transnational Muslim solidarity in contemporary discourse and practice. While arguing against the proposition that globalisation permits the umma the world community of Muslim believers to function as a politically signicant form of collective identity and an alternative to the nation in the Muslim world, I also want to caution against two presumptions that could easily be taken as the natural corollaries of such a position. The rst of these involves resisting the notion that the absence of a critical mass of mobilisation around the umma somehow signals a reafrmation of the nation as the sole legitimate basis of political community. The nation has always been a highly
r The authors 2010. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2010

NATIONS AND NATIONALISM

8

J O U R N A L O F T H E A S S O C I AT I O N FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY A N D N AT I O N A L I S M

AS EN

Mandaville

variegated and incomplete project in the postcolonial world (Chatterjee 1993), and for many peoples in Muslim-majority countries it remains a nebulous proposition at best. Secondly, a denial of the political viability of umma-based discourse does not mean that all forms of transnational Muslim solidarity are to be discounted. A tendency, even in common parlance, to reify the umma has meant that analytical usage of the term has rarely corresponded with social reality. Moreover, to view any and all transnational Muslim solidarities as somehow expressive of post-national aspirations is to miss the fact that Muslim transnationalism is not in and of itself premised on a rejection of the nation-state. Certainly we can point to instances where particular visions of the nation come to be critiqued via the language of Islam, but there are also as many cases where Islam and nationalism have coexisted protably in the context of various national imaginaries (Starrett 1998; Zubaida 2004). As scholars of Islam and international relations have shown, even where certain modern Muslim political thinkers have offered ideological objections to the nation and nationalism, Islam throughout history has generally been comfortable with and often even favourably predisposed towards territorial pluralism and the co-existence of nations (Piscatori 1986). In what follows I will argue that contemporary forms of Muslim transnational solidarity express a diverse range of political and normative agendas, and only rarely and in the most extreme cases articulate a vision of the umma as a political unit. Where political, these solidarities are generally best understood as forms of social mobilisation premised on a particular set of values or discrepant normative visions that is, they function as something more akin to what sociologists have termed new social movements (Buechler 1999). These groups and their politics are not inherently opposed to or supportive of nationalism; in other words, they refrain neither from critiquing ideas and practices taken to arise from a disproportionate privileging of the nation nor from supporting the nation when its vision and that of Islam coincide. In the course of this discussion, I also deploy two clusters of meaning associated with the increasingly amorphous concept of globalisation to explain how transnational Muslim solidarity can be understood to function in a world order characterised by an exponential increase in all manner of ows (ideas, images, bodies, commodities, nances) across nation-state borders. I associate globalisation rst and foremost with the propagation of capital on a planetary scale. In the sense that this particular vision of the global also calls our attention to the social relations of power around capital, I gure globalisation here as a form of hegemony that functions today as the referent object in a wide range of social critique and mobilisation, Islamic and otherwise. My analysis also treats the logistical and communicative infrastructures of globalisation such as media capitalism, a riff on Benedict Andersons (1991) notion of print capitalism as important enablers of various forms of contemporary Muslim networking and mobilisation across borders via increased ease of travel, cross-national institutional franchising, and new media (especially digital television and the internet).
r The authors 2010. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2010

Transnational Muslim solidarities and everyday life

The umma: a brief career of the concept in modern Muslim political discourse In current debates, particularly in the media and policy circles, the notion of transnational Islam has come to be largely synonymous with the global jihadist aspirations of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaidah. In fact, Muslim transnationalism has existed in various forms since the time of the Prophet Muhammad himself. The centuries-old tendrils of Susm have spanned multiple continents to link far-ung afliates of these mystical brotherhoods. In the thirteenth century, the Indian Ocean served as the tableau upon which a rich tapestry of transnational Islamic connectivity commercial, educational and political was played out, linking the coast of east Africa to southern Arabia across to the Indian subcontinents and over to the Malay archipelago (Ho 2006). While the umma in so far as that term expresses the multitude and diversity of Muslim peoples was certainly central to this story, it was not in any sense a story of the umma, if that would be taken to imply progress towards the social and political unication of Muslims. If anything, this was the era of greatest geopolitical fragmentation in the Muslim world. As a form of modern political discourse, the umma becomes relevant in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It is associated most commonly with the efforts of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (183897), an intellectual activist who sought to mobilise Muslims around a concept of Islamic unity deployed as a form of anti-colonial discourse. Afghanis Pan-Islam movement was premised on the idea that Muslims the world over were facing, at that particular historical juncture, a shared predicament in the form of European colonial occupation of their lands. As a leading exponent of the trend known as Islamic Reformism, Afghani argued for a revitalisation of the Muslim world that would synthesise intellectual renewal (especially a rediscovery of Islams capacity for scientic innovation) and the moral obligations of Islamic normativity. This was not, we should note, a critique of the nation as a model of political community, or a call for the establishment of a single, global Muslim polity. Rather it was a form of civilisational discourse that posited Islam as an alternative to the prevailing hegemony of European imperialism and sought to articulate it to a social movement of anti-colonial liberation. Importantly, it also pregured aspects of the Third Worldism that would arise in the subsequent century (Zubaida 2004: 409). While many Muslims found Afghanis critique of their circumstances quite compelling, Pan-Islamism failed miserably as a political movement. This failure can be explained in large measure by the fact that most Muslims were unable to effectively imagine themselves in the Benedict Anderson (1991) sense of the term as collaborators in a unied struggle. The umma, simply put, was too abstract an entity around which to construct a viable political movement. Hence in the early twentieth century, we saw major anti-colonial movements in the Muslim world including Egypt and the Muslims of India opting for various forms of nationalism over Islam.
r The authors 2010. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2010

10

Mandaville

Nevertheless, the idea of Islam as an alternative political order quickly accommodated itself to the era of Muslim nation-states. Theorists such as Rashid Rida (18651935), writing in the wake of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the abolition of the caliphate (the historical gurehead and symbol of Muslim political unity), argued for the need to bring nationstates into line with Islamic normativity as expressed in sharia law. This was the vision that lay behind the founding, in 1928, of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. As the rst manifestation of Islam rendered as a modern political ideology, the Brotherhood served as the prototype for virtually all subsequent Islamist groups across the Muslim world, from Turkey to Pakistan to Malaysia and Indonesia. However, movements and political parties working in this vein (which includes the likes of HAMAS in Palestine) work primarily and almost without exception to promote adherence to Islam within the connes of particular national borders. So while various national branches of Brotherhood-style Islamist groups might well share ideas and some measure of resources with their co-ideologues in other settings (or undertake fundraising on their behalf), their day-to-day efforts are concerned almost exclusively with local- and national-level agendas in the countries in which they operate. Since the early 1990s, Olivier Roy (1994) has been suggesting that this political-ideological variant of Islam has, to use his term, failed because of its inability to capture and consolidate power at the nation-state level. More recent work by Roy (2004) has elaborated his account as a broader phenomenon that he labels post-Islamism a concept that Roy equates with the privatisation of religion. In short, Roys account of post-Islamism argues that Muslims today have lost interest in attempts to translate Islam into a systematic ideology and mass political movement a` la the Muslim Brotherhood. However, Roy argues that this does not entail a decline in religiosity. Rather, he sees Islamic commitment shifting from the public sphere into the private domain of personal piety. Muslim religiosity may well be on the increase, Roy would allow, but we are still witnessing to invoke the title of his earlier work the failure of political Islam. But what, we need to ask, does political Islam actually refer to in the social world? And what is at stake in regarding as political only those Muslim social movements that aim to participate in formal, institutionalised politics? This question is particularly relevant given the scepticism that some analysts (including, obviously, Olivier Roy) have recently expressed about the extent to which traditional Islamism in the mould of the Muslim Brotherhood can be said to possess widespread political support today. However, it does raise questions about the extent to which Muslims are interested in handing a mandate to groups advocating state-led Islamisation. As a consequence of this, religion has not simply retreated wholly and exclusively into the realm of the private. The failure of political Islam and the individualisation of religion entail neither an end to the social and public functions of religion nor a desire on the part of Muslims to abandon the collective dimensions of nding social meaning in religion. Movements
r The authors 2010. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2010

Transnational Muslim solidarities and everyday life

11

predicated on a public or social role for Islam continue to be relevant, but the nature, form and vision of Islamic social movements may be undergoing signicant transformation today. I argue that while Olivier Roys account of post-Islamism provides highly original insights into the relationship between modernity, globalisation and the privatisation of Muslim religiosity, it ultimately suffers from a form of reductionism that denes the political as coterminous with, and limited to, the exercise of state power. By creating, in effect, a binary conguration in which Islam can function only as the organising principle of a political ideology in search of state power, or as the focus of individual piety, Roy neglects important forms of Islamic social mobilisation located between the state and the individual. What follows is not a celebratory account of the transformative potential to be found in civil society or voluntary association. Rather and seeking to argue for the analytic utility of a somewhat different take on the nature and signicance of post-Islamist social movements I want to suggest that mobilisation for social change organised around and through Islam continues to be of interest to the younger generation today. But it does not involve an understanding of transformative politics that sets as its goal the capture of state power. What we are seeing in the Muslim world today is the rise of a number of heterogeneous networks and groups organised loosely and often exibly around a particular discursive referent (justice, development, social change through proper Islamic observance, etc.). These can be seen to share certain characteristics with what sociologists have termed new social movements in so far as they are organised primarily around the promotion of particular values, cultures or ethos rather than economic change or public policy. This post-materialist (Inglehart 1977) form of Muslim politics so called because it does not seek directly to alter underlying structural or institutional arrangements represents an alternative to traditional Islamist mobilisation seeking to establish a sharia-based polity. So while we can point, on the one hand, to the rise in recent years of a new generation of Islamist political parties (represented by the likes of the AKP in Turkey and the PJD in Morocco), alongside and sometimes in tension with them we are also seeing efforts by a range of new religious intellectuals, activists and everyday social movements that seek to dene the contours of a socially transformative Islam beyond the rubric of conventional Muslim Brotherhood-style ideology hence post-Islamism.

Everyday movements and the heterogeneity of social power Scholars of new social movements (Buechler 1999) have emphasised that these projects are different in type from the traditional model of social movement found in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which tended to focus on material conditions, class interests and achieving changes in the prevailing political or economic order. Rather, new social movements
r The authors 2010. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2010

12

Mandaville

demonstrate their post-material character through grounding themselves in values, cultural systems and identity politics (e.g. human rights, ecological thought, queer identities). This does not mean that such movements have no interest in changing the material conditions of the world obviously this is a major priority for, say, the environmental movement but rather that the basis of the social solidarity that denes them as a movement lies less in their co-location within structures of production and exchange (e.g. membership of the working class), and more in terms of shared values or cultural systems. Likewise, the individualisation of Islamic belief and action (of which more follows) that scholars such as Olivier Roy have identied as part of the turn to post-Islamism does not entail a wholesale abandonment by Muslims of the realm of the public. Eickelman and Anderson (1999) and Salvatore and Eickelman (2006), for example, invite us to consider the emergence and growing relevance of new and functionally differentiated Muslim public spheres. Yet we are still left with the conceptual challenge of reconciling the shift towards individualisation that Roy correctly identies, and the continued relevance of socially engaged activism by Muslims. For this, we turn to the work of the Italian sociologist Alberto Melucci. Meluccis (1989) approach to understanding social movements is premised on a particular conception of the nature of contemporary social power and the processes through which social action accrues meaning in the world. This is a methodology that shifts our emphasis away from the state, the nation and other large-scale, top-down models of delivering social power but does not simply replace the nation-state with an argument for greater emphasis on the grassroots or on bottom-up conceptions of social agency. Rather, Melucci along with other social theorists such as Henri Lefebvre (2008) and Michel de Certeau (2002) invites us to consider the realm of the everyday as an arena in which todays social movements are embedded. In Meluccis schema, processes of producing and organising social meaning transcend the predominance of hierarchical, material power (e.g. labour, bureaucratic governance) in favour of heterogeneous relations of power. Key to this insight is Meluccis argument that not only are we accustomed to recognising a very limited range of institutional spaces as properly political (e.g. elections, governmental policy-making), but that we also associate the political exclusively with visible speech and practice in the public sphere. By shifting our attention to the realm of the everyday (and to everyday public spheres), Melucci would suggest, we can identify idioms of social movement that, while seemingly invisible in terms of their absence from those spaces conventionally marked as public (civil society, the media, etc.), nonetheless must be recognised as forms of collective mobilisation towards shared norms and worldly aspirations. This mode of social movement views sceptically the instrumentalism of nation-state power, seeing its concerns as immune to being addressed effectively by instruments of ofcial bureaucracy or by large-scale social organisation (Melucci 1989: 7). Meluccis evocative formulation of contemporary social movements as nomads of the present points to the essentially homeless nature
r The authors 2010. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2010

Transnational Muslim solidarities and everyday life

13

of such activism (in terms of its alienation from conventional spaces of national public and political life), and its embrace of temporary public spaces and biodegradable forms of representation (Melucci 1989: 7). Part of what Melucci tries to argue relates to the notion that involvement with such movements becomes an end in itself, without any aspiration to translating this mobilisation into formal political activism. An alternative vision of the good life is seen to lie precisely in the expression of movement norms through daily life activities:
Participation within movements is considered a goal in itself because, paradoxically, actors self-consciously practise in the present the future social changes they seek . . . They are no longer driven by an all-encompassing vision of some future order. They focus on the present, and consequently their goals are temporary and replaceable, and their organisational means are valued as ends in themselves. (Melucci 1989: 6)

It is through this kind of insight that we might begin to understand the characteristic of contemporary Islamic activism that is commonly although amorphously described in terms of pragmatism. However, this is not a pragmatism dened in terms of short-term tactical compromise, a willingness to negotiate on strategy and a privileging of practical outcomes over theory, ideology and even principle but rather a notion of the pragmatic that derives from the more literal roots of pragma as deed. In other words, a movement premised on the idea that social vision is expressed through the everyday activities that characterise a particular way of being in the world, rather than through external organisation towards the achievement of political power or a national consciousness. While such a conception of social movement succeeds in drawing our attention to aspects of collective action and forms of hetereogeneous and fragile mobilisation (Melucci 1989: 4) that might otherwise remain invisible to our political radars, we need to keep in perspective the continued relevance of formal, institutionalised political power and particularly under globalisation the role of large-scale cultural and economic enterprises. So this cannot be simply a story about the triumph of everyday sociopolitical activity over the state, but rather an effort to understand the processes through which social normativity, as embedded in quotidian life, interacts with, recongures and is itself mediated not only by the abiding structural force of the modern state (and social movements that aspire to capture state power, such as conventional Islamism) but also through more pervasive forms of social power that transcend sovereign territoriality, such as neoliberal economic thought and practice. Indeed, the case studies of new Muslim movements examined here will throw into particular relief the heightened importance of neoliberal norms (such as consumerism) and structures (such as globalised markets) in the negotiation and contestation of Islamic meaning. Neoliberalism, of course, also brings us squarely back to individualisation, and it is here that we need to engage in a little more conceptual digging in order to esh out the dynamics of contemporary Muslim movements.
r The authors 2010. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2010

14

Mandaville

The individualisation of religious experience and activism is also central to Roys account of post-Islamism. Dovetailing closely with the aforementioned shift away from totalising Islamist ideologies that seek to remake society through state intervention, post-Islamism entails the pursuit of the Islamic good life through a diverse and disparate range of strategies. Contemporary re-Islamisation, Roy (2004: 99) argues, is a cluster of individual practices that are used as a means of nding jobs, money, respect and self-esteem, and bargaining with a marginalised state that has played on conservative reIslamisation but been unable to control it. Of course, the privatisation and individualisation of Islam also relate closely to the idea that this new idiom of Islamic activism is thoroughly compatible with indeed, thrives within the global free market. Consumption and the neoliberal circulation of capital are crucial vehicles for its growth and spread. Hence Roys (2004: 172) reference to a religious market that is globalised, fed by economic liberalisation and diaspora connections. This is an environment conducive not only to the activity of entrepreneurs looking to commodify Islam (e.g. Islamic fashion, music, travel, soft drinks), but also to the rising inuence of conservative business gures whose commercial concerns do not involve the production of religious goods or services, but who privilege and seek to espouse Islamic norms in the conducting of their professional activities. We can also see the relevance here of another abiding theme in Roys work: the progressive breakdown of traditional structures of religious authority as a new class of claimants to religious knowledge production pious engineers, doctors and popular lay preachers (duat) articulates Islam in a modern, accessible idiom. It is here that we begin to see the relevance for post-Islamism of Alberto Meluccis emphasis on everyday social movements. Rather than viewing the Islamisation of society as a project engaged through membership and participation in politically organised movements separate from the realms of everyday life (home, work, education, shopping), the pursuit of Islamic normativity becomes ingrained within the pragmatic spaces of quotidian activity. Islam is not rendered as an external ideology, but instead is lived. While our discussion of post-Islamism as involving the privatisation of religion in contexts of heterogeneous social power and proliferating Muslim public spheres is helpful in understanding some of the key dynamics behind the emergence of new forms of religious authority and social movement in the Muslim world, a piece of the conceptual puzzle still seems to be missing. If, as Roy, Melucci, Eickelman et al. have argued, Muslim politics today is about the individualisation of religious belief and practice, in what sense can we appropriately speak of these actors as constituting a movement? How can we discern in this trend any meaningful sense of collective action, the standard indicator of a social movement? Are we dealing with anything more than new intellectuals and popular preachers speaking to atomised believers who interpret and act on their ideas and teachings in the context of their individual daily lives? As Asef Bayat (2005: 901) asks, What makes them a movement dened as co-operative unit, in terms of the collective activities of many
r The authors 2010. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2010

Transnational Muslim solidarities and everyday life

15

people to bring about social change? After all unity of purpose and action is the hallmark, indeed a dening feature, of a social movement. While Bayat has a response to his own rhetorical question that we will go on to consider in a moment, it would be helpful to begin engaging this issue from the point we left off: by considering the nature and impact of communication that occurs within public spheres. Eickelman and Anderson argue that the spaces of shared communication represented by contemporary public spheres engender forms of shared consciousness that serve to mediate the relationship between individualised experience (particularism) and larger-scale, abstract forms of collective consciousness such as the nation. On this particular point, it is worth quoting them at length:
These new publics emerge along a continuum between mass communication aimed at everyone and direct personal communications to specic others with whom one already has a personal relationship. This expanding space of public dealings with those whom Alfred Schutz called contemporaries beyond ones face-to-face consociates indeed doing everything possible to turn the anonymous or unknown contemporary into a consociate working under common assumptions of civility and morality is an important part of developing a public sphere in which religion plays a vital role. It contributes to the recognition that such a public is not mass and anonymous, but dened by mutual participation indeed, by performance. (Eickelman and Anderson 1999: 15)

They go on to invoke the clear parallels that exist here with Andersons (1991) celebrated account of modern national consciousness, Imagined Communities in which, for example, newspapers and the very act of reading together (we might think today in terms of downloading together) are both implicated in the creation of a sense of shared consciousness. But, of course, a common sense of belonging does not a social movement make. While shared communication in increasingly transnational public spheres helps us to understand some of the mechanisms through which social relations can be forged and sustained today, how can we think about this activity as constituting a collective effort towards achieving social change particularly when some of these movements seek to constitute themselves on a global basis, involving members of disparate sociocultural backgrounds and life experiences? Asef Bayat addresses this question by arguing that we must disabuse ourselves of the idea that new social movements can ever be thought of as being dened by a precise set of concrete aspirations and goals, universally accepted within the movement. What he suggests instead particularly with regard to the non-Western world, where opportunities for unfettered social mobilisation and strategic communication by opposition movements and civil society actors are limited is that movements come to be built around a loosely shared normative core and a movement frame (Benford and Snow 2000) that thematises, but does not concretise, the purposes of collective action. So just as the anti-globalisation movement today contains within it many diverse and at times competing conceptions of justice, so do contemporary Islamist and Islamic movements contend with multiple visions of what
r The authors 2010. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2010

16

Mandaville

the social realisation of Islam might look like. Likewise, and recalling Alberto Meluccis idiom of movements for social change as constituted through everyday life rather than through dedicated social organisations and mobilisation, it becomes possible to see the contours of new Islamic movements in the imagined solidarities (Bayat 2005) created through mediated communication. In other words, Muslims work in their individual capacities for social change while simultaneously embodying the ethics of a shared conception of the good life. Their communion exists not through common membership in tight, hierarchically organised social movement organisations although, as we will see, some such as Fethullah Gu lens movement still contain elements of this model but rather through shared patterns of consumption (listening, reading, shopping) and forms of everyday life. Contrast this with, for example, the relatively rigid array of hierarchical family (usra) units that constitutes the classic organisational model of the Muslim Brotherhood, itself drawing heavily on Leninist precepts. Today, the concrete modalities through which a movements norms and goals are embodied will inevitably vary from context to context (particularly when such groups exist on a global scale), but this internal differentiation is itself one of the movements organising principles. As Bayat puts it:
An imagined solidarity is, thus, one which is forged spontaneously among different actors who come to a consensus by imagining, subjectively constructing, common interests and shared values between themselves. But such imagining by the different fragments is by no means carried out in homogenous fashion. Just as in the case of the nation which is imagined differently by its fragments, social movements actors also imagine common aims and objectives not in the same fashion, but differentially (Bayat 2005: 904).

We will reserve for subsequent discussion the question of how and where groups constituted along the lines of this model can be understood as politically signicant (or as something more than just lifestyle movements), and the implications of this approach in terms of a movements visibility to the state. Our concern for the time being has been to build a case for considering the realm of the everyday as a space in which transnational solidarity movements premised on a particular form of collective normativity (such as Islam) can be found today. len: education and religious socialisation Fethullah Gu One of the most signicant movements to have emerged in the last thirty years is the Su-based educational network around the Turkish thinker and religious entrepreneur, Fethullah Gu len. The movement is important not only because of the extent of its global reach nearly 1,000 schools across every region of the world but also because of the particular model and conception of religio-political synthesis embodied in its vision. We can think of Gu len as trying to recover and fuse aspects of Ottoman religious
r The authors 2010. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2010

Transnational Muslim solidarities and everyday life

17

cosmopolitanism onto the modern secular Turkish state, leveraging the power of market-based forces and new communication technologies associated with globalisation. While emphasising the Turkishness of his project and articulating its goals in nationalist terms, there are undoubtedly aspects to the movement that also seek to recongure the relationship between religion and public life in the modern Turkish republic and it is this dimension of Gu lens work that has raised suspicions among some of the countrys secular elites. While some might suggest that Gu lens group represents a highly organised movement and thus is an inappropriate choice for studying the diffuse nature of new social movements, such an analysis misses the core of what is so distinctive about the group. The various facets of the movement educational, commercial, charitable, media are not unied within a common organisational structure. Rather, it relies on personal ties and coordination among a vast network of members and activists who have passed through institutions afliated with the group and then moved on in life, all the while retaining a sense of communion within Gu lens worldview and ethics. Gu len himself certainly assigns tasks and missions to his most senior and trusted followers, but does not possess centralised control over the activities of the movement in aggregate. One nds a wide range of interpretations of the Gu len movement and its ultimate goals. Some see in it little more than a very successful form of promarket social conservatism that emphasises faith, education, good works and the compatibility of religion and modern science but harbours no ulterior political agenda (Muslim Mormonism). Others see a project aspiring to the global propagation of a neo-Ottoman Islam that would return Turkey to a position of pre-eminence in the Muslim world. Still others see a form of crypto-Islamism whose agenda is ultimately political, an effort to plant Islam rmly at the core of the Turkish state using support for national secularism as a Trojan horse. Recalling Bayats point about the internal heterogeneity of modern mass movements, it is fair to say that elements of all three of these interpretations are undoubtedly present in the Gu len project. While organised somewhat more hierarchically than other new movements, the work of the Fethullahcilar (as followers of the movement are sometimes described) takes place primarily within the ux and uidity of everyday life. Its orientation is therefore highly practical, and the movement is constantly placed in a position of having to make compromises with changing conditions and sociopolitical environments. So while we can identify several key elements of the movements broad discursive strategy, its more tangible embodiment in the social world and any particular politics entailed therein is subject to the turbulence of everyday life and the need to constantly remake itself in order to remain relevant. This fact inevitably leads us to ask as much about how the movement has changed and adapted and how it will likely continue to do so in the future as we do about its ultimate goals. Also relevant here is the question of whether the movement can outlive its founder. Gu len is now 70 years old, in questionable health and, as a semi-exile in the USA, removed
r The authors 2010. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2010

18

Mandaville

from the movements core constituency and area of operations. As the movement grows globally and is inevitably forced to adapt its message and model to local circumstances, we need to consider the effect of this on the broader project. The transnational dimensions of the Gu len educational network are also important to consider. From an initial focus on culturally proximate settings in the Turkic states of central Asia and Muslim-majority countries in the Balkans (the Hana heartland), Gu len schools have now been established on nearly every continent and in most world regions, including sub-Saharan Africa and east and south-east Asia. They are, of course, most prevalent in countries with either a majority or a sizeable minority Muslim population in the hope of receiving a positive reception to the religious subtext. Estimates as to their numbers range from 300 to 800; it is difcult to settle on a more exact gure because of the decentralised nature of the movement (Agai 2007). Supporters of the Gu len cemaat (community) do not declare these to be its schools. Rather, the setting up of a new school is generally the product of effort by a coalition of businessmen who know each other through interpersonal links (perhaps rst forged via a lighthouse or dershane) and who have decided to respond to Gu lens call to invest in the establishment of such schools. Therefore, it is not the movement itself that sets up the schools. As in the Turkish-based educational institutions, the curriculum focuses exclusively on modern subjects and the medium of instruction is generally English. Teaching staff generally comprises a mixture of Gu len followers brought from Turkey and people recruited locally. The school principals are almost always Turkish, often hiring a local national to serve as deputy and interlocutor-in-chief with the surrounding community (Yavuz and Esposito 2003). The schools have proven enormously popular, mainly because of the quality of the education they offer compared with local state schools. Gu len seems to have understood well the ease with which education can become commodied in a globalised world, and has entered the market with exactly the right product: modern education with an emphasis on mathematics and sciences taught in English. Anectodal evidence from central Asia suggests that students leaving the Gu len schools score considerably higher on university entrance exams than those leaving state high schools (Balci 2003). The reputation they have garnered has also led the schools to be viewed by Turkey as an important public diplomacy asset (Agai 2007). The Turkish government is generally supportive of the movements schools abroad but does not identify them as Gu len institutions. Rather, they tend to be portrayed as the export of a successful Turkish model of education. The movement itself is often quite happy to view itself as representing exactly this kind of nationalist ideal, which reminds us that an Islamic critique of certain aspects of the hegemonic national vision (e.g. strict secularism) is not tantamount to a dismissal of the nation as a whole. How best to think of the Gu len movement in relation to politics? Those within the community deny that the movement is political and such claims are
r The authors 2010. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2010

Transnational Muslim solidarities and everyday life

19

not inaccurate if one thinks about being political in terms of seeking to enter the political sphere through contesting elections. The model of politics is not to form a political party that will seek to capture the state, but rather through education and other network activities to socialise a new generation of elites who will enter power through existing channels, but bring Islam along with them. The movement is thus clearly political in so far as its longer-term goals involve a reconguration of the norms around religions role in the Turkish public sphere. Prior to the crackdown on political Islam in the late 1990s, Gu len would frequently speak of his desire to create a golden generation of Turkish elites, schooled (literally) in the cemaats world-view, who would make greater space for religion in public life once they had achieved positions of inuence. The goal here does not seem to be Islamist in the sense of changing the countrys constitution or introducing elements of sharia law, but rather the idea of making space within the ranks of Turkeys political elite for a critical mass of technocrats less allergic to the presence of Islam in the public sphere. In Gu lens vision, just as the teachers in his schools lead students towards religion via their conduct, so would political leaders bring citizens closer to Islam through the examples they set in public ofce. As Agai (2007: 168) puts it, In this, Gu len represents a large proportion of Muslims in Turkey who factually accept Turkish secularism and do not challenge the state, but want to make their own way in society and inuence their imminent environment according to their beliefs. This last point allows us to bring the discussion of the group full circle, and to reconnect to our earlier discussion about the impact of globalisation and neoliberalism on the nature and organisation of social activism. There is a sense in which the Gu len movement has leveraged the phenomenal growth in the Turkish private sector to surround public institutions often quite literally with alternative spaces of Islamic normativity that challenge prevailing secular norms. In this model, being Islamically active does not entail membership of a political or clandestinely subversive organisation that seeks to capture state power, but rather embodies religious norms in day-to-day lived experience while working gradually towards the transmission of those norms to a generation of elites who will come to regard them as normal. As Agai (2007: 166) puts it, by creating new Islamic elds of action on the basis of traditional Islamic terminology and conventional denitions, [Gu len] gains power in conservative Islamic circles all the while remaining publicly focused on universal, shared values such as education and charity, and pursuing them in a wholly inclusive manner.

Global neo-Salasm Another expression of transnational Islamic solidarity that resists positing the umma as a desired form of social collective is the contemporary trend we might term neo-Salasm. A number of writers have pointed to the rise of
r The authors 2010. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2010

20

Mandaville

Salasm among young Muslims in the West today, linking the increased interest in this trend to a desire among young people to nd a path free from the cultural constraints that dened their parents religious orientation (Roy 2004). Their search for a universalist and pure (in the sense of being free from local cultural idioms) form of Islam leads them towards Salasm. Often disheartened by the tendency within their parents generation to place considerable emphasis on sectarian differences and engage in sharp dispute over the differences between legal schools (madhahib), Salasms disavowal of madhahib in the name of a single Islamic way is attractive (Mandaville 2001). It is important to note that the sala orientation to which we refer here is not generally a politicised variant, and certainly not jihadi in orientation. Rather, this is the classic, quietist salayya that focuses on purity of worship and belief. With few exceptions, most of the relevant major gures maintain their distance from organised Islamic social movements, representing themselves exclusively as men of religion. However, that does not mean that they will not discuss worldly issues. Indeed, their capacity to articulate the sala path in vernacular terms that speak to contemporary concerns is the attraction here. In this regard, the contrast in style with austere sala gures in, for example, Saudi Arabia could not be more telling. The popular sala preachers in the West are by turns entertaining, irreverent, frank and harsh moving across a full range of emotional registers as they speak. It is interesting to note that a number of the leading gures within this new trend are Western converts to Islam. Their discourse combines the streetwise sensibilities of having grown up in the USA or UK with a deep knowledge of the sala creed. They will switch, for example, back and forth from hadith expressed in uent, Quranic Arabic to urban slang in the course of expressing a single thought. Some of them have been involved with gangs and drugs in the past, and this experience is clearly reected in their accounts of how they came to Islam. It also grants them a certain credibility with young Muslims living in urban settings in the West, where those same issues continue to be the dominant sources of social tension and exclusion. The upsurge in the popularity of Salasm can be associated only in part with the sense of siege that some Muslim communities in the West have felt in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the 7/7 bombings in London. In this reading, Salasm becomes a defensive posture (Murphy 2006). For others, the attraction is linked to one of the issues at the core of the argument about new transnational Muslim public spheres, namely the fragmentation and pluralisation of authority. With so many alternative interpretations of Islam ying around, some nd security in a religious orientation that sees itself as the most authentic expression of Quranic and Prophetic tradition unmediated by centuries of innovation (bida) and sectarian strife (tna). Some observers have pointed correctly to the fact that alongside the quietist approach to Salasm can also be found a politicised variant of this creed that emerged as a result of the cross-fertilisation of Sala theology with the political ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood (Wiktorowicz 2005). The rigid and categorical
r The authors 2010. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2010

Transnational Muslim solidarities and everyday life

21

distinctions drawn between indels and believers in some variants of this discourse have been associated with the world-view of certain revolutionary and even militant Islamist organisations. However, for most, the appeal of Salasm lies precisely in its denial of politics. That is to say that through its privileging, above all, of correct adherence to a particular normative, transhistorical model of religious observance and jurisprudential citation, it succeeds in representing itself as being somehow outside the base worldly concerns of nation, politics and culture. Therefore, it is precisely as the embodiment of a particular discursive tradition (as opposed to an organic social collective or formalised institutional framework) that Salasm succeeds in travelling so well and serving as the basis of communion rather than political aspiration of Muslims in many diverse and highly globalised settings. While it lacks anything like a centralised coordinating mechanism and a clearly dened programme, the ubiquitous upsurge today in Muslim religiosity expressed through the idiom of Salasm has led some observers to brand it Islams new religious movement (Meijer 2009).

Conclusion It is clear from this discussion that todays Muslim groups are developing a new repertoire of collective action, to use the terms of the political sociologist Charles Tilly (1978). Movements constituted by the loose (and often diffuse) coordination of aggregated individual everyday practices seem to be gaining momentum as an alternative to classic Islamism. Conventional social movement organisations in the mould of the Muslim Brotherhood will certainly continue to represent an important political force in the Muslim world, alongside the emerging new Islamist parties (such as AKP in Turkey and PJD in Morocco). But these two formations do not constitute the totality of Muslim politics, and the success or failure of Islamism cannot be determined simply by how well such groups fare at the ballot box. Rather, we need to consider the possibility that the nature of Islamic activism may be changing in signicant ways. Likewise, what it means to belong to an Islamic movement and the modalities through which such afliation occurs are similarly in transformation today. As argued earlier using the cases of Fethullah Gu len and neo-Salasm, young people today seem to be drawn towards an approach to the Islamisation of society that operates through the spaces and meanings of everyday life rather than through formal membership in organised opposition groups. The reasons for this are varied. One can point, on the one hand, to explanations that emphasise the failure of existing Islamist groups and parties to achieve their political goals. Ironically, the relative success of such groups at the societal level might damage their political fortunes in so far as it leads people to wonder whether Islam actually needs to hold national power in order for society to become more Islamic. In other cases, it appears that people are shying away from conventional Islamist
r The authors 2010. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2010

22

Mandaville

movements not only because of the latters lack of political success, but because they have a very different conception of what Islamic social activism means and the social forms through which it is best expressed. While the analysis presented here has focused on what might be regarded as Muslim variants of new social movements, it could be argued that these same dynamics are also providing a new lease of life to older forms of Muslim social networking such as Susm hence the recent upsurge of interest in neo-traditionalism alongside neo-Salasm. Other groups, such as the Tablighi Jamaat, whose practice is focused on the integration of piety into spaces of everyday life dress, grooming, cooking, cleaning have succeeded in attracting a large following across multiple continents. Pushing one aspect of the argument even further, we can also speculate about how the primacy of consumption practices within certain segments of Muslim societies is having an impact on how people think about what it means to engage social and political issues from an Islamic perspective. This is where Alberto Meluccis conception of social movements of the everyday becomes relevant particularly those aspects of his work that focus on conceptions of social change premised on the lived embodiment of movement norms within daily individual conduct. Bringing in the ubiquity of neoliberal norms and media saturation among Muslims in the West and middle-class settings in the Muslim-majority world, this approach transposes the location of Islamic activism from revolutionary movements to spaces and practices of consumption. As Amel Boubekeur puts it:
The traditional intra-Islamic modes of action and mobilisation, such as aggressive street demonstrations and political militancy, make less sense. The new Islamic elites reinterpret their relations . . . in terms of networks and partnerships. Notions of partnership will develop according to standards of competence and competitiveness . . . Where the traditional Islamic militancy was heavy, expensive, and very framed, the Islamic identity suggested by this new culture sets up mobilisations, identications, modes of actions, and forms of participation that are less expensive, less stigmatising. The classical notions of Islamism, such as sacrice for the cause and for the suffering, weak, and dominated disappear. What is proposed is the revalorisation of the personal pleasure of consumption, success, and competitiveness. (Boubekeur 2005: 123)

Given this characterisation, it is not surprising that some of the more traditional Islamist actors have dismissed this new consumer-oriented trend as supercial and disengaged from the hard questions of real politics. However, at the same time the Islamists like the state are in two minds about these new movements. They are a growing force, and because they are premised on Islam they threaten the Islamists turf and threaten to poach away their constituents. The Islamists and the state are both concerned about the amorphous and diffuse nature of these new actors the state because they locate themselves in spaces and practices less easily regulated through traditional instruments of power. Moreover, both nation and state nd themselves in something of a dilemma because these new movements are to be found in specic domains (such as small-to-medium-sized enterprises and
r The authors 2010. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2010

Transnational Muslim solidarities and everyday life

23

publicprivate partnerships) that the state is actually trying to encourage in the name of national development. Given all of this, it is clear that we face a situation far more complex than advocates of post-national futures or cosmopolitics would have us believe (Appadurai 1996; Cheah and Robbins 1998). People have not given up on the nation, but their imagination of social solidarity and public normativity no longer if it ever did proceeds primarily from national sources. Therefore, Islamic aspirations that cross national borders must often be understood not as the expression of loyalty to an umma or higher form of social afliation (in other words, this is not a levels of analysis problem), but rather as one among many discourses such as human rights, social justice, ecology that names the hope for a different and better world.

References
Agai, B. 2007. Islam and education in secular Turkey: state policies and the emergence of the Fethullah Gu len group, in R. Hefner and M. Q. Zaman (eds.), Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Balci, B. 2003. Missionnaires de lIslam en Asie Centrale: Les Ecoles Turques de Fethullah Gulen. Paris: Maisonneuve and Larose. Bayat, A. 2005. Islamism and social movement theory, Third World Quarterly 26, 6: 891908. Benford, R. D. and Snow, D. A. 2000. Framing processes and social movements: an overview and assessment, Annual Review of Sociology 26: 61139. Boubekeur, A. 2005. Cool and competitive: Muslim culture in the West, ISIM Review 16: 123. Buechler, S. M. 1999. Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chatterjee, P. 1993. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cheah, P. and Robbins, B. (eds) 1998. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. De Certeau, M. 2002. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Eickelman, D. and Anderson, J. (eds) 1999. New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Ho, E. 2006. The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Inglehart, R. 1977. The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lefebvre, H. 2008. Critique of Everyday Life. London: Verso. Mandaville, P. 2001. Transnational Muslim Politics: Reimagining the Umma. London: Routledge. Meijer, R. (ed.) 2009. Global Salasm: Islams New Religious Movement. London: Hurst. Melucci, A. 1989. Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Murphy, C. 2006. For conservative Muslims, goal of isolation a challenge. Washington Post, September 5, 2006. Piscatori, J. 1986. Islam in a World of Nation-States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roy, O. 1994. The Failure of Political Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. r The authors 2010. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2010

24

Mandaville

Roy, O. 2004. Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah. New York: Columbia University Press. Salvatore, A. and Eickelman, D. (eds) 2006. Public Islam and the Common Good. Leiden: Brill. Starrett, G. 1998. Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tilly, C. 1978. From Mobilization to Revolution. New York: McGraw-Hill. Wiktorowicz, Q. 2005. The Sala movement: violence and fragmentation of community, in M. Cooke and B. Lawrence (eds), Muslim Networks from Hajj to Hip Hop. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Yavuz, H. and Esposito, J. L. (eds) 2003. Turkish Islam and the Secular State: The Gu len Movement. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Zubaida, S. 2004. Islam and nationalism: continuities and contradictions, Nations and Nationalism 10, 4: 40720.

r The authors 2010. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2010