Radicalized Loyalties by Truong Fabien; Ackerman Seth;

Author:Truong, Fabien; Ackerman, Seth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509519347
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2018-06-17T00:00:00+00:00

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RECONVERSIONS

Well you may throw your rock and hide your hand

Workin’ in the dark against your fellow man

But as sure as God made black and white

What’s down in the dark will be brought to the light

“God’s Gonna Cut You Down”

traditional folk song

Being or becoming Muslim? The “community” illusion

The “return” to Islam by the “bad seeds” of the West is commonly seen as an immersion into a familiar universe: the “community.” As the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies showed in the late nineteenth century, the word betrays nostalgia for a particular form of sociability, where human connections are experienced through similarity – in contact with shared spaces, experiences, and memories. They’re fortified by trusting interpersonal relationships, passed on through tradition, and experienced as submission to group imperatives. “Community” is contrasted with “society,” which rests on fleeting, impersonal, explicit, and self-interested connections. Society liberates individuals from purely local particularisms, even as it rekindles the anguish of individualism: “We go out into Gesellschaft [‘civil society’] as if into a foreign land.”1

From this point of view, religious communities appear an especially integrating force, in that they bring human beings together not because of what they have or what they are, but because of what they believe. This notion lies at the heart of the Muslim religion, with the Umma denoting the pivotal moment when the very first believers rejected clan-like organizations to join a new, single community of faith. It supposedly takes concrete form in unconditional solidarity among all Muslims – extending even to the creation of an Islamic nation.* Among non-Muslims, the “Muslim community” elicits varied sentiments. On one side, tolerant multiculturalism lauds its dignity and seeks to grant recognition to its faithful “representatives”; on the other side, those imbued with republican distrust are spurred to put up defenses against the “communalist” threat.

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