Muslim peripheries: A world regional perspective

Abstract

This commentary flags three key themes related to Muslim geographies. The first is the diversity and interconnectedness of Islam across regions, and the way Muslim practice is formed through a sense of place. The second is the need to rethink the spatial categories of core and periphery across Muslim space. Lastly, the third suggests that the contextualized study of Muslim geographies should reshape geographical knowledge, especially with respect to world regional geography.

You hear the dhol (drums) before you see them. Elbowing through the throng of sweaty men, you move past the bhang (cannabis milkshake) seller and step into a dusty courtyard. Peering through clouds of hashish smoke, you glimpse the drummers. One is a huge man with long unkempt hair, sharp eyes, and a barrel chest. He is wearing a bright red tunic and a dhol hangs from his neck. A smaller drummer stands nearby, peering intently at his partner. They stand at the centre of a large crowd of men crouched on the floor. They are smoking hash and bobbing their heads. A smaller group of men with torn clothes are standing closer to the drummers, flailing their arms, hopping from bare foot to foot, twirling. The tall drummer starts slowly to twirl as he drums. He twirls faster and faster, until the drum is suspended in front of him. The crescendo breaks, the crowd jumps to its feet, and a cry breaks out: ‘Mastqalandar ­– Jhoolay lal, jhoolay lal, jhoolay lal …’

The tall drummer was known as Pappu Sain, and for decades he held court every Thursday night at the shrine/mosque complex of Shah Jamal in Ichra, Lahore. Baba Shah Jamal (d. 1671) was a Sufi saint. He drew the people of Lahore and Punjab closer to Islam through the hypnotic power of his dhol. Centuries later, at his shrine, Pappu Sain followed in his footsteps. When Pappu Sain passed away in November 2021, I was overcome with sadness. I had been a regular at Shah Jamal during my graduate studies in Lahore. I associated him with my discovery of a starkly different type of Islam than the one with which I had been raised. Growing up in Saudi Arabia, I was taught an Islam that was austere, clean, ordered, and disciplined. Pappu Sain – and the mass Islam of Sufi shrines in Pakistan he was a part of – was messy, chaotic, haphazard, and ecstatic. My parents were horrified when they heard I visited Shah Jamal. They sat me down and said, ‘You know this is not real Islam. It has been corrupted by folk superstitions and Hinduism. How can this dancing and drug taking be Islam? You’re born in Saudi, you should know better!’

This scene flags three key themes. The first involves the diversity and interconnectedness of Islam across regions, and the way Muslim practice is formed through a sense of place. The second is the need to rethink the spatial categories of core and periphery across Muslim space. Lastly, the third suggests that the contextualized study of Muslim geographies should reshape geographical knowledge, especially with respect to world regional geography.

Sidaway (2023) argues that Muslim geographies can help geographical knowledge go ‘beyond the decolonial’ impulse in two ways. The first is to adopt an Islamic epistemology, or Islamic ways of knowing. The study of Muslim geographies needs to go beyond reproducing ‘colonial logics of mapping religion’ that ‘render Islam and Muslims as adjectives and objects of scrutiny’. By contrast, Sidaway suggests that geographers need to develop ‘a more holistic understanding working with Islam's own conceptual terms’. However, it is not always possible to distill a specifically ‘Islamic’ epistemology from actual Muslim lives. For example, rich ethnographic and historical scholarship highlights how Muslim identity articulates with forces ranging from Maoism to middle-class consumerism in the Pakistani context (Maqsood, 2017; Raza, 2022). The quest to recover an ‘other’ way of thinking in a purified and authentic form will always encounter practical, conceptual, and ethical obstacles – as Subaltern Studies scholars have long reflected upon (Spivak, 2012).

There is greater potential in Sidaway's second way to ‘go beyond the decolonial’. This is to give greater attention to the geography, history, and political economy of Muslim societies and spaces. Rather than depicting Islam and Muslims as ‘a form of social life and cultural difference’ that is a mere foil to white Euro-American modernity, he argues that greater consideration should be given to the many ways in which Muslim geographies have always been constitutive of the logic, trajectories, origins, and ongoing expansion of capitalism. It is in this sense that Muslim geographies can potentially ‘go beyond’ the decolonial. Sidaway observes that decolonial theory in geography tends to focus on ‘the whiteness of the Anglophone discipline, indigenous geographies, and the reception of theoretical work from Latin America’. In this rendering, the conquest of Latin America is understood as ‘the foundational moment in the establishment of a colonial matrix of power’. Similarly, the Radical Black Tradition and the Black geographies scholarship that stems from it, take the Atlantic slave trade as the foundational event/structure of the version of modernity we collectively inhabit (cf. Robinson, 1983). While Latin American decolonial theory and Atlanticist Black geographies are indispensable to the critique of geographical knowledge, these traditions are rooted in the historical geographical experience of specific geographies and thus ‘risk bypassing other regions’.

Closer attention to Muslim geographies trouble and transform our understanding of how the planet could (or should) be divided up into distinct yet interconnected world regions. A deceptively simple world regional question about the Muslim world is where – and when – is this Muslim world? Historically, the concept of the Muslim world is distinct from the ummah or the Muslim community of faith. Understood instead as a geopolitical marker of civilizational difference, this concept arose in the nineteenth century geopolitical dynamics between the Ottoman, British, and Russian Empires. By the early twentieth century, the Muslim world became a marker of pan-Islamism promoted by the Ottoman Empire (Aydin, 2017). Historicizing the concept of the Muslim world deflates myths of transregional unity and solidarity projected back to the first Islamic empires of the 7th century. Contrary to many chauvinist and nativist claims, Muslim unity across space has historically been shot through by lines of language, race, ethnicity, geopolitics, and gender. In the present, the Muslim world can be evoked as a geopolitical and developmental aspiration – parallel to how Asian developments are referenced within Asia to produce what Ananya Roy has called a ‘politics of futurity’ (Roy, 2016: 317). Politicians in Pakistan routinely reference the ostensibly Islamic path of developmental modernization pursued in other parts of the Muslim world, such as Turkey and Malaysia (Sajjad and Javed, 2022). Closer examination of the spatial and temporal registers that the metageography of the Muslim world evokes in different contexts, locations, and languages is a crucial approach to Muslim geographies from a world regional perspective.

A world regional approach can also help challenge some myths – held by Muslims and non-Muslims alike-that undergird popular and academic understanding of Muslim geographies. One major assumption about the historical geography of the Muslim world is that a pure originary Islam arose in the Arabian desert, which degraded as it diffused outwards to the so-called peripheries of the Muslim world – Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Drawing on a population atlas of the world's Muslim population, Sidaway challenges the myth of the Arab-centric contemporary Islamic world. For example, he notes that ‘the African continent has a Muslim majority and contains more Arabic speakers than Arabia’ and that ‘numerical mass of Muslims in South Asia looms largest, greatly outweighing the Middle East, even when the two non-Arab states with the largest Muslim populations in the broader region (Iran and Turkey) and considered’. This population geography belies the notion that a ‘real’ Islam is in Arabia – how can this be when most Muslims live outside this region?

Scholars of Islam in South Asia productively deploy the metaphor of the frontier to understand Muslim space as evolving, interactive, and site-specific – instead of as a recipient of a diffused version of Islam located on the periphery (Eaton, 2019). However, a critically deployed concept of the periphery can productively highlight the unequal relations of domination and exploitation that exist between and within regions at multiple scales (Akhter, 2019, 2022). Within the world regional geography of Islam and Muslims, the concept of the periphery helps to illuminate the geopolitical and cultural dynamics between Saudi Arabia and other Asian and African countries. Even as Saudi Arabia – or even Arabia or the Middle East/Southwest Asia as a whole, as we’ve seen – is a fraction of the world's Muslim population, it wields enormous geopolitical power. This is partly because ever since King Faisal adopted the title in 1964, the King of Saudi Arabia usually adopts the honorific of the ‘Custodian of the two Holy Mosques’ of Makkah and Madinah. As Sidaway warns, however, it is a mistake to flatten Muslim geographies into purely social and cultural systems – there is also a political geography and political economy at stake.

Sidaway highlights how the geography of oil infrastructure and extraction meant that regions of the Middle East – Oman, Morocco, and especially Saudi Arabia – were constitutive of the petro-modernization phase or twentieth century phase of capitalist expansion. He rightly does this to refute one of the cherished founts of critical geographical theorization, Henri Lefebvre, and his orientalist depictions of how ‘certain Islamic countries … are seeking to slow down industrialization so as to preserve their traditional homes, customs, and representational spaces’ (as quoted in Sidaway, 2023). But Saudi oil plays a much larger role in shaping Muslim geographies. Although Sidaway rightly points out the geopolitical and cultural importance of oil infrastructures, we need to go beyond oil producing/exporting regions to better understand the formation of peripheries within the Muslim world.

The rise of the oil industry in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf in the 1970s created a massive and insatiable appetite for cheap labour. In Saudi Arabia at least, the preference was explicitly for cheap Muslim labour – especially Pakistanis, Egyptians, and Bangladeshis. In some countries, this large Muslim migrant working class outnumbers citizens. Foreign workers are the majority in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE. Many of these migrants were and are the hard-currency earners for their households – deputed abroad to live cheaply and send inflation-proof riyals back home. This Muslim working class has no hope or expectation of settlement – they are a perpetually circulating army of manual labour working in domestic settings, construction, cooking, hospitality, retail, custodial services, security, and transportation. Oil exports drew in labour – and authoritarian and anti-migrant policies ensured that this labour did not stay put. Complex spatial effects arise from this movement – from remittances to labour drain to the adoption and spread of Saudi-approved ways of being Muslim in countries like Pakistan, India, and Indonesia. My parents’ disdain at me visiting Sufi shrines was coloured by their many decades in Saudi Arabia and the narrow forms of Islam nurturedthere.

Finally, Sidaway considers the Muslim world through alternative world regional lenses, such as the Balkans-to-Bengal and Afrabia. Both framings exclude the world's most populous Muslim country, Indonesia. Nevertheless, for Sidaway these alternate world regions serve not as a comprehensive framing of the Muslim world, but to push the geographical literature on Islam and Muslims beyond Arabia and minority Muslim populations in Euro-America. A critical world regional understanding of Muslim geographies is an opportunity for geographers to re-engage with alternative trans-areas, such as the Indian Ocean Region, Zomia, the Black Atlantic, and other diaspora geographies (Ashutosh, 2020; Chari, 2016). The vibrant field of Inter-Asian studies likewise encourages a view of geographical areas as interactive, constituted by extra-regional flows, and spatially complex – but bounded nevertheless (Ho, 2017). The focus on boundedness is important because it signals attention to relations of adjacency and contiguity. This is starkly different from the dominant social scientific trend in critical geography, which tends to favour close local studies that contribute to a universalizing ‘global’ theory, potentially applicable in any location – as seen for example in work around global comparative methods (i.e. Hart, 2018; see Jazeel, 2019 for a dissenting view).

But as Ho (2017) argues, the relations between adjacent regions are of a special nature and often result from scholars tracing actual relations between regions and peoples. He argues that the ‘transregional’, and specifically the inter-Asian scale, ‘is an intermediate level, neither local nor global. Phenomena at this level do not come into view under a localist or national lens. They also disappear in the abstractions of globalism’ (Ho, 2017: 922). The formation of a critical world regional lens on Muslim geographies, especially focused on Muslims outside of Euro-America as Sidaway calls for, could productively adopt the ‘intermediate’ scale being developed by inter-Asian scholars. This could help geographers balance the tension between universalizing theory and place-based knowledge, or to renew the disciplinary encounter with the more humanities-oriented sides of geographical knowledge (Chari, 2016).

Sidaway's article is a promising contribution to decolonial geography. It is most promising – and perhaps most potentially transformative for how geography is taught – in terms of rethinking world regions through Muslim geographies. World regional geographies of Islam and Muslims should be flexible, even as boundedness, adjacency, and contiguity are given due respect. This means remaining attentive to articulations with the world geographies of the Black Atlantic, Afrabia, Indo-Asia, Muslim diasporas, and other constitutive flows and networks. The point is not to swing the pendulum from places and networks to scales and territories, but to renew the geographical encounter with a world of discrete yet connected regions and the diverse knowledges they engender.