| There are approximately one billion Muslim people — about one-fifth of humanity — living in the world today. Of these the largest single language ethnic group, about 15 percent, are Arabs. Not all Arabs are Muslims — there are substantial Arab Christian minorities in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Iraq, and small numbers of Arabic-speaking Jews in Morocco — although the numbers of both these communities have rapidly declined in recent decades, mainly through emigration. As the language of the Koran, of Islamic scholarship and law, Arabic long dominated the cultures of the Muslim world, closely followed by Persian — the language of Iran and the Mughal courts in India. |
| The spread of Islam among non-Arab peoples, however, has made Arabic a minority language — although many non-Arab Muslims read the Koran in Arabic. An ethnographic survey published in 1983 lists more than 400 ethnic/linguistic groups who are Muslim. The largest after the Arabs, in diminishing order, are Bengalis, Punjabis, Javanese, Urdu speakers, Anatolian Turks, Sundanese (from Eastern Java), Persians, Hausas, Malays, Azeris, Fulanis, Uzbeks, Pushtuns, Berbers, Sindhis, Kurds, and Madurese (from the island of Madura, northeast of Java). These groups number between nearly 100 million (Bengalis) down to 10 million (Sindhis, Kurds, and Madurese). Of the hundreds of smaller groups listed, the smallest — the Wayto hunter gatherers in Ethiopia — number fewer than 2,000. However, three of the languages spoken by more than 10 million people — Javanese, Sundanese, and Madurese—are in the course of being overlaid by Bahasa Indonesia, the official language taught in Indonesian schools. With Indonesians constituting the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, Bahasa Indonesia could overtake Arabic as the most widely spoken Muslim language. |
| In addition to Muslims living in their countries of ethnic origin, there are now millions of Muslims residing in Europe and North America. Given that English is the international language of commerce, scholarship, and science, with second- generation European, American, and Canadian Muslims speaking English (as well as French, German, Dutch, and other European tongues) the growth of English among Muslims is a significant recent development. |
| The modern nation-state, based on internationally recognized boundaries, a common language (in most cases), a common legal system, and representative institutions (whether these are appointed or elected) is a recent phenomenon in most of the Muslim world. Often imposed by arrangements between the European powers, modern boundaries cut across lines of linguistic/ ethnic affiliation, leaving peoples such as Kurds and Pushtuns divided into different states. Before the colonial interventions began to lock them into the international system of UN member states, Muslim states tended to be organized communally rather than territorially. States were not bounded by lines drawn on maps. The power of a government did not operate uniformly within a fixed and generally recognized area, as happened in Europe, but rather “radiated from a number of urban centers with a force which tended to grow weaker with distance and with the existence of natural or human obstacles.” [Albert Hourani A History of the Arab Peoples London, Faber, revised ed. 2002, p. 138.] Patriotism was focused, not as in Renaissance Italy, England, or Holland, on the city, city-state, or nation in the modern territorial sense, but on the clan or tribe within the larger frame of the umma, the worldwide Islamic community. Local solidarities were reinforced by endogamous practices such as marriage between first cousins, a requirement in many communities. Clan loyalties were further buttressed by religion, with tribal leaders often justifying their rebellions or wars of conquest by appealing to the defense of true Islam against its infidel enemies. |
| Viewed from the perspective of modern Western history the systems of governance that evolved in the arid region were divisive and unstable. In Europe, a region of high rainfall, the state emerged out of constitutional struggles between rulers and their subjects animated by conflicts between social classes, within ethnically homogeneous populations sharing common national, political, and cultural identities (although these were sometimes contested, as in Ireland). In the arid zone dominant clans or tribally based dynasties exercised power over subordinate groups or tried to ensure their dominance by importing mamluks (slave-soldiers), from distant peripheries, who had minimal social contacts with the indigenous populations. Peasant cultivators and townsfolk remained vulnerable to the predations of nomadic marauders — the proverbial “barbarians at the gates.” The asabiyya (loyalties or group solidarity) that bound the clans was stronger than urban solidarity. Lacking the corporate ethos of their Western counterparts, the Muslim urban classes failed to achieve the “bourgeois” or capitalist revolutions that gave rise to the modern state systems of Europe and North America. |
| There is, however, a different way of viewing the same historical landscape. Given the predominance of pastoral nomadism in the vast belt of territories where Islam took root, stretching from the Kazakh steppes to the Atlantic shores (and in similar regions in northern India and south of the Sahara) the inability of relatively weak agrarian states to tax nomadic predators or control them through military power was balanced by the moral force and cultural prestige of Islam. Time and again in precolonial times the predators were converted into Islam’s most trusted defenders. To borrow a phrase of the anthropologist Ernest Gellner, “the wolves become sheepdogs.” Just as the Prophet Muhammad had tamed the Arabian tribes by his personal example, the eloquence of the Koran, and the system of governance that proceeded from it, so the Sharia (divine) law and human systems of fiqh (jurisprudence) to which it gave rise mediated the perennial conflicts between pastoral predators, cultivators, and townsfolk. The system, embedded in the social memory of today’s Muslim populations, was based on the duty of the ruler to uphold social justice by governing in accordance with Islamic law. The formidable task facing contemporary Muslim states is to harness political and social traditions forged in a very different context from modern-day conditions. |
A Tuareg policeman in the Sahel region south of the Sahara. From their center at Timbuktu, the Tuareg controlled the trade routes between the Mediterranean and West Africa.
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