Umma

Andrew Johnson
To What Extent Does the Concept of Umma Tally with that of Globalization?

This question calls forth a whole cluster of assumptions which, I think it is fair to say, cannot be justified. Of course, both the umma and globalisations are concepts which have undergone change over time, but their relationship can be stated very simply. In its classical form, globalization is a causal theory about the way in which the liberalisation of trade has increasingly occluded national borders, with the result that society has become, in some yet to be specified sense, economically determined. Umma, on the other hand, is a religious doctrine, concerned more with providence than history. This distinction will be given a clearer exposition later. What should be apparent is this: only if globalization is annexed by, and collapsed into, the kind of free market fundamentalism which invests history with its own order of teleology and providence does globalization have anything more than a passing resemblance to Umma. Other than that, it behoves us to keep them apart.

It is possible that some ideas, and some non-trivial ones, are of eternal provenance, that they can stand stripped of all contextual and historical appendage. I will not volunteer any examples, because I want my errors to be relevant errors. What is important is that in the realm of the humanities we cannot but locate any given idea in the context from which it arises, lest, after all, we hypostatise unduly. Obviously the umma is a much more ancient than its counterpart. Originally it was fundamentally, if not wholly, a response to the exigencies of tribal warfare in seventh century Arabia. The origin of umma is conventionally traced to the hijra in 622. Increasingly persecuted for his radical religious beliefs in Mecca, Mohammad took the extremely bold of making a pilgrimage to Medina, a predominately Jewish region characterised by a myriad of conflicting kin-ship groups. Umma served the salutary purpose of uniting his own tribe, the Quraysh, and also the wider community of Medina over which he was exerting the increasing influence. It will be noted in passing that the death of Abu Talib had deprived Mohammad of the means of economic subsistence, and so a rapprochement with the Jewish communities was doubly important.

So far I have considered umma as an idelogical force. But, as Karen Armstrong has pointed out, it has since crystallised into a religious doctrine, with all the corresponding claims to truth which this implies. Umma was an attempt to base a society not on tribal affiliations but on unitary conception of the good life. It was to be a 'community of believers', purged of the paganism which had hitherto
splintered both the social and the private elements of Arabia. Umma, in turn, is parasitic on the idea of tawhid, the sense that life should be divinely ordered in a way which mirrors the economy and simplicity of a monotheistic universe. This was supplemented by the explicit egalitarianism of Islam, which prescribed that nobody, of whatever tribe, was to be left out of the divine plan.

Globalization is similarly egalitarian, in a way that is more radical and less assured. It is less assured because the play of market forces, the eclipse of the nation state which took upon itself the task of doling out the fruits of the economy to its citizens, will inevitably lead to financial inequalities far greater than anything ever possible before. It is more radical because it implies some sort of political decentralization, a devolution of power to the individual and a concomitant opening up of infinite possibilities, latent among which is that class can be transcended, that the lot of each can be improved so long as each has the will and wherewithal to make good the economic freedom which globalization has granted. Umma, whatever the cant about Muslim leaders being primus inter primus, is inherently hierarchical. This discrepancy can be explained in terms of the fact that a religious community will always defer to certain figures as possessed of greater veridical power. Mohammad, after all, had access to the word of God. Though globalisation by no means necessitates atheism, it does call into question such appeals to authority, and it renders the individual the final court of appeal in his own affairs.

Globalization makes the world smaller, as Hobsbawm said; or even flat, Friedman has suggested. The difference between regions, peoples and cultures are effaced, broadly, by three things: first, the growth of communications, which makes people proximous in time; second, the ease and relative cheapness of travel, which makes people proximous in space; and lastly, the world market, which brings about a convergence in people's life styles and the careers open to them. That said, the internal life may be left untouched by such external factors, and in this sense it is the umma which brings people closer together. John Gray has bewailed the razing of communal values by a tide of unfettered market processes, and it is questionable whether the atomised, free-standing individuals which globalization has fathered have greater understanding of those living in neighbouring continents than those who shared and share a submission to the Quran.

But this poses (without quite begging) the question: why, given this adumbration, would the two concepts ever be conflated? The answer lies in a temptation to view globalization as some mystically defined decree of nature which, because it is inexorable, can never stop. Such reasoning is, I dare say, as stupid as it is prima facie convincing. Suppose, for the moment, that globalization is inexorable (which in a suitably restricted sense it probably is). Surely what this means is that nothing can stop it and so therefore it will never stop. Well, no, actually. A term like inexorably, though fogged up in deceptive grammar, is always applied ex post facto, and means, if it is to mean anything at all, that given the conditions it couldn't have been otherwise. No set of phenomena in the empirical world has the slightest tendency to vouchsafe incontrovertible truths about what will or won't happen. Determinists argue that, even if they cannot aspire to logical necessity, statements about casual processes can stipulate events exhaustively: but the important thing to note is that this procedure must be essentially backward looking, and so really such statements are only complete in principle.

So much for complacent dogma about the necessity of globalization. But I have not tackled a rather more interesting defence of such a position, one that is grounded in philosophy and which goes by the name of holism, or, alternatively,
monism. It was put forward most profoundly by Parmenides and Plotinus; most stupidly, and therefore most popularly, by Hegel. It amounts to this: the universe comprises an irreducible unitary whole the parts of which are really not parts at all, but one (or, if you are so inclined, One). What this thesis licenses is the implication that history has some sort of divine essence, that its movement, where it is not illusory, simply plays out an immutable, underlying logic.

What does this have to with my argument? In short, that this argument is tacitly assumed by exponents of the umma and (dyed-in-the –wool) peddlers of the free market. For it is easy to see that under the aegis of holism history has become reified, that its processes have been divested of their contingencies, that, in a certain sense, they are no longer processes at all, but things. Suddenly the world comes under logic's purview, and events proffer a new, necessary, eminently inferential kind of truth.

It is relatively uncontroversial to say that umma is predicated on a providential view of the universe; nor does this constitute a criticism. With free marketers the matter is very different. They claim to have a theory, and when they confine themselves to saying that markets are self-regulating, or the price mechanism is the most efficient way of registering people's preferences, they do. But, in order to be worthy of the name, it must stand purged of any fugitive normative claims like all government intervention is evil. Usually they are smuggled in under a cloud of canny sophisms: but, make no mistake, there exists a species of economic theory which is in truth a fully-fledged ethical world-view that has already decided what course history will take, where man's destiny lies, and can determine, come what may, man's summum bonum. In this sense it is antithetical to globalization in its sociological mould. In another, though, it is a natural step for somebody - convinced that the flow of economic forces into all areas of life is, merely by being what it is, salutary – to applaud globalization, and to see no end to its effects.

To conclude, then, either globalization overlaps with the concept of the umma at irregular intervals or it is equated with a rather nebulous, beclouded conception of globalization that it is so indeterminate that it is unclear what it would mean in the first place. In this sense, it squares quite well with umma, sharing a commitment to words like 'integration' and a providential view of history. But, firstly, it can probably sit well with a whole host of otherwise incommensurable theories. And secondly, it cannot be defended on its own terms.