Africa and Asia, before impacting what became Western Europe and North America. The nagging question persists: what has been the surplus of value beyond Arab origins and Arabic language in its continued expansion and adaptation to multiple contexts in myriad cultures? In cultural studies, “Islamic music,” “Islamic literature,” and “Islamic art” persist as labels. In philosophical studies, “Islamic philosophy” continues to be invoked, while in historical studies one must look hard to find alternatives to “Islamic history.” Even revisionists balk at changing their key terms, but I want to argue from the outset that unless that change is made, and unless it is consistently applied, there can be no revisionism worthy of the name. Old habits die slowly but die they must if a fresh vision is to emerge. A new day is dawning for understanding the long shadow of early 7th-century Arabia. The path will not be just through micro-analysis or regional studies but through meta-discourse, at the heart of which is salient and defensible key terms. A meta-discursive provocation is the goal of what follows.
What is Islamicate? Islamicate is neither a first nor a second but a third order of identity beyond “Muslim” and “Islamic,” its two precursors, both crowded with religious valence. Despite its prevalence, religion itself can become a veil rather than a catalyst for understanding broad historical movements. Neither “Muslim” nor “Islamic” because of their close association with “religion” can reveal the tapestry of culture and cultural networks, and without being revealed that tapestry remains occluded, undervalued, too often minimalized, or ignored.
“Muslim” marks a religious but also a social identity. In 2020 “Muslim” is the first order of identity for about 2 billion out of nearly 8 billion of the world’s population. One can be a Muslim by birth or by decision. In Arabic there are no capital letters, yet in English one is able to distinguish between two kinds of Muslim/muslim, one capitalized, the other not. In a revisionist vocabulary one should be able to note the distinction. Who is a muslim with a small “m”? Who is a Muslim with a capital “M”? In the latter case, to be Muslim is to avow Islam as a pious, practicing individual but one can also be muslim, in the lower case, by association as the member of a collective, whether family, country, region, or the globe, that has been marked by Islam without professing or practicing Islam. Non-Muslims, of course, can also be muslims. If I were a thoroughgoing revisionist, I would distinguish between both categories in what follows, but since English does not yield to such lexical subtleties without constant bracketing in inverted commas, that endeavor would distract from my major purpose: to underscore the need for an alternative to religious monikers, both “Islamic” and “Muslim.” In what follows, I will refer to Muslim, even though “muslim” remains an undertone of Muslim for those who are non-Muslim but also for many who may be neither devout nor observant as Muslims yet are routinely assumed to be cradle-to-grave believers in Allah as God, Muhammad as His last prophet, and the Qur’an as the final revelation for humankind.
Equally valuable but also ambivalent is “Islamic.” Reflexively, “Islamic” serves as the second order of identity for one who is Muslim. To be Muslim is to connect with Islam across centuries and borders, always acknowledging the norms and values linked to Islamic texts, leaders, and institutions. Yet the intrusion of English and the now commonplace usage of “Islamist” with a violent connotation makes it imperative to rethink the larger contour of Islamicate history. Over 1,400 years Islam has often been portrayed with negative stereotypes, from the medieval Crusades to modern colonialism but added to that multiply layered identity of Muslim/Islamic is the recent history of Islam, often defined by headlines of violence during the past half-century. The 1970s were marked by two eruptions: the Iranian Revolution (February 1979), followed by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (December 1979). These two events inaugurated a series of wars and crises that highlight Muslims and Islam as, in Elaine Sciolino’s phrase, “the Green menace,” replacing the disappearing (but now reappearing) “Red menace,” that is, the Soviet Union or Greater Russia.
While I oppose the contemporary or presentist bias, I also cannot ignore its pervasive influence. It produces a stigma, the stigma attached to Islam and, by extension, Muslims—too often riffed as Islamists—in 21st-century Euro-America. Unavoidable is the gaze of global media that defines events and actors through soundbites and images, usually negative. With the ubiquitous instant info world that we now take for granted, where tweets often count more than books, newspapers, or even television, one must ask: can Islam ever be free of the weaponizing proclivity of terror images? There are more than 1 billion Muslims worldwide, and few have anything to do with terror, yet if every Muslim is deemed a potential Islamist, can Islam itself be retained as a category of analysis without further exceptionalizing, minoritizing, and negativizing Muslims? For “Muslim” cosmopolitanism to work, it must extract the category “Islam” from the baggage it has acquired through daily, media saturation with negative images of Arab/Muslim/Islamic. If bad or violent, “Muslims” will appear in headlines, TV news, and tweets, but if good or cosmopolitan, they are relegated to the bylines or omitted, not just from essays and articles but also by visual media.
I would like to make the case for exceptions. They do exist, but their very paucity, and the reason for their paucity, underscore how “negative” Islamic/Muslim have become as labels in 21st-century America. Beyond Muhammad Ali, a sports hero to all, and Kareem Abd al-Jabbar, a basketball superstar, there are two Muslima Americans who were recently elected to the U.S. House of Representatives: Rashida Tlaib from Michigan and Ilhan Omar from neighboring Minnesota. I applaud these women, as do many other Americans who are alert to a pluralist, progressive public square of debate and compromise but above all representation and advocacy. Yet these two Midwestern Muslima pioneers have been critiqued as well as lauded, by Muslims as by non-Muslims. More than mere politicians, they, unlike their non-Muslim counterparts, are seen to carry the weight of co-religionists with whom they share little other than the label “Muslim.”2
Why Islamicate? Because a New Vocabulary Is Needed
The very act of defending Islam detracts from the deeper layers of cultural complexity that affect the domain where Islam has been introduced and Muslims are prevalent, either as majority or minority citizens. I move beyond the impasse it creates. I attempt to retrieve the larger contour of global history marked by Islam and Muslims. Throughout this manifesto I recuperate “Islam” and “Muslim” by locating both in a third referent, Islamicate. I argue that one cannot simply refute the notion that Islam is violent, or that Muslims are all Islamists; one must have a counternarrative that infuses the longer trajectory of Islam with elements that do not erase violence but instead reduce its dominance as the sole or main activity of Muslim subjects.
Let me give an instance of how difficult it is when even scholars ignore the role that “violence” plays in shaping every effort to address “Islam” or evaluate “Muslims.” The late Shahab Ahmed, a skilled interpreter of Muslim intellectual history, tried to recuperate Islam from violence by generalizing the scope of Islam and minimizing its violent subset. Ahmed argued that in all instances, no matter the activity or its register, only “Islamic” satisfies the requirements of being Muslim or being linked to Islam. He wrote his own manifesto, in the form of an extended dialogue with prior scholars on Islam and Islamic history. He justifies his preference for Islam over Islamicate as follows:
As long as the Muslim actor is making his act of violence meaningful to himself in terms of Islam … then it is appropriate and meaningful to speak of that act of violence as Islamic violence. The point of the designation is not that Islam causes this violence; rather it is that the violence is made meaningful by the act or in terms of Islam … One Muslim may disagree with another Muslim over whether his mode of meaning-making is legitimate—that is to say, whether it is coherent with its source—and may on those terms of incoherence deem the professed Muslim actor a non-Muslim, but the point is whether the actor makes the act meaningful for himself in terms of Islam.3
But what is the substantive basis of Islam apart from individual agency? Once we posit that there is no Islam beyond what individual Muslims say it is, then all who claim to speak on behalf
