Levels of Muslim Identity

October 2, 2007

As a teacher of Islam one of my most difficult tasks is to talk about how Islam has changed over time. What changes is not the five pillars or any essential doctrine, but the psychological experience of the religion. Globalized Islam by Olivier Roy is an important work precisely for its ability to make clear how the global version of Islam that is taking root in both the West and the Islamic world is a fundamentally different experience than that of traditional Islam.

One of the important ways that Islam changes is in the re-alignment of levels of identity. These levels of identity are a key point in my own work, so it is good to see Roy work with these same terms. He describes five levels of identity that coexist uneasily for Muslim immigrants to Europe:

1) kinship/shared local site
2) ethnic or national identity
3) generalized Muslim identity based on cultural values
4) Muslim identity based on purely religious patterns
5) a western subculture [117]

If we imagine an immigrant from Egypt, that person may have strong ties to a village in Upper Egypt, feel a sense of Egyptian nationalism, feel a general pride in being "Arab" and sharing cultural patterns, be a Muslim, and also be a minority group in the new country. For Roy the immigrant experience throws these levels of identity into fatal contradiction. Local ties, national identity, and cultural patterns are often left behind (especially as the second generation comes along).. and what develops in the place of those other levels of identity is a universal Muslim identity.

Roy makes the point that this universal Muslim identity develops certain "lowest common denominator" points:

In fact, the lowest common denominators in defining a Muslim culture are religious norms that can fit with or be recast along the lines of different cultural customs. Halal is a way to kill an animal, not a way to cook it. it is not linked with a culture and could perfectly well fit with global fast food. [131]

An excellent point. What is cultural is an actual cooking style, i.e. tajin in Morocco or curry in Pakistan. Global Islam ditches the cooking style but maintains a religious norm about the method of slaughtering animals. That method is applicable to any style of cooking.. even fast food. The universal Muslim identity is thus supremely able to take root in any culture.. and its ability to adapt makes it a competitor with Western liberalism.. even the flip side of the coin.

Whether the development of a universal Muslim identity (at the expense of local and cultural identities) is a good thing I cannot say. But it is clear that this is a different experience of Islam than the richly localized and particularized experience of Islam in previous centuries. This difference is not caused by any actual disagreements in doctrine, but simply from a new interior alignment of identities.