May 01, 2004
The whole world is on the move, migrating and hoping. The rich world, above all Europe and North America, faces the rising determination of a hundred latecomer nations who were once silent under the blanket of colonialism and backwardness. How do we learn to live together, and at three levels: in an international system, in individual nation-states and, most immediately and intimately, in Western cities which are increasingly the home and the goal of migrants from those ‘delayed’ parts of the world? The answer to this question must not be just abstractly formulated. We attempt here below to accomplish this against the background of what is increasingly being considered the most important counterpoint in our society: the growth and radicalisation of Islam.
A dominant Western concept about coexisting is that we ultimately all belong in the space of a global civil society. This idea is based on the assumption of an opposition between global and local. This is a false opposition between an image of the vernacular and an image of the cosmopolitan, the local tradition of small places and the larger traditions of broader spaces. On one side are the utopia of cosmopolitan liberalism, a space of flows, a frictionless society, and the modern. On the other are the specter of reactionary nationalism or fundamentalism; the space of the illiberal local and moral parochialism; of the traditional, and of migrant religious communities seen as conservative in social matters. Within these constructions, these spaces do not constitute each other, and there is no dialectic between the cosmopolitan and the vernacular that creates them both. This fiction serves to revivify the idea that some cultures are civilized and some are not. The assumption that cultures are things that can be cleanly divided from each other underpins such a notion of civilisational commonsense.
The treatment of this hot topic is always dominated by the political problems supposedly introduced by unassimilable mass immigration, by intrusive refugees and, most importantly, by a conflict rooted in the adherence of settler-descendants to the original cultures of their parents and grandparents. One of the central elements in the debate in Europe about the integration of migrant communities in society, and especially Muslims, is the question of political loyalty. Muslims today are either accused of being loyal to Mecca (and receive money from the Saudis) or to their nation-states of origin. In the Netherlands, where around 700,000 Muslims live (less than 3 percent of the population), a recent report of the Internal Security Agency (BVD) argues that mosques which are supported from ‘outside’ are forces which work against the integration of Muslims in Dutch society. The attachment of these second- and third-generation immigrants to those supposedly dangerous ethnic legacies has been deemed inappropriate to their happy new circumstances.(1)
Suspicions that Muslim migrants have their loyalties elsewhere have been strongly reinforced by the terrorist assault on the USA of September 11. This and other violent attacks have also strengthened the association between the Middle East region and Islam as its essence in the public mind. The fact that there are terrorist networks operating in many Western societies is justifiably seen as a threat to the security of these nation-states.(2) Moreover, the enthusiasm shown by some Muslim youngsters for the actions of Bin Laden has been highly publicised and discussed as an unacceptable provocation to the nation-state and thrown doubts on their loyalty. All these events have given renewed emphasis to the image of Islam as the bad other to liberalism and progress. Not only equality and human rights issues, but also numerous other indicators are harnessed to show the lack of ‘progress’ in Islamic societies.
Cosmopolitanism under fire
The prospects for cosmopolitan democracy look less promising today than they did in the 1990s. The 9/11 attacks and the dominant Western responses to them upset the widespread 1990s vision of an easy, happy progress towards cosmopolitan democracy. The rhetorical opposition between the images of the liberal cosmopolitan and the illiberal local remains influential in reproducing this failure. The opposition is misleading because it does not permit an appreciation of the social character of group formation and membership, including changes in ‘belonging’ and efforts to transcend particular solidarities.
We will briefly focus on the way in which social solidarity and belonging in specific cultural and social settings is marginalized and often stigmatized in the creation of the new and old cosmopolitanisms. Is there a place for culture or ethnicity in cosmopolitanism? Cosmopolitanism often fails to recognize the social conditions of its own constructions, presenting itself as freedom from social belonging rather than a special sort of belonging, a view from nowhere or everywhere rather than from particular social spaces. But such an approach cannot do justice to the reasons why strong attachments to particular solidarities still matter, whether in the forms of nations, ethnicities, local communities, or religions. Cosmopolitanism need not be presented as the universalistic enemy of particular solidarities, but it often is. We will focus here on the various forms of this abstract normative cosmopolitanism: extremely universalistic or more moderately ‘g-local’ oriented.
In addition, I shall describe experiences of cosmopolitanism that are more empirical in nature, in which the urban and cultural experiences are important. Here the emphasis lies on particularity, hybridity, and social-psychological openness to difference. The latter also suggests some of the ways in which a different cosmopolitanism might be developed, one which would complement, not oppose solidarity. I shall treat the links between cosmopolitanism with attitudes within Islam throughout.
1. Universal cosmopolitanism
For world-citizens and their universal cosmopolitanism the most important attachments are the ethical obligations of individuals. The highest and strongest obligation of each person is owed to humanity as a whole (Nussbaum 2002, 1997). When Diogenes the Cynic uttered the phrase, ‘I am a citizen of the world’, in the fourth century BC, he had this meaning of cosmopolitanism in mind. Questioning the exclusive moral claims of local affiliations, he pronounced himself a member of the ethical cosmopolis. One’s scope of moral concern is co-terminous with no particular community or group of communities other than the community of human individuals worldwide. Thus, a moral perspective that claims to be constituted by particular relationships can only promise exclusive moral enclaves and not moral commitments that travel. This cosmopolitanism focuses on the transcendence of ethno-national congruity, namely the linkage between territory (space) and ancestry (time). We could therefore refer to particular supranational and transnational projects such as the EU, dar-ul-Islam or the Peace movement as cosmopolitan if they compete for loyalty with ethnic or national particularisms and maintain a spirit of deepening and extension that is universal.
Islamic cosmopolitanism and world citizenship
Islam is directed at a world community of Muslims, and at proselytizing universally. Indeed, many Islamists have denounced nationalism as being divisive of the universal Muslim Umma. The Islamic Salafist groups stress the return to an original and authentic Islam. In doing so, they go against the ethnicization of Islam. Mosques in Europe tend to be ‘Moroccan’, Turkish’, ‘Algerian’, ‘Bangladeshi’ or otherwise ethnically specific, but this tendency of ethnic division has been rejected as fitna in Islamic thought, and the Salafists or ‘new fundamentalists’ make use of this to preach a global Islam transcending ethnic and national divisions (Roy 2000). There seems also to be a process of individualization at work in Muslims’ response to the migrant situation in which individual belief instead of social conformism is the basis of Islamic behaviour. To be a ‘true’ Muslim is more a personal choice and a matter of internal conversion than the result of social pressure. This ethical cosmopolitan is not only a deracinated individual, but one who must demonstrate personal strength to achieve this, a kind of virtuoso performance of freedom. The emphasis here is on personal life and individuals breaking free from the restrictions of social norms. This cosmopolitanism takes world citizenship as fundamental, clearly and always morally superior to more local bonds, such as ethnic or national solidarities, which are good when they serve the universal good and tolerable only when they do not conflict with world citizenship.
2. G-local cosmopolitanism
For the g-local cosmopolitan, in addition to one’s relationships and affiliations with particular individuals and groups, one also stands in an ethically significant relation to other human beings in general (Scheffler 2001). G-local cosmopolitanism stresses the importance of multiple and overlapping allegiances of different scales (Held 1995). It starts with rights rather than obligations, and holds that there ought to be a democratic polity to administer affairs at every level at which people are connected to each other. People would come to enjoy multiple citizenships and political membership in the diverse political communities which significantly affect them. They would be citizens of their immediate political communities and of the wider regional and global networks which impact upon their lives (Held 1995). G-local cosmopolitanism doesn’t suggest that people necessarily put the universal ahead of the particular in all cases. It does not conceive of cosmopolitanism as a form of deracination, of freedom from cultural particularity.
Hyphenated identities
Migrant communities that have to negotiate the religious policies of both the nation of immigration and the nation of origin face questions of multiple citizenship and religion (Rubah Salih 2001). These questions have gained priority on the European political agenda. Hyphenated identities, which have become of great importance in identity politics in the US, are now also increasingly important in Europe and Asia. The emergence in India of a special kind of hyphenated identity – the non-resident Indian (NRI) – illustrates this as well as the role that trans-national religious movements play in these developments (Kurien 2001). Thus, in a context in which communications have brought everyone closer together, migrant communities at the beginning of the 21st century are different from those at the end of the 19th century. The telephone, the Internet, the television and the airplane have brought them not only closer to home, but also to members of the community in other places. Instead of forming singular migrant communities that try to keep in touch with home, they become diasporic networks with a multiplicity of nodes. Moreover, there is a global production of the imagination of ‘home’ in media like television and cinema, which affects both migrants and those who stay behind. The cultural distance from the traditions of ‘home’ cannot therefore be conceptualised in the same way as before. The notion of ‘culture’ itself has become increasingly problematic since it is hard to localize it in discrete communities within bounded territories.
3. Urban cosmopolitanism
Another important aspect of cosmopolitanism is to be at ease with strangers and in unfamiliar surroundings. It is an experience associated especially with urban life, rather than political organization (Sennett, 1977). This cosmopolitanism involves an appreciation of diversity, not just in the sense of tolerance for the peaceful co-existence of separate spheres, but as a fact of common spaces within which one ‘moves’.
Islamic cosmopolitan urban spaces
Arabic and Muslim empires, like their predecessors and successors, brought together many peoples and cultures and established imperial centres that in their heydays comprised thriving artistic, literary and commercial cultures, an aspect which can be described as urban cosmopolitanism. The Abbasid court created (in the 8th and 9th centuries) such a cosmopolitan milieu mixing the Arab religion with the Persian culture and statecraft, patronizing poets and philosophers. Similar cosmopolitan milieux also arose at various points of the Muslim period in Spain (8th to 15th centuries). In al-Andalus (as Arab Spain was called) was the 12th-century Cordova of Ibn Rushd (Averros), who translated Aristoteles and incorporated Greek philosophy into the Muslim sciences. These spaces of cultural effervescence and hybridity produced figures of cosmopolitan celebration such as the Jewish philosopher and medic Maimonides of 13th-century Spain and Egypt and the later (14th century) Ibn Khaldun. He was the author of the Muqaddima, a greatly admired philosophy of history, considered by many, including E. Gellner, to be a forerunner of sociology and political science, much like Machiavelli. Similar forms of cosmopolitan milieux may have survived in the Ottoman Empire as late as the 19th century. Istanbul, Cairo, Alexandria and Beirut became the locations where economic and cultural modernity flourished from the latter parts of the 19th century. One enclave of cultural as well as political endeavours was that of the Young Ottomans, a group of intellectuals versed in European languages and ideas, but seeking a renaissance of Islamic/Ottoman civilization. A prominent member was Namik Kemal, a poet, essayist and political philosopher, deeply influenced by European currents. Yet, Kemal was firmly attached to the idea that a revived Islam must form the basis of society and government.
Egyptian cosmopolitan milieux
Similar milieux were to be found in Egypt in the 19th and 20th centuries. The most renowned Muslim reformer of the time, Jamaleddin al-Afghani, Asadabadi to the Iranians (1838-1897), was a member of a Freemason lodge in Egypt. Like the Young Ottomans, Afghani’s pan-Islamism was aimed at the restoration of Islam to its pristine origins. The cosmopolitanism of Afghani spans not only the European-Muslim boundaries, but also inter-Muslim cultures. He operated between British India, Iran, Egypt and Turkey, as well as the European capitals. His cosmopolitanism extended to elements in the style of life and culture. Apart from his membership of Masonic lodges, he was also known to frequent cafes and clubs, to be fond of cognac, and rumoured to have had illicit sexual encounters.
Masonic lodges, cafes and salons were among the milieus of cosmopolitanism, but in 19th-century Istanbul, there were also taverns and a drinking culture (Mardin 1962). European as well as Syrian-Lebanese and Turkish influxes into Egypt were stimulated especially with the ambitious construction and urban projects of Khedive Ismail, including the building of the Suez Canal and the rebuilding of Cairo. These legendary cosmopolitan enclaves in Cairo and Alexandria were celebrated in many literary and artistic works, most notably Laurence Durrell’s famous Alexandria Quartet.
In recent decades in various Middle Eastern corners, these Egyptian and Alexandrine cosmopolitan milieus have been the stuff of nostalgia: with the rise of Islamic regimes in the region, intellectuals, liberals and revellers have engaged in nostalgic trips to a romanticised past of cosmopolitan and bohemian spaces and sociabilities. The urban context of the cosmopolitanism of the first half of this century involved networks and milieus of intellectuals, artists, dilettantes and flaneurs in city centres, deracinated, transcending recently impermeable communal and religious boundaries, daring and experimenting. Urban cosmopolitanisms in the Middle East, in this old-fashioned sense, continue to exist in particular corners of urban space. It is not obvious that this urban experience of cosmopolitanism is compatible with a universal cosmopolitanism that seems to imply tolerance of diversity so long as it does not interfere with a primary commitment to equality. Universal cosmopolitanism does not confront the possibility that cultural diversity involves necessary and deep differences in understandings of the public good, or of human rights, which make the imposition of one vision of the public good problematic. Genuine cosmopolitanism in this urban version is a willingness to engage with the other.
4. Cultural cosmopolitanism
The cultural cosmopolitan claims the term ‘cosmopolitan’ not for any singular overarching view of the good, or of universal norms, but for the coexistence of multiple cultural influences and values. It calls for hybridity and for the importance of impurity, mixture, and novelty, rather than appeals to purity (Rushdie1991; Pollock et al. 2000). It is focused more on creative bricolage than on the flâneur as observer of urban difference. This cosmopolitanism is not universal but an infinitude of potential weavings-together of more or less local traditions, cultural productivity that seeks to transcend particular traditions, and practices that seek to express traditions but not only to themselves. It is not enough simply to contrast vernacular to cosmopolitan, the local tradition of small places to the larger traditions of broader spaces. For cultural cosmopolitanism it is crucial to see that these constitute each other. There is a dialectic between the cosmopolitan and the vernacular that creates them both (Pollock 2000).
Islam in diaspora
Diasporic religion, in contrast to native, locative religion, is utopian in the strictest sense of the word, a religion of ‘nowhere’, of transcendence (Smith 1978). These are religious/diasporic spaces that are non-locative. It is ritual and sanctioned practice that is prior and that creates Muslim space. This is a space which does not require juridically claimed territory or formally consecrated or architecturally specific space. The ‘social space’ of networks and identities created in new contexts away from homelands, together with the ‘cultural space’ that emerges as Muslims interact and the ‘physical space’ of residence and community buildings founded in new settings, comprise the imagined maps of diaspora Muslims (Metcalf 1996). The surprising response of Muslim communities in France to the hostage case involving two French journalists in Iraq illustrates that cultural identities, country of origin, territorial solidarity and religious conviction involve much more complex interactions than are apparent in the simple contrast between a universally respected cosmopolitanism and an Islam considered introverted and aggressive.(3)
Conclusion
Extreme ethical cosmopolitanism asserts that citizenship of the world is direct and unmediated- it is an inherent attribute of humanness – and is fundamental and unqualified. Moderate g-local cosmopolitanism values citizenship of the world, but also citizenship in a variety of intermediate associations of different kinds, including corporations and other institutions as well as territorially based populations; it sees world citizenship as at least in part mediated through these other forms of association. Extreme cosmopolitanism, and to a lesser extent many of the moderates, present cosmopolitanism first and foremost as a kind of virtuous deracination, a liberation from the attachments of locality, ethnicity, religion, and nationality. Urban cosmopolitanism is also linked to an idea of citizenship. Not only is there a strong tradition of locating citizenship in cities (rather than nations), but there is an ideal of citizenship focused on the virtue of citizens rather than their belonging to any group. The city is a place in which the virtue of good citizenship can be acquired and displayed, in part because the loyalty of an urban citizen to a city is not to the category of people who happen to be there, but to the place and the life it supports. Finally, critical and cultural cosmopolitanism questions whether the notion of citizenship is a necessary common frame to be shared universally, and worries that exalting the ideal of citizen typically depends on certain notions of public life (and restriction of intimacy to the private sphere) and on the idea of the individual – and especially autonomous interest-bearing individuals – as the subjects of citizenship. For cultural cosmopolitanism, liberal individualism creates a cosmopolitan imaginary signified by the icons of singular ‘personhood’. And when cosmopolitan appeals to humanity as a whole are presented in individualistic terms, they are apt to privilege those with the most capacity to get what they want by individual action. For all these cosmopolitanisms there are Islamic counterparts, or in other words, just like the practice of science does not exclude having religious convictions, cosmopolitanism and Islam do not exclude each other. It is important to stress the dialectic between cosmopolitanism, religion and place because it contains the possibility of a renewed coexistence.
Carlos Betancourth is urban planner and freelance consultant.