Traveling Islam: Islamic Identities in Transnational Localities

Given the proliferation of sweeping pronouncements on Islam since September 11, Transnational Muslim Politics is a thoughtful intervention in the prevailing discourse of incitement about and on Islam. What is remarkable is that, although published shortly before September 11, the book anticipates the hazards emanating from the narrow horizons of identity politics that relies on the production of an already problematized and already semantically and symbolically arrested otherness. With this in mind, Mandaville claims that his book is motivated by a concern “to provide an alternative reading of political Islam,” focusing not so much on “militant movements and their struggles against ‘the West’ . . . but rather on the politics which constitute the daily lives of the vast majority of the world’s Muslims.” “The debate between Islam and the West,” writes Mandaville, “is important, but we have allowed it to so overdetermine our perceptions of Islam that crucial contestations and negotiations within Islam go unnoticed.”

In light of this claim, Mandaville’s purpose is to provide an account of Islam that reflects the complex expressions and occurrences of Islam within the many political and cultural worlds it inhabits. It is to show how Islam is not only within the ambit of Western modernity in historical and contemporary relations as one of its problematized and subordinated others, but also as one of its counterhegemonic rivals, expressing discrepant visions of the world in relation to the West. More importantly, however, Mandaville suggests, the purpose is to show how Islam and the West have historically, though not always consciously or willingly, encountered each other and folded in each other’s civilizational political and ontological expressions. They continue to do so, even in conflictual ways, in the dynamism of a world which is radically unsettling of the identities, subjectivities and relations hitherto informed by the narrow horizons of one religion, one territory, one state, or one nation. In the book, Mandaville demonstrates this relationality by interrogating and displacing “statist territoriality” in favor of “translocality” particularly à la Appadurai, and by identifying translocality as the site of transformative politics in the world.

It is important to note that while the exploration of political Islam occupies the central stage in the book, the analysis is realized through a rich array of interdisciplinary theories, ranging from transnationalism and translocality to the state, territoriality, and its “travels” in global diasporic landscapes. This makes the book a significant contribution, beyond explorations of transnational Islam, to the studies of international relations and global politics.

Of all the conceptual shifts considered in the changing global landscapes, translocality appears central to Mandaville’s study. Mandaville takes translocality to be a “mode” of life activated and energized amidst technological infrastructural exhilarations which allow people to “transcend the boundaries of closed territorial communities.” Translocality refers to the convergence of peoples, cultures, and places that at once situates people in concrete places and specific historical cultural memories yet renders them mobile in the intensification of time-space compression. Where for peoples and cultures, rootedness and mobility simultaneously come to define the conditions and possibilities of life, translocality becomes the mode of life. It shows the way to new forms of politics: political is situated as much within the boundaries of a territorial space as configured across and in between such spaces. It is a travel story more than ever before.

For Mandaville, the import of translocality as a travel politics is thus indispensable in that it compels the observer to see peoples, places and cultures, whether Islamic, Christian, Buddhist or animist, in the travel dynamics of translocality, simultaneously territorially located and exceeding the territorial logic in transversality. This way, translocal spaces emerge as the grounds of life possibilities and expressions for all, not only for Islam but also the West as well as the rest in the world. All is within the reach of the translocality as the operating ground where identities, subjectivities and relations are fluid and syncretic and extend in multiple directions.

Conceptualized thus, Mandaville argues that translocal Islam, that is, Islam, translocalized in its historical travels, is no more or less monolithic...