Literature Review on Political Unification
Introduction
Every day, I see a fear in their eyes that I can’t do much about. It’s very painful. If you have kids, you know how horrible it is not to be able to comfort them, to ensure they are alright, to make them hope for anything beyond living one more day.
These were the words of Palestinian nephrologist Dr. Hammam Alloh describing the conditions at Al-Shifa hospital in northern Gaza during the first month of Israel’s assault in October 2023. When asked about his decision to stay at the hospital despite warnings to head south, he responded, “And if I go, who treats my patients?…Do you think this is the reason I went to med school, to think only about my life?”1 Dr. Hammam Alloh was killed by an Israeli airstrike 11 days after this interview, aged 36.
This remarkable self-sacrifice goes beyond any professional duty; it exemplifies a level of consciousness that transcends this worldly life. It reflects the nature of an imaginary built around God-consciousness (taqwā). Dr. Alloh is not alone in this regard. There are countless examples of mothers and fathers, children, journalists, educators, and everyday people in Gaza displaying a beautiful patience in the midst of apocalyptic destruction. Virtually everyone in Gaza has been displaced and hundreds of thousands have been severely injured. Despite having had their lives shattered by occupation and unrestrained military aggression, they continue to display resilience, justice, and care for others, driven by an unshakeable faith in Allah a and a profound sense of communal responsibility.2
The Umma is experiencing a crisis of imagination. From the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine to the various wars and conflicts impacting Muslim communities across the globe, and from the political repression experienced by Muslim communities as both minorities and majorities to the economic and social pressures eroding faith, it has become increasingly evident that there are fundamental flaws in our collective self-perception as an Umma. I argue that this flaw stems from our absorption into dominant social imaginaries, which has distorted how we see ourselves and the world around us.
An imaginary is a collective framework that shapes how a community understands the world, interacts with it, and imagines its possibilities. It is the lens through which people perceive the world, guiding their actions and decisions in both conscious and subconscious ways. Charles Taylor conceives of a “social imaginary” as “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.” These elements together produce a “common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.”3 In this paper, our absorption into three dominant social imaginaries will be critically examined.
The concept of an Islamic imaginary encompasses the ways in which we as Muslims collectively envision our social existence, how we engage with other communities, and how life events generate meaning within our societies. This collective unconscious integrates spiritual, social, economic, and political dimensions of daily life, shaping how we interpret the past, navigate the present, and imagine the future, all while maintaining our foundation of Islamic values. This paper seeks to critically examine the decline of the Islamic imaginary and the consequences this has had on the sociopolitical and spiritual challenges faced by Muslims in the modern era. It will explore how dominant social imaginaries—specifically, the white supremacist, neoliberal, and sovereign imaginaries—have stifled the development and expression of an Islamic imaginary around the world.
Beginning with an analysis of the impact of language and words, this paper will demonstrate how linguistic ambiguity is weaponized by despots to reinforce cultural and political hegemony. Proceeding with a critical analysis of the white supremacist imaginary, I will address its impact on the Umma and draw on Malcolm X to illustrate a path for us to eliminate racism from our worldview and strengthen transnational solidarity in the face of oppression. This section will also investigate the significance of Muslims in the West who play a critical role in deconstructing racial hierarchies and challenging the notion of an identity-based politics by asserting ourselves as exclusively Muslim, rejecting a “Muslim-first” identity that I argue legitimates multiple identities eroding ummatic solidarity. I will then discuss the neoliberal imaginary, the role it plays in shaping our condition as an Umma, and our global response to the genocide in Gaza. This section includes an analysis of the ideological economic forces propping up the Zionist state, the social ramifications of neoliberal rationality on Muslims around the world, and the neoliberal capture of Muslim states, as well as a discussion on neoliberal channels of resistance and how capitalism is reducing the power of our collective action. The final section engages with the questions surrounding state sovereignty, and a discussion on intellectual sovereignty, defining the need to de-center western narratives.
“Bad Language”: Ambiguous and Weaponized
Immediately following the events of October 7th, 2023, media coverage of the attacks presented highly explicit language to describe the violence that occurred. The words used were carefully selected to shape public perception and understanding of the events.4 Terms such as “beheaded,” “terrorist,” and “rape” were ubiquitous. These terms not only sensationalized the events but also served to dehumanize the perpetrators and justify harsh retaliatory actions. The grave consequences of these crimes were in turn often described passively using terms such as “died” instead of “killed” or “murdered.”
“Bad Language is now the mightiest weapon in the arsenal of despots and demagogues,” writes Stuart Chase in The Tyranny of Words, in reference to the use of abstract words and phrases that do not possess identifiable referents.5 Any communication that is unable to identify a consistent referent for the words being used is more useful for emotional provocation than the transfer of meaning or understanding.
We continue to be subject to the use of abstract words such as “democracy,” “freedom,” and “civilian” without any concrete understanding of what these terms actually mean. The ability to select and apply words to describe events in real time is not a matter of semantic accuracy but a function of power. Corporate news media operate with linguistic ambiguity and weaponization on behalf of the powerful to misrepresent any actions taken against them and minimize the harm and violence they produce on others. Linguistic ambiguity is the quality of speech or text that allows for multiple interpretations, making it difficult or impossible to determine the referent of the words being used. It is purposefully used to shape ordinary discourse via its intentional and unintentional components. The unintentional component consists of a taken-for-granted element, which embeds ideas that are not supported by the source but, rather, assumed to be common knowledge.6 This assumption plays a large role in developing and maintaining the social imaginaries that are essential to the construction and maintenance of empire; imaginaries that are prominently shaped via mass media.
There are many social imaginaries competing for salience. Across the political spectrum, progressive and conservative visions challenge the boundaries of debate in our public discourse but fall short in challenging the ubiquitous secular and liberal values and norms that form the foundation of our dominant social imaginaries. Many Muslims around the world also fall short in this regard and find themselves navigating social and political challenges with a fundamentally flawed perspective. The ummatic ideal envisions a transnational community bound by a conviction to live as a global community of believers united by their belief in Allah a and His Messenger e, a profound mutual loyalty, and high moral standards.7
This Umma is a community capable of challenging the violent oppression and systemic injustices perpetuated by secular liberal forces worldwide. To develop this vision, we must first transcend the limits of our dominant social imaginaries and replace them with Islamic imaginaries. The three dominant social imaginaries in which Muslims find themselves ensnared are the white supremacist imaginary, the neoliberal imaginary, and the sovereign imaginary. Each must be understood, deconstructed, and consciously avoided. Establishing Islamic imaginaries as a foundational element of a globally operational Umma would transform our social, political, economic, and spiritual realities.
In the Shadow of Whiteness: The White Supremacist Imaginary
[T]here is an unmistakable coincidence between the experiences of Arab Palestinians at the hands of Zionism and the experience of those black, yellow, and brown people who were described as inferior and subhuman by nineteenth-century imperialists.8
In The Question of Palestine, Edward Said locates the violence Palestinians experience as part of the global experience of imperialism that wreaks havoc on other racialized communities worldwide. This unmistakable connection binds the reality of Palestinians facing genocide at the hands of Zionism to the structural racial oppression experienced by the “darker races” of the world at the hands of Western Imperialism. This racist and violent imperialism, which emanated from Western Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries, was underpinned by a medieval Christian theological framework designed to organize legal and social power, resulting in the construction of “whiteness” as the dominant racial and social structure.9
This construction of whiteness has evolved across space and time but remains firmly embedded as the central principle in legal and social development through the emergence of colonial modernity. It also serves as a foundational element of Europe’s Enlightenment-era philosophy, which introduced many of the legal, theological, and social frameworks that continue to influence Western thought today. Enlightenment thinkers often promoted ideas of rationality, progress, and universal human rights, yet these concepts were paradoxically intertwined with beliefs in white superiority and colonial domination. As Kehinde Andrews explains in The New Age of Empire,
The Enlightenment was a product of the first stage of Western imperialism, with slavery and colonialism clearing the ground for its intellectual project. It then provided the intellectual bridge to the new age of empire, which maintains colonial logic but has clothed itself in the legitimacy of democracy, human rights and universal values.10
This white supremacist imaginary continues to persist today in postcolonial Muslim states, organizations, institutions, and communities globally. It perpetuates a sense of alienation within the Umma, as Muslims around the world struggle to assert their subjectivity in a world order that marginalizes their existence. The plight of Palestinians serves as a powerful metaphor for the broader condition of Muslims globally: just as Palestinians are dispossessed and subjugated under colonial rule, Muslims everywhere experience a form of existential homelessness.11 This diasporic condition does not allow for a return to a specific homeland, as the social imaginaries of Western liberalism no longer operate within geographic boundaries, but globally. The struggle lies not in reclaiming a physical territory, but in finding a deeper rooting within the world—a collective reassertion of Islamic values and structures for political and social organization. To challenge the violence of global imperialism, it is necessary to disconnect from our participation in the white supremacist imaginary and replace it with an Islamic one. This shift in the Umma’s social imaginary is critical for redefining global power dynamics and successfully defending the value of life for non-white Muslims and non-Muslims around the world.
In challenging white supremacy, imperial militarism, and our own participation in this social imaginary, we can turn to Malcolm X. After years of grassroots organizing in Harlem, Malcolm X’s entire political and religious epistemology shifted as a result of his experience of fulfilling one of the pillars of Islam, the Hajj. This spiritual experience allowed him to reimagine his identity as a Muslim and the role he would play in resisting racial oppression at home and abroad. During this pilgrimage, Malcolm X experienced a society outside the influence of a white supremacist imaginary: “Everything about the pilgrimage accented the Oneness of Man under One God.”12
Returning home from Hajj, Malcolm X embraced a broader framework for resistance to oppression which included the oppressed globally. This shift did not detract from the movement’s focus on racial justice but expanded his vision to include the struggles against imperialism and colonialism worldwide.13 Malcolm X, through the lens of his Islamic liberation ethics that understood all oppressed people around the world as one under God, attempted to represent an anti-colonial movement in the United States. Five days before he was assassinated, during a speech, Malcolm would call on his supporters to redefine themselves away from a national identity to one that is capable of operating between both domestic and global concerns, likening his struggle for Afro-Americans in the US to the struggle for independence across Africa and the Middle East.14
Nowhere was Malcolm X’s commitment to the global human rights struggle more consequential than in Palestine. Although Arabs were legally classified as “white” by US legal standards since at least the 1950s, Malcolm X deconstructed this notion of race.15 He identified Arabs as part of the oppressed global majority, aligning them with Black Americans and other colonized peoples. Malcolm’s evolving racial consciousness allowed him to reject the US legal classification and instead frame Arabs as “colored” within a broader context of anti-imperialist solidarity. This perspective marked a significant departure from the earlier, more narrow understandings of race, emphasizing a shared struggle against the forces of white supremacy and Zionist aggression. This placed the Palestinian struggle alongside the African American one as a struggle for self-determination in the face of growing US militarism. Malcolm X’s condemnation of Israeli Zionism was comprehensive and internationalist in nature. He characterized the occupation as a new imperialism, differing only from the old in form and method. One of the foundational elements of this solidarity was Malcolm X’s understanding of Islam as the leading force in the battle against Western imperialism.16
Hamid Dabashi’s Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire outlines the central role the legacy of Malcolm X plays in establishing a liberated Islamic theology, suggesting that one of the major features of his success was his having been born within the heart of empire.17 This implies a critical advantage for Muslims in the West as it relates to their role in developing ummatic solidarity and resisting oppression transnationally. One of the reasons Dabashi makes this argument is to challenge the “clash of civilizations” theory proposed by defenders of empire such as Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis. The collapse of the “Islam vs the West” binary is an essential part of establishing an Islamic Imaginary, in which we need to reclaim global ummatic solidarity in a manner that apprehends the deterritorialized nature of the 21st century. With this in mind, Muslims in the West play an important role in the functional operation of both the empire and the Umma. Muslims in the West will find themselves either standing firm as a community in opposition to their domestic political leaders and alongside their brothers and sisters in Gaza and elsewhere or find themselves standing alongside the genocide enablers, who wish to launder their actions as acceptable through their local Muslim communities, and directly or indirectly participate in or even profit from the violence.
A primary site of Muslim transnational solidarity can be found on university campuses, where students and professors alike stand at a critical battleground in contesting the legitimacy of the status quo. For this, they pay a high price. In what some refer to as a “new McCarthyism,” anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian racism is the driving force for the politically motivated repression at US universities that targets academics who are committed to Palestinian liberation.18 Likewise, students across several Western countries gathered on university campuses to challenge genocidal imperialism, forcing the popular demand of a ceasefire to remain in the collective imaginary of the public in the face of abuse from law enforcement and suspensions from university administrations.19 On the other hand, government and legacy media institutions harbor Muslims who support Israel’s right to exist, whitewashing the abuses taking place and condemning the resistance of the oppressed while legitimizing the violence of the oppressors. The ‘go-to Muslim’, often in government or media, is referred to by the elite in times of crisis to condemn any form of political violence, while simultaneously being responsible for explaining Muslim identity, values, and culture in order to find belonging and acceptance in white social spaces.20
Muslims in the West play a crucial role in reviving an Islamic imaginary through transnational ummatic solidarity, in no small part due to the shift in public consciousness they were able to spark through demonstrations in Europe and North America. By exposing the moral hypocrisy of Western human rights and so-called “universal” values, demonstrators were able to call for a ceasefire on the basis of a shared human identity, rather than a national or religious one. This approach allowed non-Muslims to envision themselves as part of a common human identity alongside the Palestinians.21 Despite efforts to spread misinformation and vilify Islam through linguistic ambiguity and state securitization measures targeting Muslim communities, the popular response to the Israeli assault on Gaza has largely favored Palestinians, with the majority of Americans opposing Israeli aggression within a few months of its start.22 While much of the world is already aware of US and European imperial violence, social media networks have bypassed traditional mass media, enabling people—especially those within the heart of the empire—to witness in real time both the brutal actions of the Zionist regime and the remarkable display of faith from the steadfast believers in Gaza.
There is also a noticeable generational shift occurring as younger demographics, increasingly disillusioned with colonial modernity, are drawn to the Islamic faith.23 According to the TikTok analytics team, the hashtag #Islam saw 35 billion views among users aged 18-24 in the two months following October 2023, with over 1 billion views in the United States and 360 million views in Canada.24 One 21-year-old user converting to Islam on October 27th 2023, said that seeing a woman carrying a dead child out of a building bombarded by Israel, raising her hands and thanking Allah c by saying “alhamdulillah” was the touching experience that inspired his interest in Islam.25 The disillusionment with modern Western ways of being is fueled by growing domestic inequality, leading to anger and frustration with the status quo. Islam offers spiritual relief and a means to resist and fight back against these oppressive systems, as well as a sense of community and belonging.
The Farewell Sermon (khuṭbat al-wadāʿ) of the Prophet e was delivered on the day of ʿArafa to a vast congregation representing the bulk of the Umma at that time. In this address, the Prophet e reaffirmed the central teachings of the Qur’an and Sunna, while offering guidance on several key issues. Among these was the repudiation of racial superiority, as he declared: “An Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab, nor does a non-Arab have any superiority over an Arab. A white person has no superiority over a black person, nor does a black person have any superiority over a white person—except through piety and righteous action.”26 Tribes from across the Arabian Peninsula—some of whom had only recently accepted Islam after the liberation of Makka—gathered to listen to this sermon. These new converts, hailing from distant regions like Yemen and Najd, had not yet fully internalized the teachings of unity and brotherhood that were ingrained in the hearts of the Prophet’s e closest companions in Makka and Madina. Historically divided by conflicts and rivalries, these diverse groups found themselves united under a new vision.
The Prophet e dismantled the entrenched notions of superiority based on race, wealth, and tribal status. In their place, he established an Islamic imaginary grounded in piety and God-consciousness, which redefined the basis of unity for the community of believers. Piety and good deeds are the true measure of a person’s worth, but they are ultimately judged by Allah c alone. As humans, we lack the ability to fully discern the sincerity of another’s actions or faith, and therefore must approach others with humility, recognizing that outward displays of religiosity do not necessarily reflect true piety. This shift in consciousness not only addressed the immediate historical moment but laid the foundation for a lasting Islamic ethic that transcended division, inspiring Muslims across generations to find common purpose in their faith.
As Muslims today, we must reconnect with this message, remembering that our identity as members of the Umma of Prophet Muhammad e comes with the responsibility to uphold justice on a global scale. While modern Muslim activists may aspire to emulate the transformative work of the companions, this aspiration should be approached with humility, recognizing that even our greatest efforts are modest in comparison. Nonetheless, the Islamic imaginary remains a powerful model for motivating and uniting Muslims in the pursuit of a more just and equitable world.
In the Iron Cage of Capital: The Neoliberal Imaginary
It was the believers’ unambiguous understanding of their own identity that allowed the ummatic ideal to flourish and spread far east and west during the first few generations after the death of the Prophet Muhammad e. This understanding fueled the early expansion of Islam beyond the Arabian Peninsula, but was quickly challenged by factional divisions exacerbated by power struggles and competition for control over the spoils of conquest during the Umayyad era, when the caliphate’s slow establishment of universal authority led to intra-Muslim conflict within the first 150 years, driven by regional elites invoking pre-Islamic tribal solidarity.27 The ummatic consciousness developed by the companions of Prophet Muhammad e was shaped by their shared interests being centered on the hereafter. This reality was best displayed during the Hijra when the Muhājirīn arrived in Madina and joined the Ansār in an act of unparalleled devotion, shedding any trace of their former selves. Gone were the tribal affiliations, the ancient blood feuds, and the regional loyalties that previously defined their existence. In their place developed a confessional identity that united and divided according to the testimony of faith, Lā ilāha illā Allāh. This transformation forged an Umma, driven by a collective purpose and unwavering belief.
Youshaa Patel, in his book The Muslim Difference, elaborates on how this Islamic imaginary was shaped by Muslims perceiving themselves as distinct from non-Muslims. Patel argues that the early Muslim community’s self-understanding was critically informed by a clear distinction between believers and disbelievers, which not only reinforced internal cohesion but also provided a framework for engaging with the broader world.28 This difference was not merely theological but encompassed all aspects of social and cultural life, contributing to the expansive nature of the early Umma. One of the major roadblocks to establishing an Islamic imaginary fourteen centuries later is the fragmented understanding of Muslim identity we possess today. Instead of understanding ourselves and our relationship with one another across the globe through the lens of faith, we each carry multiple identities that call for us to sacrifice our time, wealth, energy, and devotion, undermining our collective Islamic identity. Nationality, race, tribe, gender, and class are all embedded in our current conception of an Umma. Instead of using these worldly characteristics as tools for understanding contemporary realities, we often internalize them as core parts of our identity and prioritize those group interests, even when they harm the Umma. However, the true basis of our unity should be rooted in God-consciousness (taqwā) and the sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad e. This ethical framework guides us to engage with one another in a way that transcends material or social divisions, ensuring that our actions are always aligned with the values of justice, compassion, and piety that define our faith.
With the emergence of modernity, postcolonial relationships to Europe and the United States were shaped by philosophers and political theorists to instill the fundamental principles of capitalism into colonized subjects, namely material self-interest and atomized individualism.29 These principles have deeply embedded themselves into our conceptualizations of ummatic solidarity, and our role in the collective. Neoliberalism has shaped global politics and feeds into the structural oppression that Muslim communities around the world face today. In Gaza, neoliberalism fuels the active genocide by supplying and producing the weapons, technology, goods, and services required to maintain US/Israeli domination in the region. Muslim states find themselves impotent in the face of these attacks, partly due to the threat of violence they face, but mostly because they are firmly invested in the same global markets that continue to produce calamities for poor, weak, and disenfranchised Muslims around the world.
In contrast, US imperial policy in the region secures the state of Israel through its global economic hegemony, maintained by its projection of military power. While US military aid for Israel feeds into the military-industrial complex, the US and Israel also share the geopolitical military strategy of eliminating the distinction between civilian and military targets in an effort to project a posture of total domination, aiming to mask their declining political and economic status. French sociologist Emmanuel Todd describes the US as, “battling to maintain its status as the world’s financial center by making a symbolic show of its military might in the heart of Eurasia.”30 The wanton disregard for Palestinian life in Gaza is in many ways designed to reinforce the neoliberal imaginary that suggests empire and its global hegemonic control is unchallengeable. Instead, we are experiencing a significant political battle in the cultural imaginary, where neoliberal market rationality is producing high-intensity warfare abroad and low-intensity warfare at home, resulting in more and more people showing support for, and relating themselves, to the oppressed.31
To demonstrate this, we can take a look at our response to this genocide on social media. Neoliberal global capitalism has engineered itself to absorb all forms of action into its scope to be rendered as a resource to be extracted for profit. Instead of social media enabling transnational organizing and political revolution, in the neoliberal regime social media is a tool of control and surveillance weaponized against its users’ collective interests and not for them. The totalitarian nature of corporate governance over our ‘public square’ discourse sees censorship and algorithmic manipulation become the order of the day. In this way, efforts to organize and resist dominant neoliberal regimes of power are undermined by the use of and dependence on social media as a means of communication. As explained by philosopher Byung-Chul Han:
More and more, social media resembles digital panopticon keeping watch over the social realm and exploiting it mercilessly. We had just freed ourselves from the disciplinary panopticon—then we threw ourselves into a new, and even more efficient, panopticon.32
This digital panopticon is described by the author as the reason people possess neither the will nor the ability to participate in communal political action; they instead are only able to engage with politics as consumers, acting passively and only capable of complaining.
This neoliberal technology operates as a tool of oppression against all members of society, but particularly dissidents. In this case, anyone organizing to resist the Israeli/US genocide in Gaza will be subject to surveillance, termination, incarceration, and for Palestinians resisting the occupation and genocide directly, extermination. X, formerly known as Twitter, leases all its information to a company called Dataminr, which in turn sells that data to law enforcement agencies across the United States, including the Department of Defense.33 While many people have lost their jobs over social media posts related to the violence, the story of Ferras Hamad is particularly egregious. A Palestinian-American engineer, he was terminated from Meta for trying to fix bugs responsible for suppressing pro-Palestinian Instagram posts.34 Earlier this year, Democrats in New York introduced a bill expanding the definition of domestic terrorism to include blocking public roads, a direct response to the mass protests in opposition to the war in Gaza.35 Mass destruction, indiscriminate killing and starvation are not enough for the Israeli occupation; they also employ the use of neoliberal technology such as social media to target Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli Lavender system, supported by artificial intelligence, identifies Palestinians by tracking their communication via Meta-owned WhatsApp, and targets Palestinians for murder using as little data as being in a WhatsApp group with a militant.36
While social media campaigns to raise awareness have done a tremendous amount of good in educating and turning public opinion, most of our efforts stop there. Social media use becomes a sociopolitical vacuum, absorbing the emotions of the outraged and acting as a therapeutic site instead of an arena for meaningful political discourse. As Jodi Dean explains in Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, “the internet provides an imaginary site of action and belonging.”37 Communication under “communicative capitalism” represents a political disempowerment, as communication is reduced to a commodity that flows in data streams while unable to function as communication should. Instead of rendering a message from sender to receiver, the information circulates endlessly between individuals, making a true political solidarity impossible. The most valuable component of communication, understanding, is lost on social media and replaced with an exchange value. Within communicative capitalism, messages do not need to be understood, only exchanged. The volume of content is measured and thus assigned a value based on the number of likes, shares and reposts it gets. Contributing to public discourse online allows one to imagine they are contributing to a cause or participating in a movement. In fact, one is only contributing to an information stream that is detached from any real impact. Market domination over the political sphere has contributed to the depoliticization of the public, who instead imagine themselves as market actors who no longer have any democratic political influence but hope instead to express their political beliefs through consumption.
This mode of political engagement through consumption displays itself in media use but more prominently features itself in the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. The success of the BDS movement to center the Palestinian struggle against apartheid and settler colonialism, deploying a non-violent civil movement in compliance with international law, and demanding the end of the occupation, full equality and the right to return, makes it a powerful movement around the world.38 While the campaign has not yet achieved these objectives, it has successfully impacted the cognitive awareness of this struggle in Europe and the United States. This impact is visible among broad segments of the population and particularly among the highly educated, where Israel’s image as a legitimate democratic state has declined.39
Answering the call from Palestinian civil society to target corporations complicit in the occupation is both a moral duty and the least an individual can do to show solidarity. More importantly, it reflects an Islamic ethical responsibility, as the Prophet Muhammad e said: “Whosoever among you sees an evil, let him change it with his hand; if he is not able, then with his tongue; and if he is not able, then with his heart—and that is the weakest of faith.”40 However, this response has itself been overwhelmed by the neoliberal imaginary. Like social media campaigns, reliance on the BDS movement actively reinforces the neoliberal imaginary by framing political action primarily through consumer choices rather than collective action. By focusing on consumption, we inadvertently uphold the neoliberal framework that emphasizes individual consumer power over organized collective power.
Neoliberalism’s emphasis on consumer choice and individual responsibility places the burden of ethical decision-making on each Muslim, making participation in the BDS movement less a collective effort and more a personal, moral imperative that must be considered in every decision we make. Neoliberalism further exacerbates this isolation by undermining organized labor power and preventing the formation of organized transnational financial power among Muslims, making the individual burden of boycotting the only accessible option for many. Meanwhile, divestment and sanctions, which require coordinated political efforts and collective action, remain largely unattainable within a system that prioritizes profit and disempowers collective political mobilization.
This approach limits our claim to power as an Umma, as it overlooks the potential of organizing our labor as a form of resistance, which has historically been more effective in challenging systemic injustices and achieving meaningful change. Political empowerment requires surpassing the limits set by the market for the sake of building transnational solidarity that transcends individual consumer habits. Fostering global ummatic solidarity would allow us to organize our labor power to create an alternative market, free from all forms of oppression and capable of reinforcing Islamic unity, providing real political power on the global stage. Individually, we only possess the power to boycott, while divestment and sanctions require political and institutional action. We need to build alternative institutions grounded in Islamic values. We must not limit our imagination to this form of neoliberal resistance but use this moment to envision and work towards a system where transnational Muslim labor and financial power, not just consumption, is the driving force for political and economic transformation.
The example of the early Muslim community established in Madina after the Hijrah brought to life the concept of an economically organized Umma. While the Muhājirīn migrated solely on the grounds of faith, leaving behind their wealth and property, the Ansār were largely invested in agriculture. The Prophet e observed the marketplaces of Madina, which were operated by Jews and polytheists. Noticing the cheating, deception, high taxes, and other forms of corruption in those markets, he declared to the Muslims, “This is not a souk for you.” He then walked towards the masjid, drew a line in the sand with his foot, and proclaimed, “This shall be your souk. Let it not be diminished and let no one tax the people in it.”41 This pivotal moment in the development of the Islamic society demarcated the early Muslim community from their non-Muslim counterparts, many of whom they would later find themselves in direct conflict with. It established an alternative conception of market-based transactions without compromising Islamic principles. While the foundation of an Islamic market proved to be a cornerstone in the political, social, and economic development of the community, the act of drawing a line in the sand was a powerful visual that helped establish an Islamic imaginary. This action did not serve a functional geographic or operational role but proved to be a significant act in constructing the social imaginary of what it means to be an Umma, beyond just applying Islamic values and principles within a totally corrupt market. The line in the sand effectively displayed the either/or dynamic of Islamic market relations: either you engage with corrupt markets and participate in the injustice it produces, or you establish Islamic markets that uphold the rules, values, and principles established by Allah c and His Messenger. To disengage from corrupt markets altogether and establish an alternative can only be possible when we are able to imagine ourselves as an Umma, united against neoliberalism with faith as our central organizing characteristic.
In the Shadow of the State: The Sovereign Imaginary
One of the core contradictions impeding the development of an Islamic imaginary and transnational ummatic solidarity is between relational and spatial sovereignty.42 Modern nation-states, operating within a liberal political ontology, define sovereignty in terms of geographic territory. This framework grants the state a monopoly on violence and designates it as the ultimate sovereign authority. A central aim of the colonial project in Palestine is to subjugate not only the people, but also the very notion that state sovereignty can be challenged, even when such resistance is popular. By denying Palestinian statehood, the Western liberal order denies their right to a legitimate armed resistance entirely, and when that armed resistance occurs, seeks to eliminate that possibility using force up to and including ethnic cleansing and genocide, despite non-state actors’ right to resist colonial domination and foreign occupation. The Zionist project is the culmination of a century-long sovereign imaginary that has attached itself to the Western liberal political order and has actively undermined the possibility of a global ummatic solidarity.
The genocidal Israeli state is operating on behalf of a transnational liberal political order that seeks to maintain spatial sovereignty by any means, including genocide and ethnic cleansing. The modern nation-state aims to control the people within its territorial boundaries but is incapable of achieving this when large numbers of people reject its authority. To address this limitation in spatial sovereignty, Israeli occupation applies several layers of violent control over the territory it seeks to claim and the people it considers hostile within it. Bordering regimes are put in place that allow for the internal division of the Palestinians through exclusion, territorial diffusion, commodified inclusion, and discursive control.43
Exclusion of Palestinians is achieved through the use of prisons, checkpoints and walls to physically separate them from Israeli society, with the Gaza Strip entirely sealed off and made into the world’s largest open-air prison.44 Territorial diffusion is used to subject Palestinians to racialized surveillance through various identity cards used to regulate mobility and residency without providing any citizenship rights.45 Commodified inclusion applies neoliberal logic to colonial domination, enabling the Israeli state to dispossess Palestinian labor by rendering their pursuit of a livelihood and their contribution to nationhood as mutually exclusive domains, ultimately undermining Palestinian participation in communal life and weakening their capacity for social reproduction and anticolonial resistance.46 Discursive control in the war on Gaza operates through Israeli attempts to dominate the narrative of violence, making the “right to defend itself” central to statehood, while portraying Gazan civilians as “human shields” to legitimize the targeting of civilian life and infrastructure.47
The legal or political sovereignty of the modern nation state relies on a series of imagined narratives manipulating historical realities and obfuscating power dynamics. Despite the political tools deployed to control, shape, and limit possible imaginaries—through violent bordering regimes, commodified labor, and discursive manipulation—the establishment of an Islamic imaginary rooted in transnational ummatic solidarity offers a powerful means of liberation. It challenges the spatial sovereignty of modern nation-states and opens up the possibility of a world beyond the constraints of colonial modernity.
Benedict Anderson conceptualizes the political imaginary of nationalism as a reality constructed through national self-identification and collective solidarity, facilitated by the cultural and technical innovations of European modernity. He argues that, “Imagined communities are not just in our heads – they are not just mental phenomena of a virtual, ephemeral, and internal nature – but are part of the construction of our common, physical world and the way we act in it.”48 This engagement with a constructed reality poses a challenge for Muslims, as it compromises our ability to act in a manner that respects and upholds sovereignty as understood within the Islamic tradition. Pre-modern political orders, including the Caliphate, understood sovereignty relationally rather than spatially. The decline of the Caliphate—a transnational political institution designed to uphold Islam and empower Muslims—has contributed to the rise of imperial violence against Muslims globally.49 The Umma is not territorially defined and lacks spatial borders. The relational bonds that unite believers stem from a shared recognition of the ultimate sovereignty of Allah c, and are strengthened by the quality of faith held by the believers.
This stands in stark contrast to nationalist unity, which ties bonds to geographic territory, culture, and language, and quantifies the strength of the nation through quantitative metrics such as population, per capita income, and GDP. The companions of the Prophet e, who represent the earliest formation of the Umma, faced war, bloodshed, and torture, often while severely outnumbered and confronting much wealthier oppressors. It was their bond through faith, empowered by the mercy of Allah c, that enabled their success. This example underscores the necessity of reimagining this formula in the present day for our own success, despite the apparent strength of those who oppress believers the world over.
In Gaza, we are witness to a live demonstration of faith that is single-handedly reviving the Umma and returning us to a level of taqwa many of us could not have imagined before. It is critically important that we imagine the struggle of the Palestinian people, alongside Muslims in similar conditions around the world, not as being the weakest among us and deserving of pity, but as the best among us deserving admiration by virtue of faith.
The European Enlightenment and subsequent technological advancements drew considerable inspiration from the epistemic achievements of the Islamic world. The rich cultural and intellectual heritage of the early Islamic period, with its substantial contributions to fields such as mathematics, medicine, and astronomy, laid critical groundwork for European scientific progress. However, the advent of secularism during the Enlightenment era systematically excluded religious consciousness from the realms of economic development and politics, severing the spiritual dimension that had previously informed intellectual and social ambitions. Colonization compounded this displacement, dismantling traditional epistemic and knowledge production systems while actively undermining the cultural and religious identities of the colonized. Despite these disruptions, Islam has maintained its foundational principles and teachings.
In the current era, a secular political globalization is progressively undermining the influence of religion in politics across the globe. Establishing an Islamic imaginary plays a vital role in the process of seeking epistemic sovereignty, as it enables Muslims to disengage from the secular Western institutions implicated in the genocide and the broader dehumanization of Palestinians. By reintegrating taqwā (God-consciousness) into modern technological and intellectual frameworks, we can recover our intellectual heritage and realign our societies with the spiritual and ethical tenets intrinsic to our faith while avoiding euro-fetishism.50 The calamity many Muslims experience in the present moment is the failure of knowing and understanding global social, political, economic, and cultural trends from an Islamic worldview. Instead, many of us have our thinking rooted in the dominant social imaginaries that reproduce the power relations that continue to oppress and sustain injustice. Joseph Lumbard describes this challenge facing modern Muslims as one of reliance upon “epistemologies that are not simply foreign to classical Muslim epistemologies, but even opposed to them, because they are grounded in a paradigm that denies the very idea of the transcendent.”51
Palestinians have endured unimaginable suffering with a steadfast faith. Their pain and resilience force us to confront the harsh realities facing us. The human condition in Palestine reflects the broader challenges we face as an Umma. The violence we are witnessing is not an isolated event, rather it reflects a global pattern of neglect and inequality that continues to see Muslims suffer in Sudan, Yemen, Myanmar, India, Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria and in communities across the world. We must recognize that our faith calls us to engage with one another beyond material affiliations. The suffering of Muslims around the world is not merely a burden for local populations to bear, but a responsibility we must all share. The persistent violence against the “wretched of the earth” is a wake-up call for us to realize our collective potential as a universal Umma. Our challenge is to uphold the principles of justice, compassion, and solidarity as exemplified by the Prophet Muhammad e. The ephemeral nature of this world reminds us to invest in the eternal life, to seek Allah’s c pleasure, and to sacrifice for those who suffer. By doing so, we honor the divine purpose that guides our existence and reaffirm our commitment to a world where peace and justice prevail.
Conclusion: Towards an Islamic Imaginary
While the Umma may be in the throes of a crisis of imagination, the global liberal order, currently led by the United States, is experiencing a crisis of its own. This crisis is far greater than ours and threatens a rapid collapse.52 The liberal West is witnessing its domestic politics unravel at the seams with rising inflation, unemployment and political extremism on issues related to race, religion and immigration, while suffering loss after loss on the global geopolitical stage. After a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, failure to contain Russian aggression, diminishing global reliance on the US dollar, and the loss of economic and technological status to China, the United States and the Western bloc continue to find their global dominance increasingly challenged across multiple fronts.
The prevailing Western imaginary—a framework built on white supremacy, neoliberalism, and state sovereignty—has expanded globally. While it asserts universal claims of progress and development, these promises are increasingly detached from reality. The recent genocidal campaign in Gaza is not a sign of strength, but of weakness. The world desperately needs a new vision, one currently being modeled by the resilience of the people in Gaza. This vision challenges racial oppression and demands economic justice by limiting the market’s power over human life. It envisions a world of dignity and free movement, transforming the “global village” into a reality. The primary obstacle to this future is the self-imposed limitation on the Muslim imagination. Tawfiq is from Allah c; if the Ummah remains sincere in its faith and strives toward its highest ambitions, it can reclaim its role in restoring the human condition.
Our liberation from dominant social imaginaries requires a return to an authentic Islamic vision. To achieve this, we must purge the heart and mind of all notions of racial superiority, specifically the lingering reverence for whiteness and the Eurocentric philosophical traditions that underpin it. By rejecting identity politics in favor of our collective identity as an Umma, we restore taqwā (God-consciousness) as the only true measure of human distinction. This internal shift must be accompanied by a conscious resistance to the market forces and neoliberal ideologies that dictate our behaviors and relationships. Only by identifying how these imaginaries shape our resistance can we begin to dismantle the neoliberal rationality that currently destabilizes Muslim communities globally.
True security is not found in the protection of the state or the possession of a passport, but in the recognition that Allah a is al-Malik (The Sovereign) over all creation. The prevailing global imaginaries—rooted in apartheid, colonialism, and genocide—are built upon the falsehood of racial hierarchy and the greed of global capitalism. To counter the resulting state violence and environmental decay, we must establish epistemic sovereignty by reintegrating taqwā into our production of knowledge and our daily lives. By establishing an Islamic imaginary that prioritizes the well-being of the Umma over individual self-interest, we offer a transformative alternative to the world. Restoring this collective faith is the only path to true success in this life and the next.
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Suggested Citation:
Mustaf Egal, “Reviving an Islamic Social Imaginary: Confronting White Supremacist, Neoliberal, and Sovereign Hegemonies,” Ummatics, Jan 21, 2026, http://ummatics.org/Islamic-social-imaginary.
Notes
“‘We’re Being Exterminated’: Hear One of Dr. Hammam Alloh’s Last Interviews from Gaza Before His Death,” Democracy Now, Nov 13, 2023, https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/13/remembering_hammam_alloh
Notably, this remarkable faith and resilience has had a positive impact on others too: 78% of English-speaking Muslims have said their relationship with Allah a has improved since October 7th, while 91% have said that the people of Gaza have given them quite a bit or a lot of religious inspiration. See Osman Umarji, “Gaza’s Rise: Inspiring the Muslim Ummah’s Collective Consciousness and Religiosity,” Yaqeen Institute, Jan 8, 2024, https://yaqeeninstitute.org/read/post/gazas-rise-inspiring-the-muslim-ummahs-collective-consciousness-and-religiosity.
Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (New York: Duke University Press, 2004), 23. For more, see Chapter 2 of this work.
For a discussion on this type of active framing in sociopolitical analysis and the need for ummatic frames, see Aisha Hasan, “Towards Ummatic Frame for Political Analysis,” Ummatics, 02 Oct 2024, https://ummatics.org/geopolitics-and-international-relations/ummatic-frames/
Stuart Chase, The Tyranny of Words (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938),14.
Carl W. Roberts, “Semantic Text Analysis: On the Structure of Linguistic Ambiguity in Ordinary Discourse,” in Text Analysis for the Social Sciences, (Routledge, 2020), 61.
Garbi Schmidt, “The Transnational Umma—Myth or Reality? Examples from the Western Diasporas,” The Muslim World 95, no. 4 (2005): 577 .
Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1980 [1979]), 68–9.
John Chenault, “Western Christianity and the Origins of Antiblackness, Eurocentrism, and White Supremacist Ideology” (PhD Thesis, University of Louisville, 2022), https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd/3835/. For further studies on whiteness and white supremacy, see: David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York and London: Verso, 1991); Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); Charles W. Mills, “White Supremacy as Sociopolitical System: A Philosophical Perspective,” in White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, ed. Ashley W. Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), 42–55, and the expanding field of Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS).
Kehinde Andrews, The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World (Penguin UK, 2021), 24.
Kehinde Andrews, The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World (Penguin UK, 2021), 24.
Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Random House, 2015), 343.
Ta-Nehisi Jones, “The Ideological and Spiritual Transformation of Malcolm X,” Journal of African American Studies 24, no. 3 (2020): 430.
Robert E. Terrill, “Colonizing the Borderlands: Shifting Circumference in the Rhetoric of Malcolm X,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 86, no. 1 (2000): 67–85.
Hamzah Baig, “Spirit in Opposition: Malcolm X and the Question of Palestine,” Social Text 37, no. 3 (2019): 58.
Hamzah Baig, “Spirit in Opposition,” 62.
Hamid Dabashi, Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire (London: Routledge, 2008), 254.
Natasha Lennard, “University Professors are Losing their Jobs over ‘New McCarthyism’ on Gaza,” The Intercept, May 16, 2024, https://theintercept.com/2024/05/16/university-college-professors-israel-palestine-firing/
Sohail Mahmood, “The Gaza War Roils US College Campuses: A Brief,” International Policy Digest, 6 June, 2024, https://intpolicydigest.org/the-platform/the-gaza-war-roils-u-s-college-campuses-a-brief/
Asim Qureshi, ed., I Refuse to Condemn: Resisting Racism in Times of National Security (Manchester University Press, 2020), 152.
Azmi Bishara, “Gaza,” Al-Muntaqa: New Perspectives on Arab Studies 7, no. 1 (2024): 14.
Jeffrey Jones, “Majority in U.S. Now Disapprove of Israeli Action in Gaza,” Gallup, Mar 27, 2024, https://news.gallup.com/poll/642695/majority-disapprove-israeli-action-gaza.aspx.
Ayse Aytekin, “Western Youth turn to Islam, Inspired by Palestinians’ faith in God,” TRT World, Nov 9, 2023, https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/western-youth-turn-to-islam-inspired-by-gazans-faith-in-god-17452581
Nahid Widaatalla, “After Seeing the Struggle of Palestinians in Gaza, TikTok Users are Learning about Islam,” The Conversation, Dec 18, 2023, https://theconversation.com/after-seeing-the-struggle-of-palestinians-in-gaza-tiktok-users-are-learning-about-islam-218503
Nahid Widaatalla, “After Seeing the Struggle of Palestinians in Gaza.”
Aḥmad, 23489.
Peter Webb, “Identity and Social Formation in the Early Caliphate,” in Routledge Handbook on Early Islam (London: Routledge, 2017), 145.
Youshaa Patel, The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line Between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present (United Kingdom: Yale University Press, 2024).
Muriam Haleh Davis, Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria (Duke University Press, 2022).
Francis Shor, “War in the Era of Declining US Global Hegemony,” Journal of Critical Globalization Studies 2 (2010): 74.
Matt Davies and Simon Philpott, “Militarization and popular culture,” in The Marketing of War in the Age of Neo-Militarism (Routledge, 2013), 52.
Byung Chul-Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (Verso Books, 2017), 5.
“How the Gaza War is Reshaping Social Media,” The Intercept, March 29, 2024, https://theintercept.com/2024/03/29/deconstructed-gaza-war-social-media-instagram-tiktok/
Reuters, “Former Meta Engineer Sues Company, Saying He Was Fired Over Handling Gaza Content,” June 5, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/technology/former-meta-engineer-sues-company-saying-he-was-fired-over-handling-gaza-content-2024-06-05/
Truthout, “Report Indicates Israel Uses WhatsApp Data in Targeted Killings of Palestinians,” https://truthout.org/articles/report-indicates-israel-uses-whatsapp-data-in-targeted-killings-of-palestinians/.
Truthout, “Report Indicates Israel Uses WhatsApp Data in Targeted Killings of Palestinians,” https://truthout.org/articles/report-indicates-israel-uses-whatsapp-data-in-targeted-killings-of-palestinians/.
Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Duke University Press, 2009), 43.
Omar Barghouti, BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights (Haymarket Books, 2011), 62.
Amir Prager, “Achievements according to the BDS Movement: Trends and Implications,” INSS, Strategic Assessment 22, no. 1 (2019): 47.
Muslim, 49.
Yasir Qadhi, The Sirah of the Prophet e: A Contemporary and Original Analysis (KUBE Publishing Ltd., UK, 2023), 180.
Kevin Olson, Imagined Sovereignties: The Power of the People and Other Myths of the Modern Age (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 12.
Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Haymarket Books, 2021), 77-92.
Avram Bornstein, “Military Occupation as Carceral Society: Prisons, Checkpoints, and Walls in the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle,” Social Analysis 52, no. 2 (2008): 106-130.
Elia Zureik, “Strategies of Surveillance: The Israeli Gaze,” Jerusalem Quarterly 66 (2016).
Andreas Hackl, “Occupied Labour: Dispossession through Incorporation among Palestinian Workers in Israel,” Settler Colonial Studies 13, no. 1 (2023): 97.
Sandra Simonsen, “Discursive Legitimation Strategies: The Evolving Legitimation of War in Israeli Public Diplomacy,” Discourse & Society 30, no. 5 (2019): 503-520.
Kevin Olson, Imagined Sovereignties: The Power of the People and Other Myths of the Modern Age (Cambridge University Press, 2016) 27.
James Piscatori and Amin Saikal, Islam Beyond Borders: The Umma in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2019) 25.
John M. Hobson and Alina Sajed, “Navigating Beyond the Eurofetishist Frontier of Critical IR Theory: Exploring the Complex Landscapes of Non-Western Agency,” International Studies Review 19, no. 4 (2017): 547–572.
Joseph Lumbard, “Islam and the Challenge of Epistemic Sovereignty,” Religions 15, no. 4 (2024): 406.
Alfred W. McCoy, “The Decline and Fall of It All? American Empire in Crisis,” CounterPunch (2024).
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