Folds of Identity
In a secular and post-secular world, no single set of religious teachings have a monopoly on how to live the good life. Most religious actors and representatives, however, would often wrongly make muscular claims that they do. Islamic tradition and modern iterations of it do have some bearing on the life world of Muslims today. To what extent normative Islamic teachings shape the identities of Muslims is a proposition that is always contested. Even in a single culture or faith tradition norms are often plural, if not diverse. However, from the outside it might appear that Islamic societies are more fractured, divided and possibly more undecided on the large moral questions of the day.
Perhaps the most honest account would be to say that Muslim identities are marked by agonism: hovering between multiple iterations of tradition and the ethicoscapes of the modern. In short, Islam like some other traditions is a work-in-progress albeit at a rapid rate. Western Christianity is embedded in strong and viable states and possesses strong institutions and massive global economic, political and cultural power. Muslim states by contrast lack such power. Arabian Gulf states might own vast amounts of economic wealth but it hardly earns their owners cultural and moral capital on a global stage.
Elsewhere, vast Muslim majorities are trapped in grinding poverty, political instability and in environments of diminishing life chances. In such settings, forms of hyper Islamic identities abound, often giving adherents greater comfort in rhetoric due to the absence of viable ideologies for human development and flourishing. Economic conditions, we should bear in mind, alone do not determine identity. The poverty of dignity, the lack of self-worth, political exclusion, experiences of political injustice, cruelty, cultural discrimination and inferiority all form part of the equation or puzzle of identity. Often the pathologies of identity gain the larger share of public attention than more meaningful constructions of human identity and personhood.
Institutions, ranging from state, governance to civil society in Muslim majority societies have systematically been weakened by authoritarianism. Turkey, once a beacon of a hopeful Islamic democracy is rapidly sliding into autocracy. The lost opportunities of the Arab spring, given Western fears of Islamist politics, was largely stillborn and has brought a harvest of despotism in its aftermath. In Indonesia, numerically the largest Muslim democracy is struggling to come to terms with strong assertions of Islam in the public sphere.
Human identity, I argue, is like a “fold” to use the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s expression. Arabic rococo art or the arabesque and European baroque art have something in common. They share features of infinite reproduction on multiple planes. These folds and creases occur both in matter and in the soul. Hence, identity is certainly not linear in character. Rather, like matter and the creases in the soul, identity is unpredictable. However, identities are often linked to goals, purposes and ends: aspirations. It is at the level of reaching those ends and goals (telos) that the journey of identity might appear to be driven by a goal, but it is mere appearance. So even the journey and life of any identity is always marked by curves, switches, folds and creases.