One of the temptations of rejecting Eurocentrism in modern scholarship is to confuse the semantic terms for reality. Europeans have reshaped the semantic landscape over the past few centuries, but that does not mean that what the terms were pointing to did not exist in some form before.
Last year Aeon published What is the Muslim world? Islamists and Western pundits speak of ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslim world’ but such tribalism is dangerous colonial propaganda. This led me to read The Idea of the Muslim World. This book did not convince me that colonialists had invented the Muslim world.
Rather, the rise of Europe and the West reconfigured preexistent identities and solidarities.
Today, I noticed Aeon published Race on the mind: When Europeans colonised North Africa, they imposed their preoccupation with race onto its diverse peoples and deep past. The author of this piece also wrote Inventing the Berbers: History and Ideology in the Maghrib. The book actually seems somewhat nuanced. That being said, the Aeon piece is focused on Europeans.
As someone who has read a fair amount recently on the Moorish period of Spain, one thing that is obvious and notable is that ethnolinguistic difference between various Muslim groups. Though 19th-century Europeans imposed a particularly harsh and brutal taxonomy on other peoples, the reality is that to engage in taxonomy is human. The Berbers and Arabs in Al-Andalus were divided due to the fact that Berbers were overrepresent military, while the Arabs had the cultural prestige.
There is an unfortunate trend today to see all past history as a reflection of the present. When you see this, understand that there’s shoddiness…
The fact that the Islamic world had a name for itself (dar al-Islam) long before the West as we know it existed seems somehow relevant. Which isn’t to say that there haven’t been divisions within it since its beginning.
the christian sense of self originated more organically, but it was there quite early. the contrast btwn christian and heathen nations, and different rules applied to pagans and christians. that being said, it was all quite contemporaneously with islam i think. so it’s like all this is a product of late antiquity.
I don’t think its as much a product of late antiquity, but rather the result of big differences in theology and customs.
If the main difference to other denominations is just the exact ritual you do at home or the temple you visit, then this fairly irrelevant in a larger scale, more diverse group.
But if you only marry other believers of your cult, refuse and condemn other beliefs and change your way of living quite significantly according to your cults rules in an unusual way, you stick out.
And thats true for all Mosaic religions from the start, as well as for Buddhism and Zoroastrism as other examples, of a lot of modern sect.
I think it doesnt matter in which context such religious-ideological denominations would have come up, they would have always stick out and craving for a distinction.
Unlike usual ritualism, their sheer existence has a lot to do with distinctiveness, special “individual holyness”, being better and superiour to non believers.
They cry for attention by doing things which are of no practical use and they do it in a very standardized manner, recognizable to believers and non-believers alike everywhere they are present.
I’m pretty sure Urnfields cult was recognised as a different unity at its time too btw. We just have no records.
Have you read Jürgen Osterhammel’s “Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia” yet? It’s a brilliant book, lots of primary sources (many forgotten about). It’s a very nuanced portrait, though ultimately strongly distinguishes the Enlightenment view of Asia from the later 19th century mercantilist and imperialist view. (However, the economic and scientific advantages caused by the Enlightenment probably helped lead to later feelings of racial superiority, even if the Enlightenment itself was more universal than much before or later.)
Amazighs are a nation with their own language, culture, and history, the Arabs also. Europeans didn’t invent the so-called Berber nor the term which was used by the Arabs. Amazigh people dont use the term to call themselves. The book is nothing new, there are already dozens of books in the Arabic language that claims that Amazigh people are not a group of people, and that the European imperialism invented them (they say the same about the Kurds, the Nuba, and the Copts) and that North Africa is not their homeland. It is a product of Arab conquest of North Africa in the seventh century. What people fail to understand is that Arabism is just another type of imperialism in North Africa. imperialism is not solely western