Sunday, April 28, 2013

Ummah


The abscence of an apparent reason for the terrorism of the Boston marathon may
only be an issue in America, and the developed world. Indeed, the ‘global South’
i.e. everybody else, might well be working from other definitions of what is going on.
Here is a passage from a 2005 anthropological work on Terrorism:

Tomorrow’s globalization (be it of commerce or violence) will not be American. 
On the example of the great empires of the past, the United States will at least have 
the dubious merit of having enabled larger forms of collective association, probably less around 
the idea of nation than that of a community of new believers in a global and technological
world. Western Democraties are yet too enamored of the concepts of nation and 
nationalism which have forged their history to understand the transnational unity of 
the Muslim world. The Ummah, that is, the community of believers ( over one billion
people in the world) transcends race and nation and Arabs are within it a minority.

From: Martin Kalulambi Pongo et Tristan Landry, Terrorisme international et marchés de
violence, Presses de l’université Laval, 2005.
Translation: doxa-louise

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