The world that Ibn Battuta experienced in his travels nearly 700 years ago was as globalized as the world we live in today
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Age of Change
That golden luster has dulled a bit in the centuries since Ibn Battuta's glorious expedition across Dar al-Islam. The supremacy that medieval Islam enjoyed in the fields of science, trade, mathematics and architecture has, in many parts of the Muslim world, given way to stagnation and decline. Colonialism, Western imperialism, corruption, civil wars, extremism and terrorism have exacted their toll on the cultural and artistic dominance that marked the Islam of Ibn Battuta's time. The end of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924 and the resulting geopolitical fragmentation of the Middle East punctured whatever lofty visions the dream of a unified ummah once engendered among Muslim intellectuals. Over the past century, a great many Muslims have come to regard themselves less as members of a worldwide community of faith than as citizens of individual nation-states.
At the same time, the religious and political institutions that once dominated the lives of Muslims have begun to disintegrate as greater education and widespread access to new ideas and sources of information allow individuals the freedom and confidence to interpret Islam for themselves. The result: a cacophony of disparate voices vying with one another to define the future of what will soon be the largest religion in the world. As with any shouting match, the loudest voices — the extremists and radicals — get heard. Hence the abiding image in Western media of Islam as a religion of violence and terrorism.
Yet something remarkable has been taking place in what is left of Dar al-Islam in the 21st century. A new kind of global identity is forming across North Africa and the Middle East as young people — who make up the overwhelming majority of the region's population — are beginning to rise up and demand a voice in their political and economic destinies. While this so-called Arab Spring has progressed in fits and starts and though it has been more successful in transforming certain societies (Tunisia, Egypt) than others (Libya, Syria), what is taking place across the lands that Ibn Battuta traveled centuries ago is not, as it has so often been portrayed in the West, merely a nationalist phenomenon. On the contrary, this generation — which is intimately interconnected by new communication technologies like satellite television, social media and the Internet — has formed a new kind of transnational identity, one that cannot be contained by any ethnic, national or sectarian borders. It is an identity founded on young people's shared ambition to free themselves from the grip of their corrupt and inept political, religious and economic institutions and thus to return their culture and society to the days of glory it achieved in Ibn Battuta's time.
No doubt, there are great cultural, ideological and even religious differences in this new generation of Muslims. One should expect nothing less. The notion that there could ever be unanimity in beliefs and practices among more than a billion people scattered across the globe is utterly absurd. Only a fool or an ideologue — they are often one and the same — would claim otherwise.
What cannot be denied, however, is that thanks to this global youth generation, whose reach extends from Asia to Europe and North America, Dar al-Islam once again signifies more than a geographic designation. Once more, it has become an ideal, an aspiration, a shared sense of consciousness. The ummah, which has always been a virtual idea, is now quite literally virtual, with Muslim communities forming on the Internet, unconstrained by the boundaries of space and time.
Where this new generation will take Islam remains to be seen. It will be many more years before we know the full implications of the Arab Spring. But one thing we may be confident about is that the new world being built one protest at a time across much of the Muslim world is one that the peripatetic traveler Hajji Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta, as he came to be known on his return to Tangier in 1354, would not have found all that unfamiliar.
Aslan is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside and founder of AslanMedia.com. His books include No god but God, Beyond Fundamentalism and Tablet & Pen