Muslim World Cosmopolitanism

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LA ILAHA ILLALLAH, no god but Allah, is the most fundamental and oft-chanted phrase of the Islamic belief. It simultaneously negates the existence of all other deities, and affirms the divinity of the only one true God, Allah---all in one breath. It is truly the most exclusive and iconoclastic claim that rejects the notion of anyone being divine except Allah.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines ‘cosmopolitan’ as something that is “common to the whole world,” or a person who is “at home in all parts of the earth or in many spheres of interest” (1978, 301). Now, how, on Allah’s earth, can we talk about “Muslim” world cosmopolitanism?

That is just how Allah or His prophet, Muhammad (570-632), from day one, viewed Islam, whether anyone liked it or not, as the religion for entire humanity. Listen to its first revealed injunction “Read in the name of thy Lord, Who created Man from congealed blood; Proclaim that thy Lord is Most Bountiful, Who taught with Pen; Taught man that which he knew not.” (Quran, 96: 1-5). In this first proclamation of Islam, Allah reveals Himself as the Creator of entire humanity, and the Giver of all knowledge.

It was, in fact, this universal sense of God that gave Islam a different outlook which broke with the earlier notions of tribal or regional gods who supposedly competed against one another in providing protection and prosperity to their respective followers. Islam freed God from the tribal and racial confinements of the past cultures. (Maududi, 1960)

The greatest attraction of Islam was that people did not have to belong to a certain caste or ethnicity to be equally chosen of Allah, the Creator. Not tribal allegiance, but human commitment was required to reach the Divine Being. S...

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...rrode religious restrictions in matters of inter-religious marriages.

Behind most Islamic arts and sciences in the Middle Ages there were also great non-Muslim minds. It was in Islamic Spain where a cosmopolitan society could produce the Arbophile mozarabs who were the medieval Christian version of the modern Anglophile Muslims, and you are looking at one of them.

Thank you.

Bibliography

Cook, M.A. “Economic Developments,” in Joseph Schacht and C.E. Bosworth, ed., The Legacy of Islam (Oxford, 1974).

Donner, Fred M. “Muhammad and the Caliphate,” in John Esposito, ed., The Oxford History of Islam (New York, 1999).

Mawdudi, Sayyid Abul A’ala. Towards Understanding Islam (Lahore, 1960) Mehmud, Safdar. A Short History of Islam (Karachi, 1970)

Smith, Jane I. “Islam and Christendom,” in John Esposito, ed., The Oxford History of Islam (New York, 1999)

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