ABSTRACT
In the first chapter of this book I sought to explain why international relations needs to engage more closely with literatures that offer a sophisticated political sociology of globalisation. To this end I suggested that IR might be able to interact profitably with fields such as anthropology, postcolonial studies and transnational sociology. I also argued for an expansion of the theoretical parameters of ‘the political’ within international relations as a means to better understanding the political dynamics of what I termed translocal space. I concluded the chapter by submitting a query about the nature of the ‘travelling’ cultures and politics we find in translocality. In the rest of the book I will go about providing an answer to this through an exploration of the changing boundaries of Muslim political community. Obviously I could never hope to offer a comprehensive study of globalisation and political Islam within the space available to me here. Instead, in the context of this book I will focus on two important aspects of translocality identified in Chapter One, the movement of peoples and the rise of communication and information technologies, and examine how
they are experienced by a selection of political communities within the contemporary Muslim world. I want to suggest that by studying the ‘grass-roots’ impact of globalisation in this way, we can perhaps discover important things about how transnational and globalising forces affect the configuration of Muslim political identity in relation to other identities, both Muslim and non-Muslim. Furthermore, I want to argue that these same processes are also helping to transform the boundaries of political community in Islam. In essence I am seeking to understand what happens to Islam when, as a theory, it travels. Islam is particularly interesting here in that as a religion it is already, at least in theory, a non-territorial force. As a normative code, Islam is equally valid wherever a Muslim might find himself. At the same time, however, throughout history different territories – or ‘places’ – have significantly mediated Islam and continue to do so today. We also find here a very strong, and, as I will later argue, overdetermining sense of what Edward Said would call Islam’s ‘point of origin’.
