Запись рестрима от 21 июля 2026 г. • 18:19:26

The modern Muslim world presents a striking paradox. Never before have Muslims been bound together by such dense networks of communication, trade, and migration—yet political fragmentation remains among the defining features of contemporary Muslim affairs. The puzzle is not that unity has failed to materialize, but that cohesion has so consistently formed at scales below the Umma rather than at its level. Classical Islamic political thought offers a vocabulary for this difficulty in Ibn Khaldun's concept of ʿaṣabiyya—a solidarity most potent in small, kin-based groups that tends to dissipate across generations of settled life, an engine of dynastic decay as much as of state formation, pulling apart at scale as readily as it binds. What allows it to underwrite large polities is its augmentation by the religious "coloring" (ṣibgha) that, in Ibn Khaldun's reading of the early conquests, can suspend the rivalries that ordinarily fracture expanding powers. The real question is therefore sharper than whether communities can cohere: it is whether religiously augmented solidarity can remain durable at imperial scale. Set against this classical horizon is the harder modern lesson that aspirations toward large-scale unity have foundered not on insufficient sentiment but on the incentives of sovereignty, regime survival, and state-building. Leaders embraced the rhetoric of union precisely to contain its institutional consequences—a defensive unionism that wields solidarity as an instrument of regime preservation rather than a step toward integration. This suggests an uncomfortable resolution to the opening paradox: the modern Muslim world did not fail to generate cohesion so much as generate it at the wrong scale, with nationalism becoming the effective ʿaṣabiyya of the modern era—a solidarity strong enough to consolidate the sovereign state and, in doing so, to constitute the very obstacle to ummatic agency. The colloquium opens onto what kinds of cooperation are realistic under an order still structured around sovereign nation-states, and whether meaningful ummatic agency can be built with, rather than against, the grain of these realities. Dr. Malik Mufti is Professor of Political Science at Tufts University. His scholarship on sovereignty, nationalism, state formation, and Islamic political thought has made significant contributions to debates in comparative politics and political theory. He is the author of Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism and Political Order in Syria and Iraq and The Art of Jihad: Realism in Islamic Political Thought, both of which engage central questions explored in this colloquium. The discussion was moderated by Dr. Hamdija Begovic. Saturday, August 29 at 12 PM (noon) Eastern Time ______________________ 👉 If you found this video insightful, consider subscribing to the Ummatics Institute channel and activating notifications so you never miss our latest updates. Visit https://ummatics.org/ for full access to all research publications and events. Also, follow us on X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn @Ummatics