Is the Medina Charter, the reign of the Prophet, intended as a model of ideal society, a concrete thing, or is it rather a model you normally don't think about?
Oh God! You caught me off guard, what is the “Medina model”? [laughs]
That is an answer in itself! [laughs] I mean the reign led by the Prophet in Medina.
No … yes … OK … I understand, but … what were the main rules?
This excerpt is drawn from an interview with Tareque, a young Muslim activist and fervent worshipper.1 His answers to my questions, similar to those of other youths involved in my research, challenge a widespread idea in the scholarly literature that the kind of society which existed in Medina at the time of the Prophet Muhammad and the first caliphs—referred to by scholars as the ‘Islamic utopia’—represents a model that is valid for all Muslims.2 Tareque's reaction to my question is only one among many different attitudes I witnessed during ethnographic research addressing utopian visions and aspirations for the future of young people with Bangladeshi origins living in Rome. Just like Tareque, some of my interlocutors knew little about this supposed ‘model’, or themselves proposed representations of an ideal society where the example given by the first Muslims, or even Islam tout court, does not play a fundamental role. Other interviewees reflected on that golden age but in ways that deviate from those generally described in the existing literature on ‘Islamic utopia’. For them, this exemplary past is not important as a model of policy but instead works as a matrix that guides personal conduct, or should be contextualized in its specific space-time and consequently relativized. Still others postponed its realization to a messianic future at the distant edges of historical time, when an extramundane agency will miraculously erupt in the human world, establishing a reign of perfection. Within this last category, some, whom I refer to as ‘pessimists’ throughout this article because of their disillusionment with the possibility of changing things without divine intervention, eagerly await other-worldly figures like Imam Mahdi to manifest themselves. Those whom I term ‘optimists’ because of their confidence in the future on both a personal and collective level think that the very idea of expecting an external solution to solve the imperfection of our world is a dangerous one, as it could distract people from their responsibilities. In addition, it was not uncommon to witness the same person presenting different versions of an ideal society, depending on the discursive context.
In this article I try to make sense of this variety of attitudes by connecting utopian visions with the positionalities and life trajectories of my interlocutors. In doing so, I present three scholarly innovations inspired by the reflections of authors such as Levitas (1979) who relate utopian visions to the concrete conditions experienced by different groups. First, the analysis is not limited to an Islamic utopia understood as a ‘retro-utopia’ (Bloul 2005), that is, an ideal society that simply reproduces a model that “was given and then gradually lost” (Maïla 1987: 40). A second novel element is that in spite of a substantial body of literature on the Islamic utopia, it is only recently that researchers have taken the trouble to ask ‘real’ people about their concepts of ideal society, instead of inferring them on the basis of historical accounts (Campanini 2011) or on distant observations of developments in ‘political Islam’ (Tayob 2008). Exceptions to this do exist in a series of contributions concerning the Arab Spring that address the carving out of utopian space-times during the mass protests that took place in the early 2010s (cf. Sparre 2018). A third characteristic that suggests a different way of looking at utopianism among Muslim people is that previous scholars who have analyzed attitudes toward a retro-utopia have often reduced any differences to one of two possible alternatives: a militant Islam, eager to restore a seminal model, and ‘the rest’, who accept a separation between ideal society and history (Mura 2019). On the contrary, my contribution attempts to further develop this bipartition into a more fine-grained analysis.
I attempt to avoid employing general categories and to consider the multi-dimensional diversities borne by individuals and small groups. Due to the specificities of my interlocutors, for example, I cannot use the distinction made by Al-Azmeh (1990) between fundamentalists who strive to enact the utopia and representatives of a ‘historical Islam’—that is, the majority, who look upon this utopia as a myth—since all of my interlocutors belong to the latter category. The consideration of further positionalities is often needed when scholars are confronted with people in the flesh rather than dealing with projections of geopolitical concerns in matters of Jihadism with regard to Muslim people. It is, in fact, hard to deny that studies of utopianism in relation to Islam are, to a large extent, prone to representations inspired by the paradigm of a clash of civilizations. In many cases scholars have used utopia as a lens to critically analyze political Islam (cf. Addi 1992; Tayob 2008) and often associate a ‘true utopia’ with controversial outcomes such as the Daesh (Benraad 2016). On the one hand, this Orientalist posture assumes that Muslim people are perfectly and exhaustively expressed by their religion, and that this religion should be conceived of in a traditionalist and hostile fashion. On the other hand, this approach tends to create taxonomies that ultimately distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslims, as in the case of a juxtaposition between ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘historical Islam’. In this respect, this article represents an attempt to study utopias not as symptoms or indicators of radicalization, but as an area of transparency from which to observe connections between the present time and possible futures. In this way, utopia becomes simultaneously an object of inquiry and a method, that is, an analytic category that helps in understanding what people think of society, and how their position within society impinges on their political imagination (Levitas 2013).
Owing to the diversity of my interlocutors, I also cannot limit myself to assume, as Werbner (2004) does, that in a country where Islam is a minority religion, utopia is simply superimposed over a messianic future. The condition of living in a non-Muslim country is important, but it is not the only factor capable of shaping utopian visions. My interlocutors held attitudes blending traditionally conceived militancy and messianism in various ways, with many of them practicing an ‘everyday millenarianism’ (Robbins 2001) in which mundane engagements and chiliastic expectations cohabit. Nor can I reproduce the methodological nationalism of Addi (1992: 122), who posits that an “Islamicist utopia” that aims at reinstating a “primitive legal order” is “politically active” in “countries where great expectations have been disappointed.” Disappointment hardly ever affects all members of society, as demonstrated by the relative popularity of protest movements among Muslim youths in countries where the promises of modernity have been fulfilled only for specific social groups (Glynn 2002). This disappointment of the underprivileged is hardly shared by members of the dominant classes, just as the situation of so-called minorities differs from that of the majority. In Italy, Muslims are a minority and have cause to feel that they have been under attack in recent decades. Yet even within Bangladeshi-Italian Muslims there are differences. Although my interlocutors, as ‘migrant children’, have common experiences with regard to racism and Islamophobia, they are at the same time separated by dissimilitudes in terms of relationships with power, personal networks, and trajectories.
Optimists vs. Pessimists: Positionalities and Collapsed Taxonomies
My interlocutors are positioned along a continuum of multi-dimensional diversities that I attempt to navigate by locating two opposing stances: optimism, the outlook of young people who are confident about the possibility of improving society, and pessimism, an attitude characterizing young people who lack confidence in their ability to change the status quo. Optimism goes hand in hand with an aversion to messianism and is predominant among (but not exclusive to) youths in the sphere of influence of a generational narrative of civically engaged Islam promulgated by Giovani Musulmani d'Italia (GMI, Young Muslims of Italy), the main Muslim youth organization in Italy (Frisina 2006). Optimists tend to think of themselves as actors of change, often based on successful experiences of civic engagement and/or promising educational and professional careers. Pessimism is in some cases associated with the belief that only a miraculous intervention can redeem society. This messianic attitude is widespread within the East Rome Madrasah (ERM), which is run by Bangladeshi migrants and suffered a problematic relationship with the authorities during my fieldwork. Young people whose acquaintances are mostly confined to Bangladeshi networks, and whose engagement is mosque-based and consequently influenced by the point of view of the first generation of Bangladeshis in Rome, are more prone to pessimism, while optimists are often well-connected with people of non-Bangladeshi backgrounds who are recognized as civil society actors. Although it is not possible to establish a fixed correspondence between the two attitudes and the young people's positionalities, my research highlights that these attitudes connect in various ways to their ideological influences (the generational Islam of the GMI vs. the religiosity of the first generation), their personal networks (networks extending into the larger society vs. ‘ethnic’ networks), and their relationship with power (positive experiences of engagement vs. police repression).
Socio-economic variables also play a role in shaping different attitudes. My interlocutors had come from households that in Bangladesh were labeled as middle class, while in Italy their parents obtained jobs as wage laborers or opened small shops. However, the most important differences do not relate to the occupation of the parents but rather to the educational/professional trajectory of the young people. Those who have invested in religious education, for example, are less confident in the future, while those who have managed to build careers through mainstream education tend to have optimistic attitudes. It is also worth emphasizing that even the relationship between optimists and the GMI and between pessimists and the ERM is not one of total overlap—in both situations, there are voices out of harmony. In addition, in other environments covered by my fieldwork, such as the Rome Mosque and Madrasah (RMM) and the Rainbow Center (RC), a welfare center for youth located in close proximity to another mosque/madrasah run by Bangladeshi migrants, the two tendencies are blended together.
The age of my interlocutors ranges from 12 to 27 years, but age alone does not particularly affect the data distribution around the poles of optimism and pessimism, with the exception of the group aged 22–27, formed entirely of optimists with promising careers. Regarding gendered characteristics, the young people involved in the research were predominantly (cis) males, comprising only seven (cis) females out of a respondent group of more than fifty people. Essentially, this ethnography is a study of masculine concepts of ideal society expressed in gender neutral terms, implying the naturalization of a masculine and heteronormative point of view on life, religion, and society.
Considering that some optimists presented here are in the orbit of the GMI, an organization that has been associated with “Salafi-reformism” (della Porta and Bosi 2010: 35), and that messianism plays an important role in mosques and madrasahs, one could be tempted to operationalize another binary that is typical in studies of Muslim utopianism, ‘reformism’ versus ‘millennialism’ (cf. Bahrawi 2017), or to refer to the category of ‘Salafism’. Yet such categorizations do not fit this case study either. First, in all of the environments, the young people define themselves simply as ‘Muslim’. Second, opinions associated with ‘Salafism’, ‘reformism’, and ‘millennialism’ are present throughout the whole group of interlocutors. The relationship between the drive to reform society and messianism, for example, is not a mutually exclusive one; there is a dialectical link between the two attitudes whereby one presupposes the other and is structured in opposition to it, albeit thereby incorporating some of the opposing idea's basic elements into itself (cf. Bielik-Robson 2018). As for Salafism, traits often associated with it, such as antipathy toward ‘cultural Islam’, do not surface in a particular group among my interlocutors; on the contrary, they are so widespread that they would appear to be more a common feature of the second generation.
For these reasons, I prefer not to participate in the taxonomic euphoria that has characterized studies on Muslim activism and instead employ descriptive characterizations such as ‘optimist’ and ‘pessimist’ that avoid Muslim exceptionalism by referring to a common humanity shared by people of different religions and atheists alike, and by focusing on further positionalities. This is not to deny the importance of political ideologies. It is simply an attempt to reconstruct the ‘politicity’ of religion in a different way, responding to the specificities of a field where classic categories of political Islam seem to be discarded by the youth.
Context and Methods
Rome is home to a large population of Bangladeshi migrants and their descendants, which grew rapidly in the 1990s and now numbers some 37,000 people, according to official figures. This collectivity has proved more secularist than, for example, its counterpart in the UK, but the emergence of a new generation of young people born or raised in Italy since the 2000s, together with the growing popularity of Islamic knowledge in Bangladesh and globally, has encouraged many families to ensure a religious education for their children. This development fostered the appearance of 21 informal mosques run by Bangladeshi migrants, many of which host madrasahs where Italian-Bangladeshi youths (both girls and boys) spend about eight hours a week for several years.
The young people's attitude toward the madrasah is in most cases very lukewarm. Despite this, a very small minority of them decide to continue their religious education, becoming Qur'anic memorizers or teachers (both privileges reserved for boys). If the latter end up by remaining within the religious circuits of the Bangladeshi diaspora, others, while rejecting the educational model of the madrasahs, have found a renewed interest in religion through contact with Muslims from different national backgrounds. In this way, they gain a different image of Islam, a situation that is typical for members of the GMI.
My work is grounded in the ethnographic research project “(Un-)typical Utopias—Visions of the Future from Adolescents at Islamic Schools in Bangladesh and Italy,” funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation. Fieldwork took place in Rome between 2018 and 2020 and was largely based in three Bangladeshi mosques/madrasahs, the GMI, and the welfare center RC. I conducted 21 recorded interviews and 8 focus group discussions, along with informal interviews and conversations, extensive participant observation, and the collection of material such as videos, pictures, and pamphlets.
In interviews and focus group discussions, I tended to follow a sort of script. Generally, after inquiring about personal aspirations, my first set of questions was on the features of an ‘ideal’ society. These questions were based on a non-normative definition of utopia as an ideal state of society (Levitas 1979), so as to leave people as free as possible when responding. Then I asked about the role of religion for those who totally overlooked Islam in their images of an ideal society, which was the bulk of the interlocutors. As none of them described a society where Islam is predominant, but rather a society where different religions cohabit harmoniously, I then introduced a second set of questions that applied a normative definition of ‘Islamic utopia’, that is the retro-utopia of the origins. In the next section, I will go through the utopian visions that stemmed from these dialogues based on the first set of questions, while in the subsequent section I will take into account opinions regarding the ‘Islamic utopia’.
Utopianism as a Subgenre of Realism
In this section we will see how an ideal, non-normatively intended society is constructed by my interlocutors, and how in the case of the optimists this operation is carried out in open opposition to a normative Islamic utopia. The images of an alternative society depicted by young people, despite differing to some extent from each other, converge in the description of what, following John Rawls (2001: 6), I call a “realistic utopia.” Rather oxymoronically, in fact, this ideal society is based on values of political moderation and on the fundamental acceptance of a number of structuring characteristics of current society. Here, optimists are in the lead, as they invest most in realistic utopias, but there are also voices of young pessimists, since they too do not imagine properly ‘ideal’ societies, but rather societies that represent the best possible option. The essential difference is that pessimists are more laconic and less confident about improving the world via their own efforts and tend to nurture messianic expectations, which we will discuss in the second part of this article.
In the course of the following sub-section, I will discuss how political moderation is discursively articulated in opposition to ‘extremist’ attitudes that include the yearning to restore the Islamic society of the golden age. In the next sub-section, the characteristics of realistic utopias are considered in light of the insights of John Rawls and Jacques Derrida, highlighting the ontological nature of an ideal society that ends up reproducing salient traits of the actual one.
The Creed of Political Moderation
Significantly, the first reaction of interviewees to the word ‘utopia’ was often one of skepticism. The youths use the term in a derogatory sense to mean something that cannot be realized, and both optimists and pessimists base their visions of a better society on values of realism and moderation. In this sense, for them to take an ideal model of society seriously would be both naive and dangerous, as implied in the comments of an optimistic university student, Kamrul, who occasionally attends the RMM:
It is obvious that for a Muslim it is normal to aim for that society, but … we should build on the present! Let's look at what we have now! Because if you are not up to do this, this means that you want a revolution … you are shifting toward subversion. If you think that a revolution is an ugly thing, excessive, and then drastic … and even if you think it is an option but you don't want to go so far, you need to base your work on what is available at the moment, and this starts with integration.
Kamrul immediately makes a connection between an Islamic retro-utopia and terms such as ‘revolution’ and ‘subversion’. He recognizes that it is “normal” for a Muslim to “aim for that society,” but ends up suggesting that subversion is at the same time excessive and ugly, and discards a ‘revolutionary’ utopia in favor of an ultimately conservative integration. In a subsequent reflection, he emphasizes this point by saying that excess is unacceptable from both a religious and worldly perspective, creating a new link between utopia and extremism:
A thing which recurs very often [in the Qur'an] is: “Allah doesn't like excess” … extremism, as a matter of fact, is the farthest possible thing from Islam … for me a solution, which is dictated by the Qur'an itself, is balance … we don't need to stand against the evil, we should accept and make the best of it so as to continue our struggle along the road toward the good … and a corollary of balance is good sense.
Here, values connected with an idea of political moderation are specified (integration, good sense, balance) and juxtaposed against negative terms such as extremism, subversion, excess, and, indirectly, utopia. Kamrul inscribes this discourse within the textuality of the Qur'an: his quote is a recursive trope (Q 2, 190; 6, 141; 7, 31), as is that of punishment for excessive behavior (i.a., Q 20, 127; 49, 9). In this sense, the religious corpus interplays with concrete life according to a double hermeneutic: on the one hand, the Qur'an helps to interpret what happens in one's worldly existence; on the other hand, worshippers are called upon to interpret the sacred texts. Therefore, in the same way in which ‘excessive’ behavior should be curbed based on measures provided by the Qur'an, ‘unacceptable,’ limit-exceeding interpretations of the text should similarly be held in check.
The latter aspect is underlined by Asad, an optimistic, nearly graduated university student and GMI activist, while commenting on the opinions expressed by another young man involved in the research:
The Ahmadiyyans … I don't agree with them. They can do what they want, it's a minority, etc., but if they tell me that they are Islam, etc., I say, “No! You misunderstood! Eh, you're … you're beginning to rave!” As well as those who belong to … Islamic radicalism.
… we are thinking beings and as such we have the gift of criticism, of interpretation, anyone can say anything, so to say, … but not if you use it for propaganda, [that is,] to achieve a certain goal to the detriment of other people and not for the common good.
While stressing the importance of interpretation, Asad also sets some limits. Attitudes that are perceived as extreme are connected with Islamic radicalism, excluded from an idea of true Islam, and branded as contrary to the common good. He tellingly uses the Italian verb delirare (to rave), which etymologically refers to ‘exceeding the boundaries’. Yet this does not mean that extremism is disreputable only in the religious field: extremism is always wrong for my interlocutors. Mostafa, for example, a university student who volunteers at the RMM and who portrays himself as deeply pessimistic, describes unspecified ‘young rebels’ as posers and relegates revolution to the demeaning role of a youthful fad:
Since I was 14, more or less, I have heard, “society limits us, there's no freedom in the world” …, and every kid has a fuckin’ cig in his hand without a reason! And this happens because they think they are revolutionaries, no? How can I put it? They think they are escaping this system, [they think] they are cool in this way!
A common ground of moderatism, however, does not mean that there are no differences at all, differences that are constructed by the intersection of divergent biographical experiences and social determinants. In politics, for example, moderation can assume stricter or more open forms. Tellingly, those who feel well-placed in society, the optimists, obsessively stress integration conceived in assimilationist terms. This rhetoric often goes hand in hand with conservative attitudes concerning immigration. In some cases, similar opinions also point to political influences from families and personal networks. For example, young people connected with the more politically active, left-wing-oriented association of migrants in Rome are sensitive to issues such as anti-racism and Islamophobia, even though they do not seem willing to advance the principles behind such positions into a more general critique of society. Another factor that plays an important role in creating differences between diverse shades of moderation is political and police power, which is often mediated by allegiances with mosques. In fact, youths like Kamrul and Asad, who usually attend mosques that ultimately emerged intact from a campaign to increase governmental controls in 2018–2020, are often optimistic about society and sympathetic to established powers, to the extent of even approving severe measures reserved for other mosques.3 Conversely, youths from mosques that underwent stricter controls and closures are decidedly more critical of anti-immigrant and Islamophobic narratives, and distinctly more pessimistic.
Realistic Utopias
Although many interviewees approach utopia as a dangerous reverie, eventually all of them accepted the task of imagining an ideal society. Due to my interlocutors’ inclination to moderation, we can define their imagined societies as ‘realistic utopias’ (Rawls 2001). Such societies are at the same time desirable, as they lessen the problems of actual society, and achievable, as they respect the naturalized psychological and social limitations of humankind. Islam, interpreted as a ‘natural religion’, is suitable to be used in the construction of realistic utopias, based on views of thinkers like Sajid Qutb (March 2010). However, my interlocutors do not describe a denominational utopia, as Qutb and even Rawls does when portraying the Orientalist quasi-utopia of Kazanistan (Hatzenberger 2013); on the contrary, they describe a “reasonably just constitutional democracy” (Rawls 2001: 11) where multi-religiosity and tolerance constitute “the essentials of what realistic utopia requires” (ibid.: 76). Among my interlocutors, both pessimists and optimists emphasize the fact that an ideal society should be built around tendencies that are already present in current society and for this reason are naturalized as immutable laws. The pessimists are more stringent in their descriptions of an ideal society, being discouraged as they are about the possibility of actually enacting change, while the optimists offer more details. In any case, all youths call a society ‘ideal’ when it chiefly is an improved version of what they have at the moment, and where problems may not be totally resolved but are appropriately managed.
For Saeed, an optimistic university student and GMI activist on a fast track to a career as a professional, the problematic nature of our world sets the limits for an ideal society:
If we made an ideal city … [it] would prompt other problems. Hence, there will always be problems. We can't deny it … we should accept it. But the point is how to face these problems … Problems will always exist in the world, a perfect world will never exist … we can't nurture false hopes. So the ideal society doesn't exist, it will never exist. But what we can do is [to understand] how to solve these problems. So the ideal society knows how to address its problems.
The utopias portrayed by my interlocutors are ontological in the sense defined by Jacques Derrida (2008) as they reproduce what already exists—that is, the current social order, albeit in an improved form. An inevitable corollary of this attitude is that imagining a perfect world fosters “false hopes.” The duty of a responsible person is to construct the best possible society, not an ideal one. This argument elicits theodicies that carve out a space for ‘the evil’ even in an ideal world, as in Kamrul's observations about balance, or Saeed's reflections about the persistence of problems.
Another consequence of this acceptance of imperfection is that an absolutely ideal society is located in an other-worldly dimension, an abstraction that pertains to a hyperuranic realm or to a messianic future, as we will see. In the realm of historical contingency, utopia can only be approached in the way explained by Kamrul:
It is not a condition, the ideal society is not the final destination, the ideal society is the journey. The society that starts to do this thing. With a target in mind. Look, one of my favorite metaphors, the metaphor that I try to apply most to my life is a discourse from Machiavelli's book The Prince, … [t]he archer should not aim directly at the target, because the arrow will take another direction …
Thus, the ideal society is not a condition that is actually and fully enjoyed. Rather, it is the anticipation, in the present, of something that might be realized (or not) in a more complete form in the future. The tension of moving toward a goal takes the place of its actual achievement.
The ontological nature of the utopias described by my interlocutors implies that many of the fundamental values on which they base their descriptions, such as affluence and tolerance, maintain a relationship of continuity with the characteristics of our society. Only one youth advocates radical changes; the others simply hope for improvements. This was not without some divergences. In fact, if the optimists generally tend to downplay the faults of current society, the pessimists are more ambivalent and sometimes present an ideal society as a sort of inversion of current society, where the values that are currently celebrated but not yet realized are actually implemented.
The optimists’ attitude is epitomized by Nazmul, an engineer and member of the GMI. While talking about the importance of religious tolerance, he explains that in his perception it is directly connected to “the West,” although there are many historical examples from the Muslim world that are chronologically antecedent to those of Western modernization:
[Learning from living in a multi-religious context] is not possible where Islam prevails, where there is a dominant thought … I feel lucky … to have the chance to grow up here … Because I think that the West made its mistakes a long time ago, but today it understands what is important …, in some respects it is much more sensitive.
In general, the fundamental political, social, and economic institutions of current society are not called into question, and in some cases are even provided with a religious legitimization. Abdul, a 19-year-old madrasah graduate and teacher at the ERM who belongs squarely in the group of pessimists, ascribes affluence and free trade to the exemplarity of the Prophet's life. He structures his aspirations along two axes: business and khedma, an Arabic word that he translates as “helping people to follow the right path.” When I ask Abdul whether his goal to become a businessman can interfere with his religiosity, he explains: “If you look at the past, all the prophets were businessmen. Now, in 2019, business is more evolved of course, it is not like in ancient times … Thus, if we want to follow the Prophet we should do business, both to support religion and for non-religious purposes.”
The virtues of capitalism and developmentalism are fundamentally acclaimed by these youths, whose families arrived in Italy with the explicit intention of participating in the material aspects of European culture, and who often feel the responsibility of continuing the project of upward social mobility aspired to by their parents. In particular, capitalism was one of the structural features of society that elicited discussion, yet it was never explicitly challenged, even when its harmfulness was recognized. For example, environmentalism was a widespread topic in the media during the period of my fieldwork, and the idea of an Armageddon triggered by global warming was often evoked and connected with the eschatological narrative of religion. Some youths contested that our economic system is responsible for climate change, but none proposed to abandon capitalism. Even economic inequalities were naturalized as a transhistorical feature of human societies, as outlined by Mostafa, the young pessimist who volunteers at the RMM:
Since ancient times, if we talk about cave men, there was someone with more food, more things, and another with less things, if we talk about unevenly distributed wealth … At this point what do we do about the proprietor of Amazon? Must we go catch him and beat the hell out of him?
Similarly, many interviewees called for a subordination of economic activities to a moral dimension pursuing the common good, but they did not seem to call into question the tenets of the economic system. Instead, it would simply be a matter of avoiding ‘haram money’, that is money from activities that are ‘impure’.
In ideological terms, these young people, despite technically being a minority, are still part of the mainstream—as observed by Miri Song (2012) in her research among Muslim university students in the UK—and recognize themselves in hegemonic values. They believe in parliamentary democracy, do not contest neoliberal economics, and depict the exercise of power as an inevitable aspect of living in society. Yet although almost all the participants in the research enjoy a relatively stable socio-economic status, are politically moderate, and tend to imagine realistic utopias, the level of similarity of these utopias to existing society is higher for those who are better placed in society. Others who are not so well-placed are more ambivalent and tend to be more attracted to millennialism.
The Specter of the ‘Islamic Utopia’
Differences become more evident when we examine the interlocutors’ viewpoints about an ‘Islamic utopia’. In this case, the pessimists are more inclined to conceive of utopia as a radical possibility, even though they project the re-establishment of a pristine model of Islamic society into a messianic and undefined future, due to their belief that human agency cannot itself enact change. Conversely, the optimists’ attitudes defuse the revolutionary potential of an Islamic utopia in various ways, and treat the expectation of a messianic kingdom as something that would potentially impinge on their project of changing society through small improvements. In the dialectic between a realistic utopia and an Islamic utopia, the latter, as an absolute possibility opposing realism, or as a maximalist option opposing political moderation, works as a spectral presence haunting the ontological nature of a realistic utopia that is guilty of reproducing what already exists, even in an ideal world (Bielik-Robson 2018).
The first sub-section that follows is dominated by optimists, whose discourses attempt to relativize/exorcize an idea of Islamic society. The following sub-section sets the scene for the pessimists and their celebration of an inevitable Armageddon. For them, the Islamic utopia, articulated in messianic terms, seems to work as a horizon of redemption, not only in a religious sense, but also in social and political terms.
A Utopia in Quotes
The first way in which optimists defuse the subversive potential contained in the Islamic utopia is by appropriating the exemplarity of this golden age in terms of orthopraxy and personal morality. In general, in spite of many scholars’ belief in a correspondence between Shari'a and utopia (Addi 1992), not one of my interlocutors imagined a society where Islam is enmeshed with its political institutions, at least within a historical temporality. As in John Rawls's (2001: 60) “reasonable liberal” utopia, an ideal society is non-denominational and reproduces salient traits of Western liberal democracies. Only two young interviewees, who as madrasah teachers constructed an idea of a social destination of religion similar to that of the previous generation, asserted that if one day Muslims became the majority in Italy, it would be possible to build a society more responsive to Islamic principles.
Otherwise, the respondents are typical representatives of a generation of Muslim activists who do not question the “model of the state,” to use the expression of one of my interlocutors, but actively take part in civic processes with the idea that such engagement, in connection with a piety lived in terms of personal morality, is key to improving society (cf. Sounaye 2015). Based on this individualizing logic, the model of the first Muslims is not considered a blueprint for society but a repertoire of behaviors and exemplarities from which individuals should draw to lead an Islamic lifestyle. In this way, a question inquiring about the Medina Charter elicits an answer from Khalid, a successful and optimistic university student and GMI member, that quite unexpectedly pivots upon personal behaviors:
If you look at Medina, at the time of the Prophet, there was a great religious tolerance, yes?
Yes, indeed! The Prophet is supposed to be an example for us, and we really should try to imitate His deeds, His lifestyle. Hence, let's say, it would be the ideal model to follow. Because He, obviously, He made the wisest choice on every subject, the fairest choice.
For Khalid, it is not society that should resemble the model of Medina; rather, it is the individual who should “imitate” the Prophet's deeds, following an implicit social change theory in which individual behaviors are key to improving society. Thus, the Islamic utopia is transformed from a normative model into a non-prescriptive repertoire. This concept is found across all the interlocutors, even though some pessimists allow it to cohabitate with an idea that the societal model as a whole should also be improved.
The second way in which optimists keep the idea of a normative Islamic utopia at a safe distance is by means of relativization. Most of the respondents refer to this utopia in quote marks due to the fact that they think this model should undergo adjustment according to different space-times in a process whose ultimate outcome is unknown. Tellingly, when I inquired about an ideal Islamic society, some replied “where?” In this way, they implied the existence of different ideal societies for different places/countries. As Saeed, an optimistic GMI member mentioned above, put it:
It always depends on the context. “We were made people and tribes, that we may know one another.” Hence not all the world should be like Medina … Medina works if you are applying Islamic stuff to Islamic places …We have to fit in properly here. We have to model ourselves based on how the model of the state is structured here, we have to respect their history, their culture, etc.
If Saeed legitimizes an adaptation of the model of ancient Medina to different places by referring to a verse from the Sura of the Chambers (Q 49:13), Asad complements this adaption by proposing an adjustment for different historical periods, and by putting forth, albeit with some hesitation, the idea of a modernization of Islam:
Surely, as a model we have that golden age, but [at the same time] we try to understand the current context …, to modern[ize] … Unfortunately, the Arabs, but also the Bangladeshis, don't agree, because they think that Islam is only made of laws and you have to follow these laws. It's true! I completely agree! But the world changes.
The third way in which a haunting Islamic utopia is exorcised is by projecting its attainment to a future that is not only distant in chronological terms but is part of another temporality, in which linear time spins to become cyclical, and in turn sees the conclusion of a messianic cycle that culminates with qiyamah, the Last Day. For those confident about the possibility of attaining a realistic utopia, messianic visions jeopardize such a vision: in comparison with messianic ideas of ultimate justice and equality, their utopia ends up looking like one that fell into “the disgrace of adaptation” (Derrida, quoted in Bielik-Robson 2018: 142). Moreover, for optimists, messianic expectations sabotage the virtuous processes already in place in our society. While pessimists are more inclined to speak about apocalyptic scenarios, optimists are not only more laconic but also refuse to think at all about a radical change brought about by extramundane agents, despite acknowledging the veracity of messianic narratives. They believe that the idea of a divine intervention may distract people from their duties.
Farid, a young university student who, despite being close to youths from the ERM, tends markedly toward optimism, explains:
Our goal is not to think “ok, the end of the world is near,” and let everything go, and just wait for the end. It is not what we want. The world will end, it will happen one day, and we weren't born to [simply] wait for that day. If we think this way, then we end up thinking “ok, I have to die one day or another, so I am not doing anything.”
Asad, the optimistic GMI member and university student cited above, articulates a similar attitude in generational terms:
Those are the adults, right? Because I am talking mainly about the adults … we are young people … I mean … this thing [Armageddon] does not give me hope. Islam is a religion of hope … What we can do is to try … during the time we have available in this world … to improve this place, it is to improve the conditions because there is a crisis here. I do not say that we will be presidents …, but in our small way we can make the difference, and by living in close contact with the GMI, I found out that also small things … even small things can grow until [they become] great things. This is my hope, my utopia …
… On the opposite side, others are waiting for it [Armageddon], they already recognized all the signs and since they are … I would not say 100 percent observant … they are ordinary people, superstitious, they said “it's over, I'm retreating to the mosque. I'm going to read the pages of the Qur'an left, end of the story.” No! No! Absolutely no!
For Asad, adults, along with young people who incorporate their views, have resigned themselves to the inevitable degradation of our world. For him, conversely, the duty of a good Muslim is to improve our society, in accordance with a theory of social change for which there is no need to seize power (i.e., to become “presidents”) in order to improve reality. Rather, “small things” (from individuals or small groups) can make a difference by virtue of a cumulative effect. In this way, an Islam that claims to be modern—active and reflexive, practiced by young people on a fast track to prominent positions in society who are involved in civic processes, like Farid and Asad—is juxtaposed against a sort of vernacular religion practiced by adults and “ordinary people” in general, in the same way in which active engagement is juxtaposed against messianism, interpreted as passive waiting.
Celebrating the End
Those interlocutors whom I describe as pessimists are often closer to Asad's concept of ‘ordinary people’ compared to the optimists. Their educational and professional careers are less distinguished, and in general they have fewer reasons to celebrate the status quo. Yet they do not embody the spirit of resignation and laziness portrayed (and feared) by Asad and Farid. Some of the pessimists also participate in the activities of mosques and migrant organizations. The difference is that their networks extend into more marginal environments in terms of political and economic power: the Bangladeshi diaspora, migrant associations, and the subterranean world of informal mosques and madrasahs.
Messianism is particularly popular among the pessimists and madrasah students, as mosques and madrasahs play a pivotal role in conveying such narratives. In the ERM, for example, both students and teachers believe that in a few years the arrival of the Dajjal will start a chain of events leading to the reign of Imam Mahdi4 and then the Last Day. The idea that our world will soon end is underpinned by an enumeration of ‘signs’ indicating that the current level of degradation is such that the world can only end, for example, “the children will disobey their parents” and “people will have plenty of money.” There will be “wars of economy,” “increasingly large buildings,” “climate change,” and “wars between Muslims.” The widespread diffusion of mobile phones is also related to the predictions of Islamic eschatology: “It is told that people will have the whole world in their hand.”
Most pessimists, however, do not live with a fear of such an upheaval. Significantly, those who feel anger and a sense of powerlessness at the current state of society are more attracted to the prospect of Armageddon. Tareq, a 14-year-old secondary school student who occasionally attends madrasah near the RC, and who is seriously disappointed with politics not only in Italy but also in Bangladesh, believes that a new “Great Flood” would be a just punishment for the ruling class. As outlined by Mostafa (the pessimistic university student who volunteers at the RMM), a salvific celebration of the end goes hand in hand with a lack of confidence in the effectiveness of human agency, and the hardships connected with the events leading up to the reign of Mahdi are perceived as the price to be paid to achieve a final state of peace and perfection:
And sincerely, thinking a little bit about how society is now, I would like Him [Mahdi] to come, because I am seeing signs that were announced by our Prophet, signs that serve to understand if the time of his arrival is near. It's basically the story of the end of the world for Muslims. It is said that there will also be plenty of wars and this frightens Muslims but I think it is cowardice … Imam Mahdi will bring peace, and the Dajjal is basically someone who doesn't like Imam Mahdi and wages war against him.
In the same way that the optimists structure a realistic utopia in opposition to an Islamic utopia understood in a normative sense, that is, as a solution to its non-feasibility, the messianism that makes the realization of an Islamic utopia possible for the pessimists is a reaction to the impossibility of realizing a reasonable, realistic utopia using the means available to humankind. Mostafa perfectly illustrates this link:
The reason why an ideal society will always remain a utopia and will never become reality is that everyone should do their small part, should give their small contribution, but not everyone does. Hence there's this admiration, also on my part, for Imam Mahdi. Because one of the signs is that sin, outside your home, your reality, will be so widespread that you might leave home pure and come back full of sins … And this thing cannot be fixed if everyone doesn't do their little part …, and at this stage you really hope for a miracle to put things in place.
Mostafa is disillusioned about the possibility not only to change society but also to slow its decay. Since not everyone is doing their “small part,” the end of the world as we know it will be the natural outcome of its degradation. This is a view that stands in continuity with a religious concept of history, where after a period of ‘perfection’, corresponding to earlier Muslim society, the world sinks into an abyss of growing imperfection from which it will be redeemed by the intervention of a messiah. If the optimists practice an engaged messianism, emphasizing social involvement as a way to repel the coming of the end of this world, young people like Mostafa practice an ‘everyday millenarianism’ (Robbins 2001), in which the end of this world is awaited with hope and even brought closer through prayer, while daily activities and even social engagement continue to flow normally.
Yet, the attitudes of young people like Mostafa, Tareq, and Abdul are not exclusively religious, they dialogue with their social and political conditions. Not only are their careers less promising, and their organizations less connected with recognized civil society actors, it is their concrete experiences of participation that are different. During the period of research, youths from the societally more active GMI took part in inter-religious dialogues or were protagonists in organizing events with institutional actors, while Mostafa and Tareq, in contrast, did not have any experiences that fostered confidence in collective action. Still others, like Abdul and Rahman, have experienced the political realm essentially in the form of unfruitful rallies protesting against the closures of mosques or police repression. These differences in lived experiences interplay with religious imaginaries and lead to ways of envisioning an ideal society where, due to perceptions of being powerless, injustices can only be redressed in an extra-historical scenario.
These apocalyptic visions interplay with a more personal, or even intimate, dimension. In Tareq's case, this personal dimension is constituted by a familial crisis, magnified by the job precarity and exploitation experienced by a migrant household, while Mostafa attributes his interest in the messianic narrative to a state of “astrophysical depression” apparently caused by disappointing romantic relationships. In these and similar cases, the idea of the reinstatement of a just society offers a horizon of meaning and redemption for those who have momentarily lost faith in the possibility of improving both their lives and the larger society.
Tellingly, for these respondents many of the characteristics of a perfect Islamic society reproduce features already proposed for a realistic utopia and, again, quite often stand in continuity with the attributes of current society. But unlike in the case of realistic utopia, these tenets are not applied in an improved yet still partial form; rather, in the Islamic utopia, they are fully realized. Mostafa, for example, describes a sort of capitalist Cockaigne, but adds to the scenario an altruism that, although caused by a state of unlimited abundance, interrupts the sacrality of private property that dominates in our society: “He [Mahdi] will bring peace and serenity in this world, and it is said that during his rule the world will be so rich that people will ask other people ‘do you want a part of my wealth? Because I don't know where to store it.’” The values that are most often emphasized in these descriptions are those of fairness and equality. Jamal, a 15-year-old secondary school student and memorizer of the Qur'an at the ERM, while talking about the society of the first Muslims as a model for the society of the future, explains: “They weren't exactly social classes in the sense … all the people were at the same social level. They were all considered equally. There was a constitution, the law is the same for everyone … the law was the same for everyone. Hence, no one could overrule the others.”
In these descriptions, the “radical community” (Bielik-Robson 2018: 137), which for Ernst Bloch represents a transhistorical “fantasy” characterizing every human society (cited in ibid.), surfaces, and a normative Islamic utopia is imagined, quite counter-intuitively, with an emancipatory dimension—a last refuge for thinking about an absolute possibility and absolute social justice. This considerably contradicts the doxic images of messianism and retro-utopianism as completely backward and reactionary, albeit assuming we take into account only its ideas of social justice along the axes of social class and religiosity, and ignore the mechanisms of domination that unfold along the lines of gender and sexual orientation.
Conclusion: Utopias and Muslim People
My findings suggest that for Muslim people, utopianism cannot be reduced to a return to a primordial order. While a normative Islamic utopia is accepted as part and parcel of the religious corpus, at the same time the respondents distance themselves from it in various ways: it is relativized, refused, projected onto a messianic time, or even totally neglected. This variety of visions points not only to different positionalities but also to divergent utopian traditions within the Islamic world (Campanini 2018). The realistic utopias outlined by my interlocutors, for example, point to the literary utopias conceived by philosophers such as Ibn Ṫufayl and Ibn al-Nafīs, as they deny the possibility of achieving a perfect society and perpetuate a “rational necessity” of integrating the current social structure and power relations (Lauri 2013: 35). Similarly, ancient Medina is not the only historical antecedent for a religiously inspired utopia, and the tolerant society longed for by my interlocutors might just as easily be traced back to the reign of Al-Andalus or the Ottoman Empire. As highlighted by many of the young men, imagining an ideal society is a creative process whose outcomes are not predetermined. The deeply rooted idea that a utopia for Muslim people is constituted from a derivative reproduction of a pre-existing matrix is disproved by evidence, which suggests that the utopia of origins and Islam in general are not their only sources of inspiration.
In this sense, the non-reflective use of a normative concept of Islamic utopia risks reproducing a form of Orientalism that not only interprets the ideas of Muslim people based on a fossilized and overreaching concept of ‘tradition’, but also projects onto them characteristics that the Western world considers to be negative. In addition, the widespread assumption that a ‘true’ Muslim believes that a utopia should by definition be authoritarian is not confirmed by my empirical findings. The ideal societies portrayed by these young Bangladeshi-Italians do not resemble jihadist dystopias, as dreaded by many; on the contrary, they are built in opposition to the idea of extremism and to media images about controversial realities such as the Daesh. Moderation, in the form of both conservatism and liberal reformism, is the compass that these youths use to navigate the sea of their utopias. They choose not to challenge the tenets of liberal democratic states and late-capitalist societies, and often leverage individual morality as a privileged site for political action, in accord with the disseminative governmental project of late modernity (Foucault 2008). This shifts the focus of the problem of social change away from a molar level, that is, one concerned with seizing power and reforming political institutions, to a micro-physical level (cf. Göle 2002). Despite being common to all my interlocutors, this attitude is stronger in those who are more independent from previous generations and who feel better placed within society. The youths who explicitly claim that they enjoy a relative privilege within their generational cohort and the Bangladeshi community in Rome are more inclined to describe realistic utopias that implicitly celebrate the status quo and their own success, both as individuals and as members of their group, and that entail a cult of bourgeois normality and political moderatism. It seems that a principle of hope still exists among these young people, but it is one that has been domesticated and substantially subsumed by a neoliberal imaginary in the process of constructing a public Islam.
On the other side of the coin, those who feel marginalized, victims of police repression, or relegated to secondary social circuits often dream of a messianic reign whose very idea mobilizes “possibility against reality” (Blumenberg, quoted in Bielik-Robson 2018: 140). This radical utopia is a specter that haunts the realistic utopia proposed by the optimists, preventing the ontologism of what ‘actually’ exists from monopolizing any form of political imagination and sabotaging in this way, albeit only in their imagination, the process of ‘technicalization’ of governmentality that characterizes advanced capitalist societies. Thus, a normatively conceived Islamic utopia ends up representing a “messianic powerless power” (ibid.: 144) and assuming, counter-intuitively, emancipatory tracts, albeit only along the axes of social class and religiosity. As Campanini (2018: 44n4) says, “looking back is not necessarily reactionary,” at least not in all respects, yet this is something that proves difficult to observe if we use utopianism exclusively as a lens in assessing securitarian risks.
The polarities that span my group of interlocutors are not those of Islamological categories such as ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘historical Muslims’, or ‘reformists’ and ‘millennialists’. Instead, they mainly reflect dissimilar lived power relationships and generational visions of activism. There is an important difference between the migrants’ children, who have grown up in a country where Islam is a minority religion and have developed an awareness of being part of a larger project of humanity that does not include only Muslim people, and their parents, a generation of migrants who grew up in a country where Islam is the religion of the majority and who therefore understand Muslim activism differently than the youths. The religious repertoires conveyed not only by actors such as mosques, madrasahs, and youth associations, but also by digital and traditional media, interplay with, and find their immanent significance in, these positionalities. The result is a religious discourse with multiple inscriptions that activate a political theology of Islam selectively, based on specific instances, with outcomes that are most exhaustively known and interpreted on strictly empirical bases.
Acknowledgments
This article draws on findings from the ethnographic project “(Un-)typical Utopias-Visions of the Future from Adolescents at Islamic Schools in Bangladesh and Italy.” I am grateful to the Gerda Henkel Foundation for supporting my research, to Eva Gerharz and Max Stille for their guidance, to Mara Matta, Carmelo Russo, and Alessandro Saggioro for facilitating my work in various ways, and to all the anonymous interlocutors for making this ethnography actually happen.
Notes
Interviews took place in Italian. The names of people, mosques, madrasahs, and the youth social center that is mentioned in this article are fictional. The only name that has not been altered is that of the association Giovani Musulmani d'Italia.
The formulation I employ to indicate the temporal extent of this golden age is deliberately vague, as the subject is the cause of heated debate between the various orientations of Islam.
A campaign of sweeping checks on mosques in Rome had taken place in 2015–2016. Beginning in 2018, a new round of law enforcement visits started. These checks, aimed at ascertaining compliance with safety regulations, led to the closure of many prayer rooms during the period of my research.
Muhmmad al-Mahdi, the Hidden Imam, is a messianic figure expected to appear at the end of times to establish the Divine Kingdom of Allah. The Dajjal, whose complete name is Al-Masih ad-Dajjal, is a false messiah whose arrival is supposed to signal the start of the ‘third period’ in Islamic eschatology.
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