The Muslim world is currently experiencing one of the most critical turning points in its modern history. The tension between integrating into the global system and remaining faithful to its own identity continues to exert a direct influence on the political and cultural choices of contemporary Muslim societies. The modernization trajectories of countries such as Turkey, Egypt, and Iran are at once stories of aspiration and deep contradictions. Muslim societies that were willing to pay a heavy price in the name of modernization have, in the end, neither fully modernized nor developed a temporality or spatial imagination unique to their own civilizational ethos.
Moreover, the benefits of modernization have largely remained in the hands of political elites and those aligned with them. For the broader Muslim public, modernization has been experienced as a process that further marginalizes the periphery in favor of the center. This structural imbalance still continues. The political, economic, and cultural marginalization of the periphery has led to the emergence of multiple zones of tension across the Muslim world. These tensions are further compounded by the fact that large parts of the Muslim geography remain under various forms of occupation—sometimes military, but more often political, economic, and cultural.
The Muslim world has not forgotten that Europe’s 19th-century modernization project went hand in hand with colonialism. From the Maghreb to Indonesia, nearly 80% of Muslim lands were under direct colonial rule by the late 19th century—a fact that remains alive in the collective memory of Muslim societies.
The reality is that the Muslim ummah has yet to fully free itself from this legacy of occupation—because the occupation continues, albeit in different forms and at varying intensities. From Algeria’s use of French as its sole official language until quite recently, to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, from the tragedy of Chechnya to the ongoing plight of Palestine, the wounds of this long historical assault remain open.
Before offering a critical evaluation of this historic gathering, it is essential to consider the broader fault lines shaping the condition of the Muslim world today. For only by understanding the true nature and scope of the questions placed on the table in Mecca can we grasp the urgency and significance of the task at hand.
The prolonged experience of political, economic, and cultural subjugation has produced a deep psychological trauma in Muslim societies, giving rise to what may be termed a psychology of victimization. To understand the wide range of political attitudes present in today’s Muslim world—from the most conservative and conciliatory to the most radical and confrontational—one must properly analyze this condition of perceived victimhood.
This state of victimization reflects a consciousness shaped by injustice and occupation. One who perceives themselves as a perpetual victim tends to live in a state of unresolved anger, resentment, and regret. The desire for revenge grows stronger with time. Conflict becomes the only viable mode of engaging with the “other.” The question “Why me?” evolves into a foundational marker of identity. Ultimately, the psychology of victimhood overtakes the actual experience of being a victim; perception begins to shape reality, and victimhood becomes an ontological stance.
Today, the average Muslim individual interprets nearly all events—from foreign invasions in Iraq, Chechnya, or Palestine, to corruption within their own society—through this lens of historical and ongoing victimization. This mindset creates an illusory sense of security, as it externalizes the causes of all problems. We find comfort in identifying the conditions that rendered us victims, in locating those responsible, and in mentally punishing them within imagined spaces. This becomes the most immediate and emotionally satisfying response. As a result, rather than pursuing deep critical analysis, we tend to channel our frustrations into reactive narratives. We become more concerned with which strategic formulations best serve our purposes than with truth itself.
In internalizing the very conditions that produced the victimhood, we paradoxically become actual victims. The historical trajectory of the Muslim world over the past two centuries has played a pivotal role in spreading this psychological state. Deprived of the possibility to live within a time and space rooted in their own civilizational paradigm, many Muslims feel alienated—displaced not only from history, but also from geography. This alienation produces a crisis of belonging, pushing individuals toward the search for alternative identities.
Some seek refuge in escapist fantasies shaped by the colorful screens of MTV; others embrace totalitarian or reductionist political ideologies; still others resort to violence as the only perceived way out. To fully grasp the depth of this crisis, we must briefly touch upon the dislocation of time and space that underlies much of the contemporary Muslim condition.
With the advent of modernity, the Muslim world experienced a profound dislocation in both time and space. A psychology of marginalization emerged—a sense of being historically displaced. Entire populations began to feel as though they had been pushed out of history, forced to live within a temporal imagination produced and directed by others—namely, the West. They became aware of the heavy cost of inhabiting a historical narrative not of their own making. Yet they also found themselves lacking the power to resist or to construct an alternative vision of time and history.
The material gains of the modern era have overwhelmingly served the interests of Western civilization. Intellectuals and political leaders in the Muslim world, afflicted by a sense of historical delay and cultural inferiority, have done little more than try to insert themselves into the Eurocentric historical framework. Rather than questioning its premises, they have sought to secure a place within it.
Traditional societies, by contrast, did not conceive of time as a horizontal, linear progression. Time was understood vertically, not as something that recedes behind us, but as something under our feet—a sacred ground upon which one stands. In this worldview, history was not a fading past but a foundational presence. Modern conceptions of time have rendered this metaphysics obsolete, reducing progress to a material, linear, and one-dimensional phenomenon.
Classical philosophy defined time as the measure of movement. As movement accelerated, so too did time. But this acceleration has now escaped our control. What Karl Marx once described as “alienation”—the condition in which human beings can no longer master the tools they themselves have created—has become a normalized state of being. Western societies attempted to overcome this alienation by redefining both the individual and society. Muslim societies, however, especially those that sought to preserve traditional identities, underwent a double alienation: estranged both from modernity and from their own civilizational traditions.
This double alienation helps explain the impulse among many Muslims to return to the security of a remembered past—whether it be the era of the Prophet (asr al-saʿādah) or the classical age of Islamic civilization. While this posture may be open to critique, it should not be mistaken for mere escapism. Rather, it arises from a belief that an alternative temporal imagination is possible.
The notion of time that Ahmet Haşim once described as “Muslim time” (vakt-i Müslim) was not dictated by mechanical precision, but by the rhythms and textures of life as lived through an Islamic consciousness. Within this conception, one could find the melodies of lullabies, the architecture of Selimiye Mosque, the discovery of the circulatory system, or the elegance of Islamic calligraphy—all integrated into a coherent civilizational outlook. Here, the human being did not aim to conquer time, but to inhabit it with meaning—to live in alignment with a mode of being that made time spiritually significant rather than oppressive.
The vast majority of Muslim societies still retain—often unconsciously—a traditional conception of time. The restless pace of modern life, with its relentless schedules and imposed urgency, is widely perceived as the burden of an alien temporality—a notion of time imposed from outside the Islamic worldview.
For the past two centuries, Muslims have strived to recalibrate their “condition” to align with the demands of modern time. Yet this effort has not enabled them to shape modern history from within. On the contrary, the more energy expended in adapting to this modern temporal framework, the deeper the sense of alienation became. What began as a mismatch has now evolved into a form of historical trauma.
This internal tension not only distances us from the intellectual and spiritual legacy of classical Islamic civilization, but also renders us temporally displaced in our own present. We become, in a sense, homeless beings in time—disconnected from both the past and the present, suspended between memories and impositions.
Those who attempt to articulate this deep temporal fracture in political terms often emerge in the form of radical movements. Their rhetoric is, in part, a response to the unbearable pressure of a time consciousness that offers no sense of rootedness, meaning, or transcendence.
In the next reflection, we will turn to the spatial dimension of this crisis—examining how the modern experience of displacement in space has further fragmented the Muslim sense of belonging and identity.
İbrahim Kalın – 2005
