Recently, I came across a thumbnail of a podcast hosted by a well-known Pakistani journalist. The video’s thumbnail stated that an “Islamic army” was to take control of Gaza.

Indeed, one of the suggestions made by various countries to US President Donald Trump is to convince Israel to withdraw its forces from Gaza and allow an international peacekeeping force to be stationed there. In fact, this suggestion is already part of the ‘peace plan’ that Trump is offering to Israel, the Palestinians and their respective allies. 

If all goes to plan and the hawkish Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, actually agrees, there is every likelihood that a peacekeeping force will replace the Israeli forces that have flattened Gaza and killed tens of thousands of men, women and children there — both Palestinian Muslims, as well as non-Muslims.

The peacekeeping force will most likely be made up of military personnel belonging to Muslim-majority countries. Therefore, it will be a Muslim force. Calling it an “Islamic army” is not only problematic but largely incorrect as well. Let me explain.

The constant interchangeable usage of the terms ‘Islamic’ and ‘Muslim’ in public discourse has resulted in an inability amongst most to understand the important difference between the two

In Pakistan, the words ‘Islamic’ and ‘Muslim’ in most cases are used interchangeably, or as if one were the synonym of the other. At least from the early 20th century, on political and social levels, the word ‘Islamic’ often carries clear ideological connotations, whereas the word ‘Muslim’ is almost entirely about cultural identity. 

So, in this context, not all Muslims are ‘Islamic’ as such. There are numerous men and women who identify with Islam due to their family background, heritage or the social environment in which they were raised. But they don’t adhere to or agree with the politics and practices associated with what is usually perceived as ‘Islamic’. 

They remain Muslim, though. However, they often view the word ‘Islamic’ as an outcome of mixing religion with politics. Some may be entirely secular and even dismissive of contemporary laws shaped by particular interpretations of the faith’s scriptures by certain governments, yet they identify themselves as Muslim and follow the basic doctrinal tenets and cultural practices of Islam.

So what is ‘Islamic’? Transmitting the Quran through art (calligraphy) is correctly understood as Islamic art. Architecture and design that are presented as visual representations of God’s infinite nature are also Islamic. A conference in which Muslim theologians discuss the dynamics of Islam’s scriptures can be termed as an ‘Islamic conference’ as well. But a conference that is framed to generate discussions about the political and economic standing of Muslim-majority countries is certainly not an ‘Islamic conference.’ It is a meeting of political representatives of Muslim-majority countries.

The confusion in this regard only deepened when political gatherings of Muslim leaders began to be labelled as ‘Islamic summits’ or when sports events involving athletes from Muslim-majority countries are labelled as ‘Islamic games.’ There is nothing ‘Islamic’ about them, unless the summits were discussing the complexities of Islamic theology or, in the latter’s case, sporting events were reshaped by putting them in the context of the sharia [Islamic teachings]. 

Returning to the case of Pakistan, the bulk of literature produced during the height of the Pakistan Movement in British India speaks about Muslim nationalism. For example, the All India Muslim League (AIML), which became India’s largest Muslim-interest party, treated the Muslims of the region as culturally distinct from India’s Hindu majority. 

Muslim nationalism even presented India’s Muslims as an overarching ethnic community within which lay different Muslim ethnic and sectarian/ sub-sectarian groups. Therefore, the Hindu majority began to be viewed by AIML as an ethnic, cultural and political ‘other’.

Muslim nationalism encapsulated the ethnically diverse Muslims of India as a cultural whole but one with different ethnic, sectarian and sub-sectarian groups. Therefore, the AIML’s purpose was to create a Muslim-majority country with Muslim nationalism at its core. Had the AIML been leading an ‘Islamic’ movement, it would have struggled to address and regulate multiple interpretations of Islamic theology held by different sets of Islamic sects and sub-sects. In fact, according to the political scientist Muhammad Waseem, the concept of Islam in different ethnic groups among India’s Muslims too differed from each other on various theological points.  

This is when ‘Islamic nationalism’ entered the picture. Though slightly older than Muslim nationalism, Islamic nationalism’s purpose was to regenerate colonised Muslim societies through a revival of a global caliphate and universalised sharia laws, but it struggled to compete with the more regional, specific and ‘modernist’ Muslim nationalism. 

However, whereas Muslim nationalism succeeded in producing a separate Muslim-majority country in South Asia, it could not come to terms with the ethnic and sectarian fissures that intensified once the country was created, and the Hindu ‘other’ became a minuscule minority in the new country. 

So, starting from 1956, but more intently from 1973 onwards, an Islamic nationalism was introduced. This allowed the entry into the Constitution of various laws and rhetoric derived from a majoritarian interpretation of Islamic theology. From then onwards, everything began being termed as ‘Islamic’ — even though the Constitution still contained a large chunk of secular laws. 

According to the political scientist Ahmet T. Kuru, Islamic nationalism is a complex and often contradictory idea. It combines religious identity with nationalist aspirations. It is distinct from secular nationalism, which separates national identity from religion. Muslim nationalism lies somewhere between the two. It also combines religious identity with nationalist identity but keeps theology in the private sphere, to avoid theological complications between sects and sub-sects, and to mitigate any possibility of these complications mutating to give birth to a theocracy. 

But after 1973, the Pakistani state saw Islamic nationalism as a more robust tool to manage sectarian/ sub-sectarian and ethnic complexities. The term Muslim nationalism transcended to mean Islamic nationalism and then simply vanished. The question is: did Islamic nationalism resolve the complexities? No. It made them even more complex and, indeed, it did begin to mutate and give birth to a theocracy.

So far, this tendency has been mitigated by the state to settle for a volatile variant of ‘theo-democracy’ with an ‘Islamic constitution’ or, for that matter, ‘Islamic’ everything, even when much of this is anything but. 

So, to the journalist anticipating a peacekeeping force in Gaza made up of soldiers from various Muslim countries, it is an “Islamic army.” But the truth is, it will be just a Muslim army — unless its core purpose will be evangelical in nature and jihadist in intent, which will never be the case. 

One has to be extremely careful in how one uses the words ‘Islamic’ and ‘Muslim’ in the highly divisive and dangerously polarised world that we live in today.

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 5th, 2025