Submission in Context

“If the final revelation is about Abrahamic restoration - a return to the primordial tradition of Abraham along with covenantal fidelity, then where does the term ‘submitter’ (مسلم) fit into this?”

The Proclamation (Qur’an in Arabic) never uses “submission” or “submitter” as the name of a new religion or its adherents. The phrase we find is hanīfan musliman (حنيفا مسلما) - “an Abrahamic submitter.” It is descriptive, not denominational. It marks those who submit wholly to God’s covenant and uphold the covenantal law - as a specific criticism of the Jews and Christians who created offshoots that deviated from Abraham’s path after they were entrusted with upholding it: "But they split their matter (the Abrahamic tradition) into "religions", each rejoicing in their own." (23:53)

In other words, it means: “to remain on the covenantal tradition of Abraham, unlike the Jews and Christians who abandoned it by creating their own offshoots.” The truly faithful (مؤمنين) today are the “true Abrahamic submitters” (حنفاء لله مسلمين له) and in this sense, calling the 4000 year old Abrahamic tradition a new 1400 year old religion called “Islam” doesn’t make sense.

The final revelation makes this clear, and it should be uncontroversial. Quranic references to “submission” contrast with Jews and Christians who deviated from the original tradition. In fact, the first time a reference to submission appears reveals much:

They say, ‘No one will enter Paradise unless he is a Jew or a Christian.’ This is their wishful thinking. Say, ‘Produce your evidence (from scripture) if you are telling the truth.’ In fact, any who submit their face (i.e. entire countenance) to God and do constructive works will have their reward with their Lord: no fear for them, nor will they grieve. (2:111-112)

God then ties such submission to Abraham:

Who but a fool would forsake the tradition of Abraham? We have chosen him in this world and he will rank among the righteous in the Hereafter. His Lord said to him, ‘submit.’ Abraham replied, ‘I submit to the Lord of the realms. (2:130-131)

‫So in response to their saying

‘Become Jews or Christians, and you will be rightly guided.’ Say: ‘No, rather the tradition of Abraham, the Hanif, who did not associate sovereignty to another besides God.' (2:135)

So based on Abraham’s submission outlined in the verses 2:130-131, God states:

Abraham was neither a Jew nor Christian. He was Hanif and a submitter, never an idolater - and the people with most claim to him are those who truly follow his way: this Prophet, and [the true] believers, God is close to [true] believers. (3:68-67)

Thus God says:

“Do they (the Jews) seek anything other than God’s covenantal code? Everyone in the heavens and earth submits to Him, willingly or unwillingly; they will all be returned to Him. Say (Arabian Semites): ‘We have faith in God and in what has been sent down to us and to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and the (Israelite) Tribes. We have faith in what has been given to Moses, Jesus, and the other prophets from their Lord. We do not differ on any of them. It is to Him that we submit.’ Whosoever (from the Jews and Christians) seeks anything other than complete submission to God, it will not be accepted from him: he will be one of the losers in the Hereafter.” (3:83-85)

In the above passages, not only do we see the actual context of references to “submission”, but we also see how it is explicitly tied to fidelity to the covenantal code. This is even more explicit earlier on in the third chapter “The Family of Amram”:

The true code to God is complete (Abrahamic) submission. Those who were given the Scripture (Tanakh) disagreed out of rivalry only after they had been given knowledge. If anyone denies God’s revelations, God is swift to take account. If they (the Jews) dispute with you, say, ‘I have submitted myself to God alone and so have my followers.’ Ask those who were given the Decree (Jews and Christians), as well as those without one (Ishmaelite pagans), ‘Do you too submit?’ If they submit, then they are considered guided, but if they turn away, your only duty is to convey the message. God is aware of His servants. (3:19-20)

If the Musalman tradition understood the nature of the discourse in Arabic, as well as its context, they wouldn’t have lost their grounding in first principles. Unfortunately, it inherits Arabic words as phonemes, stripped of their actual meaning, and turns them into an ethno-religious name and identity. What makes this so egregious is that it takes the Abrahamic restoration and its rebuke of the Jews for subverting the tradition into an ethnoreligious offshoot, and does the same! The Musalman tradition insists Abraham was a “Muslim” in the same sense that Muhammad was, while paradoxically claiming Muhammad came with a new religion called “Islam.” It’s like declaring 1 + 0 = 2. They back project this “new religion” on to Abraham, but when the Jews and Christians did the same with their respective religions, God says:

People of the Decree, why do you argue about Abraham when the Torah and the Gospels were not revealed until after his time? Do you have no sense?…Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian. He was Hanif and entirely submissive, never an idolater. (3:65-67)

A short and (over)simplified history

How did later people use “submitter”? Well after the Prophet’s death in 632 CE, Abū Bakr was selected as the first leader. He was initially referred to as “Successor of the Messenger of God”. When Umar b. al-Khattāb succeeded Abū Bakr in 634 CE, people at first called him “Successor of the Successor of the Messenger of God”. However, it was said: “This will become too long. Rather, you are the Commander and we are the faithful.” So he was called Commander of the Faithful. (See Al-Balādhurī, Ansāb al-Ashrāf) However, according to al-Tabarī et al, it was suggested by Christian ambassadors from the Levant who found the previous title long, saying: “You are known as the “Faithful” and this is your Commander.” Of course, the latter version infers that the believers in Madinah were referred to as “the Faithful”.

Administrative papyri from the first century after prophetic emigration to Yathrib (AH), such as a tax receipt from Egypt under ʿAmr b. al-ʿĀṣ, distinguishes between ahl al-īmān (people of faith) and local Christians. The wording shows that “faithful” was the preferred communal label. In the early 2nd century AH under the Umayyad empire, “Submitter” begins to function as a boundary-marker for the polity in opposition to the Christian Roman Empire (premised on Quranic usage), but the term is socially restricted to Arabs.

Large numbers of Persians, Arameans, Berbers, and others “submitted” but were referred to as mawālī tied to Arab tribes as subordinates. In practice, many of these new citizens still had to pay jizya (tribute taxes) even though God only applied it to unbelievers. Here we see instances of “submitters” being used in a quasi-ethnic sense as Arabs. Al-Balādhurī in Futūḥ al-Buldān preserves a report that a group of converts from Khurāsān (modern day Afghanistan) came to complain to the caliph: “We have submitted, yet they still impose jizyah on us and call us mawālī!” The famous Umayyad caliph ʿUmar b. Abd al-Azīz tried to abolish the practice, insisting that new submitters should not pay jizya and be counted as true submitters. According to al-Tabarī, he ordered that non-Arab submitters should be entered into the tax registers of the faithful and exempted from jizya. This reform met resistance from Arab elites who feared loss of tax revenue, showing how entrenched the discrimination was.

By the late 2nd century AH, “submitter” became the primary communal name and “the faithful” shifted to a moral-theological term. Early Abbasid legal literature such as Abū Yūsuf’s Kitāb al-Kharāj states that once someone submits, whether Arab or non-Arab, he cannot be made to pay jizya. He criticises governors who continued to collect it, citing it as unjust and contrary to covenantal law. This shows that by the late 8th century, the legal Abbasid establishment was pushing to universalise “submitter” against the earlier racialised restriction.

The designation of the faithful as “submitters” then endured across successive empires, anchored by Arabic’s role as the liturgical and legal language of revelation. This continuity was not broken even as later dynasties adopted other tongues as the spoken or administrative lingua franca of their dominions. The Turkic dynasties of Central Asia, Anatolia, and India (such as the Seljuks, Ottomans, and Mughals) employed Turkic and Persian as the languages of court, but often retained Arabic for law, theology, and liturgy. In the Maghrib and across North Africa, Berber languages became vernaculars of emerging faithful societies, while dynasties like the Almoravids and Almohads nonetheless grounded their legitimacy in Arabic scripture and jurisprudence. In Southeast Asia, Malay emerged as the lingua franca of monotheistic polities such as Malacca, Aceh, and later the Johor Sultanate, but Arabic terminology defined the boundaries of theology and law.

This pattern extended deeply into Africa, south of the Sahara. The great empires of West Africa (Ghana, Mali, and Songhay) conducted diplomacy and commerce in Mande or Songhay languages but their institutions relied on Arabic literacy for theology, law, and record-keeping. Scholars in Timbuktu, Jenne, and Gao wrote legal treatises and chronicles in Arabic, embedding the Arabic term “submitters” within the Malian and Songhay courts. Later, in Hausaland and the Sokoto Caliphate, Fulfulde and Hausa served as the dominant vernaculars of daily rule, while Arabic remained the binding medium of the Proclamation’s commentary, legal responsa, and mystic literature. Similarly, in the Swahili coast city-states, Swahili became the lingua franca of trade and politics, yet Arabic which was often interwoven into Swahili itself provided the theological and juridical idiom of an Ishmaelite legacy identity.

Across this vast geography, the persistence of Arabic as the liturgical, theological and often legal language meant that the term “submitter” retained its resonance. Even when rulers and their subjects spoke Turkic, Berber, Hausa, Fulfulde, Swahili, or Malay in everyday life, their belonging was expressed in ways to retain a connection with the Ishmaelite legacy. The reference thus endured not because of political uniformity but because Arabic preserved a trans-ethnic vocabulary and was still used in important facets of governance unlike today, which each empire and society absorbed into its own vernacular expression of faithfulness.

So how did “submitter” turn into Musalman?

The pre-colonial usage of “Musalman” shows us that the word Musalman is Persianate, from muslimān (literally “one who submits”). It entered South and Central Asian vernaculars via Persian, the administrative and literary language of the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire. In Persian and Urdu poetry, Musalman could mean both a covenantal identity (true Abrahamic submission to God unlike the Jews and Christians) and a communal identity (member of the Islamicate polity).

However, during colonial codification (18th–20th centuries), European colonial powers reified identities for administrative control. The British census from 1871 onwards forced populations of British India into rigid categories: Hindu, Musalman, Sikh, Christian, etc.

“Musalman” became an administrative identity: a countable, bounded community defined by law and statistics. Anglo-Muhammadan Law treated the Musalman identity as a legal secular category. This hardened the distinction between “Musalman” and “Hindu,” creating communal blocs where earlier there had been more fluid overlaps in practice.

In West Africa, British colonial administrations distinguished between “pagan,” “Musalman,” and “Christian” subjects. Musalman in Hausa and Fulfulde usage became a tribalised identity. With the British conquest of Northern Nigeria and the Sokoto Caliphate (early 20th c.), colonial administrators imported their Anglo-Indian vocabulary. British reports and censuses in West Africa used Mohammedan or Musalman reflecting Indian colonial habits. In practice, Hausa and Fulfulde speaking people still used Musulmi, but in English administration they might be labelled “Musalman.” In French West Africa, the term used was usually “Musulman”, from French. French colonial law in West Africa created “Musalman courts” for family law, carving Muslims into a separate legal category that was ethnically marked.

The Dutch in Indonesia and the British in Malaya distinguished “Malay-Musalman” identity as an ethno-religious bloc, contrasting it with “Chinese” and “Indian.” “Musalman” in South Asian diaspora communities in Malaya became an ethnic descriptor.

Pre-colonial discourse had always emphasised “faithful and “submitter” as covenantal references. Under colonial regimes, the idea of modern “religion” was popularised and ethnicised: “Musalman” became a census identity. The British in India, for example, wrote of “the Musalman race” or “Musalman community,” racialising the category in line with their broader ethnographic obsession with castes and tribes.

The consequences of this transformation was that people began to think of themselves as “Musalman” in the same way one might be “Hindu” or “Sikh,” not primarily as primordial Abrahamic submitters but as members of a colonial communal bloc. This hardened identity fed directly into communalist mobilisation in colonial India (e.g. Muslim League vs. Congress, partition politics). The reality that Noah, Abraham, and their righteous descendants were simply “submissive” adherents of the Creator’s code receded. Instead, “Musalman” was seen as a bounded ethno-religious identity specific to a population - and everything was consequently from that lens.

So in short, colonialism took the fluid, Abrahamic reference in Arabic which was converted to Persian and re-engineered it as a census and legal identity, turning it into an ethnicised communal marker. Where God simply spoke of the true Abrahamic faithful, colonial administrators transformed “Musalman” into a fixed social race, a “community” to be governed, counted, and politically mobilised.

The post-colonial or nation-state stage (mid-20th c. to present) brought further developments, whilst adopting “Muslim” – now an anglicised ethnic term – from Musalman. In South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh), the British census had already hardened “Musalman” into a separate community. Post-Ottoman Arab states (Iraq, Egypt, Syria) adopted Arab nationalism rather than “Musalman” as the binding identity, but constitutions still state “Islam is the religion of the state” and reserve laws for “Muslims” in family law, perpetuating the communal category. In North Africa, Berber vs. Arab tensions reinforced the sense of “Muslim” as an ethno-religious bloc (e.g. in Algeria, Berber identity movements explicitly opposed Arab–Islamic homogenisation). In Sub-Saharan Africa, “Muslim” identity is both religious and political. Hausa–Fulani are assumed Muslim, Yoruba are divided Christian/Muslim, and these categories are embedded in electoral politics. In Senegal, Mali, Guinea, French colonial law separated “Muslims” into distinct jurisdictions. Post-independence states preserved Islamic family law codes, making “Muslim” a legal category.

In Malaysia, the constitution defines “Malay” as inseparable from being “Muslim” (Article 160: a Malay is one who professes Islam, speaks Malay, and follows Malay custom). This fuses Muslim with an ethno-national identity, a direct legacy of British colonial communalism. The Pancasila ideology in Indonesia requires belief in “one God,” but Islam is legally recognised as the majority religion.

The transformation thus went in four stages:

1. Primordial submissive subjects of God (universal covenantal),
2. Pre-colonial empires (Persianate–fluid),
3. Colonial modernity (ethnicised Musalman)
4. Nation state (Institutionalised ethnic identity)

Conclusion

For all the anti-colonial rhetoric, if the faithful are to begin the journey of reclaiming their story, it should start at the very beginning. The narrative didn’t begin with the British census, French colonial courts, or even the rise of Mughal or Ottoman polities that later became the basis for Muslim identity. It began in the very words of the Proclamation itself. The Arabic term “submitter” referred to someone bound to the Abrahamic covenant. To reclaim that origin is to reject the colonial reduction of “Musalman” as a mere communal census block and the imperial definition of Muslimness as ethnicity or cultural heritage.

It is to remember that Abraham was called a “hanīfan muslīman” or “facing God submissively,” (3:67) and Moses’ people were told: "If you have faith in God, then put your trust in Him - that is if you are submissive.’” (10:84) The apostles of Jesus even declared, “Bear witness that we are submitters.” (3:52) This universality predates empire, census, and nation.

To reclaim their narrative, the faithful must return to where it was first defined: the Abrahamic language of covenantal fidelity, not the colonial or postcolonial scripts that recast “Musalman” or "Muslim" as a racialised identity or a statist category. Only by grounding identity in its primordial root can the faithful free themselves from the imposed frames of empire and modern nationalism, and recover the universality that bound Abraham and his prophetic descendants in a single tradition of upholding God’s code and His sovereignty, whilst maintaining loyal opposition to Iblīs and his allies.