The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

nationalism

It is often assumed that an inherent contradiction exists between nationalism and Islam. On the one hand, nationalism is a product of secular Europe, which posits that human society should be organized along the dividing lines of language, kinship, and territoriality. On the other hand, Islam turns a community of believers into a political unit whose single religion should overpower any differences of culture, race, or geography. Nevertheless, the putative contradiction between Islam and nationalism did not prevent the inexorable global diffusion of the national state during the 19th and 20th centuries. Now, in the Islamic world no less than in the West, the national state provides the only viable unit of political organization.

The dramatic success of nationalism in the face of long-standing identities linked to Islam has puzzled scholars since Europe’s decolonization of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia in the years following World War II. These debates have involved concerted efforts to identify not just the relationship between Islam and nationalism but also the meaning of nationalism itself. Earlier scholars conventionally understood nationalism as a political doctrine that stated the nation is the natural unit of human society, but this only begs the question of what the nation is and where the nation comes from. More recent work has focused less on nationalism as a set of ideas than on nationalism as a sociological phenomenon. This shift has been accompanied by a broader historiographical move away from a textualist, and often elitist, history-of-ideas approach to a perspective that focuses more squarely on subaltern practices and the popular imagination. Nationalism is no longer seen as a purely intellectual edifice: it is more often considered to be a constructed stage on which particular social performances are played out.

Nationalism as Idea

If nationalism is understood primarily as political ideology, one way to trace its spread from Europe to the Islamic world is to study how the language of “nation” penetrates local vernaculars and how it is absorbed by and eventually naturalized into political discourse. The Islamic world’s exposure to modern nationalism effectively began with the French invasion of Egypt in 1798, when Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) addressed the population as al-umma al-miṣriyya, a phrase that his learned Orientalist experts thought would adequately convey the intended meaning of the “Egyptian nation.” But the word umma was more familiar in its Qur’anic context, where it referred to a whole community of believers rather than a delimited geographical body. Indeed, Muslims writing in the early and mid-19th century struggled to make sense of how the European Christians organized themselves politically. Terms such as ṭā’ifa (sect, segment), milla ([religious] denomination), and even qabīla (tribe) were all variously employed to describe the nations of Europe—sometimes in the space of a single text. As Ami Ayalon (1987) points out, the famous work Takhlis al-Ibriz fi Talkhis Bariz (The Extraction of Gold in the Abridgement of Paris, 1834) written by Egyptian chronicler Rifa’at al-Tahtawi (1801–73) interchangeably uses the words milla, umma, and ṭā’ifa to refer to the French people. Not until the growth of the Arabic printing press and the standardization of modern political terminology did umma become the generally accepted equivalent of a European “nation.” Even then, the earlier religious connotations of umma remained intact, sustaining a certain ambiguity about the basis of European political identity.

Muslim writers in the second half of the 19th century often slipped between traditional religious and contemporary political understandings of nation. This ambiguity was instrumentally useful as Muslims sought to defend against the increasing encroachment of European powers into the Islamic world. Muslims in India and Central Asia called for aid and solidarity from their coreligionists, which inspired Sultan Abdülhamid II (d. 1918) to cast himself as the new caliph. The claim to unite a Muslim community faced with European advances in India, North Africa, and the Caucasus had evident rhetorical appeal. Yet political activists such as Afghani (1838–97) had no qualms about invoking the historical glories of particular peoples to galvanize them into action against the threat of foreign invasion. Elsewhere, Afghani couched his arguments in pan-Islamic terms, demonstrating what might be construed as a blatant disregard for the logical consistency of his overall position. Nikkie Keddie (1969) offered an alternative position: that Afghani used religion for “protonationalist” purposes. By glorifying the Islamic past, opposing Islamic and Western cultures, and adopting a historicist perspective on civilizational progress, Afghani conceptualized “Islam” within a framework that was essentially nationalist.

In contrast, filtering out “Islamic” from “nationalist” elements was a challenge that equally confronted political nationalists in the mid-20th century. The ideologues of the Ba‘th Party elaborated an understanding of the Arab nation that owed much to romantic German notions of nationalism as the organic expression of a vital linguistic and historical community. Yet if the Arabic language was to be the constitutive element of the Arab nation, it was impossible to ignore its sacred status as the language of Qur’anic revelation. As a consequence, even secular Ba‘thism was obliged to incorporate the Islamic factor into its political formula. For the Christian Michel ‘Aflaq (d. 1989), the genius of Islam was simultaneously the genius of the Arab people; ‘Aflaq thought it would be dangerous to detach religion from nationality, as the Europeans had done. For secular Arab nationalists, differentiating between religious and nationalist culture was ill-advised, if not impossible. Both were equally part of the primordial Arab nation.

Nationalism as Political Practice

Once they ascend to the seat of power, political leaders have proved astute at avoiding a decisive choice between religious and nationalist principles. Such ostensible secularists as Syria’s Hafiz al-Assad (in power 1970–2000) and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein (in power 1973–2003) crushed religious opposition to their rule while donning the outer trappings of piety to appease any concerns about their ungodliness. Islamists have demonstrated a similar political dexterity at reconciling the apparently contradictory logics brought into play by attempting to construct a modern political project according to religious imperatives. This is most clearly demonstrated in the political theory and empirical practice of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Far from representing a return to the pristine principles of Shi‘i jurisprudence, the Iranian doctrine of clerical rule enacts a radical departure from existing tradition. As Sami Zubaida (1989) has argued, Ayatollah Khomeini’s (1902–89) argument for wilāyat-i faqīh (guardianship of the jurist) rests on a preeminently modern and implicitly nationalist conceptualization of “the people” as a distinct social entity and, more importantly, a political force. The rhetoric of the revolution owed more to political radicals such as Karl Marx (1818–83) and anticolonial activists such as Frantz Fanon (1925–61) than it did to Shi‘i scholars. As the revolution became institutionalized, it increasingly conformed to the framework of the modern national state: the new constitution was modeled on that of the French Republic; the export of the revolution was reconsidered as it threatened to undermine the gains made by the regime; even the ideological basis of wilāyat-i faqīh proved flexible when faced with the thorny question of which scholar should succeed Khomeini after his death. While religion provided much of the symbolic content of Iranian politics after the revolution, the overall framework remained that of the modern national state.

A similar process of accommodation with existing national frameworks can be seen across a variety of Islamic movements in the 20th century. The Muslim Brotherhood is perhaps the most widespread of such movements in the Middle East. Founded in 1928, the Brotherhood’s emphasis on social renewal and Islamizing the private sphere diverted its energies from working to unify the Islamic world after its dismemberment into separate national states at the hands of the colonial powers. While the Brotherhood did establish branches in a number of Arab states, each branch remained autonomous. There was little attempt to centralize control or to create an alternative to the existing system of national states. As a result, each individual branch developed in response to local, not transnational, conditions. The most notable example of this is the involvement of the Palestine Muslim Brotherhood in the formation of Hamas in 1987, completing the transition into a national(ist) movement. Lebanon’s Hizbullah provides another example of how the reality of a particular state works to shape and delimit political programs within a recognizably nationalist political field. Although Hizbullah was initially inspired by the political radicalism of distant Iran in the mid-1980s, during the following decade it underwent a process of “Lebanonization” that witnessed its steady integration into the national political scene. This is not to say that Hizbullah gained unconditional support from all Lebanese as an uncontested representative of the nation, but that Hizbullah operated firmly within the organizational framework and social imaginary of the Lebanese national state.

Nationalism and Modernity

The commensurability between Islamist and nationalist political programs supports the notion that nationalism is more a constructed social phenomenon than it is the offspring of a particular intellectual genealogy. Since the 1980s, several theorists have articulated a “modernist” perspective that proposes that nationalism is the product of a variety of social processes such as urbanization, industrialization, modern educational practices, print capitalism, and innovative methods of social control (e.g., cadastral maps, surveys, and censuses). Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (1983) and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1991) have been influential in this regard. While Gellner, in particular, subscribed to the opinion that Islam was an island of resistance against the tide of nationalism sweeping the world, the necessary association between secularism and nationalism has been hotly disputed by other scholars studying the Middle East. As James Gelvin (1997) argues, “Popular nationalism and Islamism might be viewed as kindred oppositional movements that use a traditionalizing discourse to mobilize their constituents against those forms of cultural and political domination they view as alien.” Seen from this angle, nationalism and Islam each act as avatars for anti-imperialism. Yet if contemporary Islamism is simply a particular expression of Third-World nationalism—a local variation on a larger theme of resistance—then the specific discursive configuration of nationalism and religion have little real significance. Accounts of nationalism as a sociological phenomenon arguably neglect the content of nationalism as secondary to nationalism’s structural function within the world-historical context.

In the early 21st century, the appearance of al-Qaeda seriously challenged the thesis that Islam and nationalism were on convergent paths. A transnational network apparently operating in the interstitial spaces of an increasingly globalized world, al-Qaeda rejected the modern system of national states and called for the unity of the umma to be restored under a new caliphate. But while al-Qaeda projected the image of being a free-floating structure detached from the institutional framework of the state, its achievements were always dependent on a real territorial base (first in Sudan, then in Afghanistan) and real state support (whether directly from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, or indirectly from the United States). The image of its supposedly cosmopolitan, international membership masked the reality of its dependence on Saudi and Egyptian nationals to fill leadership positions. Far from heralding the end of the appeal of nationalism among Muslims, al-Qaeda illustrated the difficulty of constructing a modern political project along nonnational lines.