Arab Nationalism

The Politics of History and Culture in the Modern Middle East

Peter Wien

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315412191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Arab nationalism has been one of the dominant ideologies in the Middle East and North Africa since the early twentieth century. However, a clear definition of Arab nationalism, even as a subject of scholarly inquiry, does not yet exist.

Arab Nationalism sheds light on cultural expressions of Arab nationalism and the sometimes contradictory meanings attached to it in the process of identity formation in the modern world. It presents nationalism as an experienceable set of identity markers – in stories, visual culture, narratives of memory, and struggles with ideology, sometimes in culturally sophisticated forms, sometimes in utterly vulgar forms of expression. Drawing upon various case studies, the book transcends a conventional history that reduces nationalism in the Arab lands to a pattern of political rise and decline. It offers a glimpse at ways in which Arabs have constructed an identifiable shared national culture, and it critically dissects conceptions about Arab nationalism as an easily graspable secular and authoritarian ideology modeled on Western ideas and visions of modernity.

This book offers an entirely new portrayal of nationalism and a crucial update to the field, and as such, is indispensable reading for students, scholars and policymakers looking to gain a deeper understanding of nationalism in the Arab world.

1 Introduction

A critique of Arab nationalism

Nationalism explains the order of the world. Other than, for instance, communism, or economic liberalism, it has no recourse to pure theory or doctrine with global validity, however. Instead, nationalism is a compartmentalized perception of the superiority of a particular community of people, based on ideas of ethnic origin or other variants of rationalizing the bonds that bind a community together. Sometimes, mere physical borders create these bonds, even if they were more or less arbitrarily drawn. The lack of doctrine, however, is compensated in stories. Nationalism is of a narrative nature because its ideas about the shared origins of a community have to be communicated in order to be of value. Stories of a shared origin, but also stories about the glorious deeds of the forefathers, of Great Men who saved or shaped the nation, or stories of injustice and humiliation, communicate the imaginary of the nation to which one belongs. Nationalism does not tolerate a pluralism of stories and ideas. It is an ideology because it postulates a hegemonic version of the story of the origin and evolution of the community, and it is modern because it uses the means of the modern nation state – education, media, bureaucratic coercion, or mass mobilization – to disseminate and enforce the hegemonic narrative. Besides that, there is no rationale for belonging to a nation. It consists of a certain narrative heritage that one considers one’s own. Efforts to present it as superior to other nationalisms are secondary to this acceptance of identity, and consequently, there is no way to rationalize individual adherence to one nationalism over another, except through the continuity of exposure to a particular set of stories. In contrast, the individual endorsement of ideologies such as communism or free market capitalism can be the result of an intellectual effort and a rational choice. It is, however, not impossible to switch from one nationalism to another, but difficult because the act would compel the individual to throw a whole set of collective images, themes and stories overboard in order to adopt new ones. In certain cases, a particular nationalism might become utterly discredited through defeat in war or association with a particularly heinous crime, as happened in post-World War II Germany, but even that involves a slow and conflict laden process of unlearning. Most of the time, to turn away from one nationalism therefore means to turn away from all.¹

Nationalism is thus a reference system for the shaping of collective identities, and as such it is an intrinsic part of twentieth-century culture. Politics and socio-economic transformations, such as the creation of urban mass societies and coercive state systems that practice social engineering, or the demands of an industrializing society to oversee and rationalize the workforce, created the foundations for the emergence of nationalism. On another level, political agendas evolved from it. But in its essence, nationalism is a cultural reference system that creates belonging.

Over the past 50 years or so, works that aimed to synthesize Arab nationalism throughout the twentieth century often focused on the evolution of regimes and on the formulation of ideology by the letter. In scholarly works, conceptual epithets such as “crisis of …, the problem of …, the predicament of …” abound. Until the 1960s, Western observers described the emergence of the post-World War II Middle Eastern state system according to modernization theory, postulating that the new nation states were on an irreversible route towards democratization and the development of secular societies. The upheavals after the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, however, made popular a four-fold periodization that was divided into “the rise of Arab nationalism,” followed by the “formative years” of nationalist ideology, shaped by the likes of Sati‘ al-Husri and Michel ‘Aflaq, and its “flowering” in the 1950s under Nasser, which, again, was followed, according to this periodization, by a steep “decline” in the 1960s where nationalism became a delusory propagandistic tool to discipline societies and divert attention from the parochial activities of cliques whose only concern was to remain in power, only to be replaced in the 1970s by Islamism as an alternative popular political ideology. Beyond this broad-brush approach, and beyond the obvious shortcomings of Arab leaders and ideologists, it remains to be shown how, and to what extent, the ideas and practices of Arab Nationalism became, and perhaps remain meaningful for ordinary people in the Arab world.²

The present book builds on an approach that first received prominence in 1997 in a volume edited by Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, who assembled an array of individual studies shedding light on aspects of cultural and intellectual history as well as biography related to Arab nationalism, all within the framework of individual countries. The editors pointed to the lack of theoretical sophistication in Arab nationalism research that is still present even in more recent publications. The contributions to their volume offered examples for what Gershoni called a “New Narrative” of Arab nationalism built on a primary source base that transcended the level of big politics and great thinkers. This volume shares similar perspectives and adds a transnational point of view, as well as non-textual representations in festivals and nationalist liturgy, along with institutions in the cultural inquiry. It examines all these with regard to their social and political meanings.³

Even today, Arab nationalism as a framework of cultural references circumscribes an imaginary space between the Atlantic Ocean, the southern and eastern rim of the Mediterranean, and the Tigris River. To try to grasp it means to enquire into the real and imaginary movements of people – dead or alive – their words and ideas in this space, between locations and in time. It also means to look for their manifestations in particular places and at particular times. While the space is imagined, only these manifestations make it experienceable; the people who moved in this space were at times excited about its promises, as well as disappointed about its corruption and containment. The following chapters address the questions of if and in what ways this virtual pan-Arab community ever existed, transcending the borders of nation states, or to what extent local agendas actually confirmed borders and fissures, even if they were presented in the language of nationalism. In the case studies, Arab nationalism is not presented as a political agenda of unification and cooperation first of all, but rather with a focus on the roots, the establishment, and the evolution of imaginative, symbolic, or “lived” ties between people(s) who claimed to belong to an Arab national community.⁴ At the same time, however, Arab nationalism was never the exclusive frame of reference for people living in the Arab lands. As usual, it only offered one of a wide variety of options that people could choose from in the process of constructing and negotiating their identities. It is therefore important to describe nationalism as fractured and conflicted, and as gaining shape in contradictory ways and out of specific contexts. It would be a misunderstanding therefore to speak of only one Arab nationalism. Rather, there is a conglomerate of sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary Arab nationalisms that take different forms in the different Arab lands and are deeply rooted in local contexts. They do, however, share a common reference to a vaguely defined and delineated Arabness. This study about Arab Nationalism is therefore also about shifting boundaries – between countries and their peoples, between elites and the populace, between the Ottoman and Mandate eras in the Middle East, and between various ideological commitments.⁵

Before going into a number of case studies to illustrate these points, a few conceptual remarks are necessary to highlight leading problems in Arab nationalism research – to dissect Arab nationalism as a multifaceted subject of investigation.

How modern is Arab nationalism?

Nationalism as a worldview emerged together with the modern nation state and the societal transformations that it accompanied. It is considered a product of European modernity. An outdated, but still popular, narrative about Middle Eastern history describes the advent of modernity in the region as a rupture, brought by imperialism as Napoleon Bonaparte embodied it when he disembarked at Alexandria in 1798. According to more recent scholarship, however, the French conquest of Egypt, though definitely a break politically, only served as a catalyst of trends that had taken root in Middle Eastern societies some time before. The debate follows two lines of inquiry. One disproves the notion that modern, “enlightened” ways of thinking only appeared in the Ottoman lands as a consequence of the encounter with Western science. Some researchers have identified signs of a rudimentary autochthonous Islamic Enlightenment in the Middle East of the eighteenth century or even earlier – a controversial notion that ushered in fierce debates. In the second line, more cautious researchers have argued that a growing economic middle class in places such as Cairo developed individualized forms of literary expression and critical approaches to textual debate that thrived regionally, building on an expanding book market based on the output of specialized workshops that produced manuscripts for export and local consumption.⁶ Altogether, these phenomena prepared a momentous shift in worldviews away from concrete and locally limited perceptions of community adherence towards abstract notions of allegiance to broader groups based on shared ethnic, religious, and cultural markers.

In this context, Islamic Studies scholarship has put a great deal of emphasis on the alleged emergence of Neo-Sufi trends, based on a revival of Hadith studies in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Sufi circles, and the new networks that evolved from the heightened scholarly activities in the Haramain cities (Mecca and Medina), combined with a new level of mobility among scholars and their disciples throughout a broad region of Islam, spanning from West Africa and Morocco to the Indian Ocean region. An equal amount of energy has been spent on the refutation of such theses – especially the related arguments about an Islamic Enlightenment. According to the Neo-Sufism concept, the unquestionable surge in activist Sufi organization throughout Africa, north and south of the Sahara, and the Middle East that occurred in the nineteenth century was due to a shift in Sufism away from localized mystical and superstitious practices to a more rational and worldly way of organizing and linking people, especially men, together. Neo-Sufism re-focused Muslim spirituality away from a distant deity to the person of the prophet as a go-between of the divine and the worldly spheres. The Sufi way thus took a turn towards a tariqa Muhammadiyya (a “Muhammadan path”) in the eighteenth century, which proponents of the Islamic Enlightenment thesis interpret as a step towards the endorsement of an anthropocentric worldview. At least, Sufi organization provided assets that became useful in anti-colonial resistance throughout the nineteenth century, such as the strict hierarchical order of a master’s charismatic leadership and his disciples’ obedience, the missionary activities of the orders, and the resulting wide spatial distribution of a network of lodges, and not least the esprit de corps founded on an awareness of shared genealogies, common practices and a distinctive belief system. In addition, the increased focus of Neo-Sufism on the Prophet as a pathway to the divine either led to, or at least coincided with, a revival of Hadith studies in the academies of Mecca and Medina where legal scholars, who were at the same time Sufi masters, had already argued in the eighteenth century that their students should go back to the sources of Islamic law that were the closest in time to the life of the prophet. They should use individual intellect and reason (ijtihad) to adjust Islamic law to current circumstances instead of practicing taqlid, which is the principle of mere emulation of century-old authorities in Islamic jurisprudence that conservative adherents of orthodoxy among the legal scholars (‘ulama’) propagated.⁷

Critics of Neo-Sufism reject the idea that the described phenomena were new. Many of the supposedly novel positions of these leaders had been formulated by others centuries earlier, and the authoritative writings of alleged Neo-Sufi leaders such as the Moroccan Ibn Idris (1760–1837) banned free-wheeling ijtihad rather than promoting it.⁸ The fiercest critics of Neo-Sufism have tended to rely on close textual arguments without much sense for historical contextual source critique. For instance, Ibn Idris’ emphasis on normative behavior in his writings might have been a reaction precisely to increased transgression among his disciples. Another argument weighs more heavily, however, namely that Neo-Sufism might be a mere invention of nineteenth-century colonialism and a product of the surprise of French, British, or later Italian authorities when they encountered resistance against their endeavors from various well organized Sufi movements. Arguably, the effectiveness of this resistance ran counter to the Orientalist prejudice that the Sufi maraboutism of North African peoples was particularly passive and otherworldly. The unexpected experiences to the contrary called for a new explanatory paradigm, which was then passed down and readily accepted by twentieth-century scholars.⁹

Critics of Neo-Sufism have been ready to concede that the new organizational forms and the mobilizing power of Sufi orders in the nineteenth century were indeed a novelty, as evident, for instance, in the swift organization of anti-French resistance in Eastern Algeria by ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri in the 1830s, or the respective role of the Sanusi brotherhood in Libya and the central Sahara.¹⁰ In contrast, the assertion that aspects of Neo-Sufism related to doctrine and philosophy constituted a rudimentary form of autochthonous Islamic Enlightenment has been attacked, sometimes with fierce conviction. Terminology has been a problem, because the occurrence of the Enlightenment epithet itself with its baggage of ideological usages in a European Geistesgeschichte, was sure to give rise to misunderstandings, even if, at times, they tended to smack of traditional Orientalist perceptions as if Islamic cultural manifestations, including Sufism, belonged to an a-historical continuum and were incapable of an autochthonous Enlightenment unless they had been poked and impregnated by European modernity driving them to frantic activism.¹¹

Even if there is still substantial controversy over the Enlightenment theory, scholars indeed do offer strong arguments supporting the dissemination of an increasingly anthropocentric worldview with the Prophet as the lead model in Sufi circles during the eighteenth century.¹² The result was, arguably, that individual members of increasingly activist Sufi orders were ultimately considered to be individually responsible for the application of the norms put forward in scripture. They were compelled to give up inherited patterns of orientation that were bound to the societal bonds of local tradition and authority, especially if this re-orientation took place in the context of the highly transformative and mobile networks of masters, their deputies, and the disciples in the expanding brotherhoods. The new – or Neo – Sufis found themselves part of wider and more abstract networks of belief and identity.

These trends preceded and thus maybe facilitated the occurrence of other markers of change and transformation in the Arab world during the nineteenth century that help explain how Arabs became modern, in a recognizable European sense, so swiftly. Such markers are rudimentary capitalist market conditions, the emergence of a quasi-bourgeois elite, the development of a book production industry, and a move towards individualism even before European encroachment. At least some Arabs were much better prepared to handle the encounter with Europe than the aforementioned rupture theory insinuates. Individuals adjusted their identities and adherences as a consequence of new notions of space and the position of the individual within it, resulting from new patterns of movement that Neo-Sufism pioneered – building wide networks that bound people together – beyond the scholarly class that had had the sole privilege of traveling widely in the Islamic realm for centuries. In the nineteenth century, these trends concurred with the integration of the southern and eastern rim of the Mediterranean into the imperialist world economic system, as well as the intensification of global trade throughout the Atlantic world and the Indian Ocean, which resulted in labor-driven movements of rural populations that followed the re-direction of trade routes to the exponentially expanding port cities, as well as to the administrative hubs of the emerging bureaucracies of nascent nation states and colonial administrations. The ensuing re-direction of group allegiances and emergence of new social norms among heterogeneous urban populations produced new ways of social mobilization that influenced both contents and language of political as well as religious debates, but also the shape of communal behavior (both violent and non-violent). The economic classes that formed did not supersede older allegiances, but at times, the process of uprooting as a consequence of the new mobility paradoxically threw them into stronger relief because differe...