Islam and nationalism: continuities and contradictions *

ASEN, LSE, 27 March 2003 ISLAM AND NATIONALISM: CONTINUITIES AND CONTRADICTIONS Sami Zubaida Islamic advocates in politics have often proclaimed that ‘the Muslim’s nationality is his faith’. Many such Muslims have denounced nationalism for dividing the Muslim community, the umma, into fragmentary units, contributing to its weakness in the face of its religious and civilizational opponents. Sayid Qutb, the founding ideologue of modern radical Islam, responded to the Prosecutor’s questioning of his patriotism in the trial that culminated in his execution in 1966: I believe that the bonds of ideology and belief are more sturdy than those of patriotism based upon region and that this false distinction among Muslims on a regional basis is but one consequence of crusading and Zionist imperialism which must be eradicated. (quoted in Mortimer 1982: 271) Such proclamations reinforced the view of some Western commentators, including Ernest Gellner, that the Islamic idea of the community as the political unit is incompatible with the territorial nation state. Nationalists, on the other side, have exalted the nation as a cultural and territorial unit as the ultimate basis for unity and solidarity. Few nationalists were actually hostile to religion as a faith and cement of social solidarity. Faced, however, with religious divisions within territorial nations, many secular nationalists have advocated a separation between religious faith and national solidarity, exemplified in the slogan of the early Egyptian nationalist leader Sa’d Zaghloul (1857-1927), ‘religion is for God, and the fatherland is for all its members’. Arab nationalists have often considered Islam as a most valuable part of the heritage, turath, of the Arab nation, alongside language. In some contexts this assertion has the effect of devaluing its specifically religious content and its claims to be a basis of the political unit as Islamic government. We may discern three overlapping bases of conceiving the political unit in the Middle East: 1. The territorial nation-state, such as Egypt or Iraq or Turkey; 2. Pan-Arab nationalism (for the Arabs); and 3. Islam. In practice, nationalist, as well as Islamic