Abstract
The poor record of the nominal nation-states established in the Middle East following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and after a period of colonial rule has contributed to the de-legitimisation of these states and of the military regimes monopolising the political power in them. Pan-Arab nationalism has been the legitimacy of these states and of their regimes. Thus the legitimacy crisis has contributed to the end of Pan-Arabism and to the rise of an alternative: political Islam. One of the major ideologues of this Islamic variety of religious fundamentalism qualifies the secular nation-state as an ‘imported solution’ (Hall mustawrad)1 and calls for an Islamic solution which is ‘the Islamic state’. Are these developments peculiar to the Middle East and to Arab nationalism?
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Notes
On religious fundamentalism see the seminal work Fundamentalisms Observed, ed. by Martin Marty and Scott Appleby, Chicago 1991, on ethnicity, Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley, 1985).
Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley, 1993).
For an analysis of the constraints underlying the politicisation of Islam, with several case studies, see the four chapters of part IV in B. Tibi, Islam and the Cultural Accommodation of Social Change (Boulder, Col., 1990), pp. 119–77 (second printing 1991).
See Bassam Tibi, ‘Major Themes in the Arabic Political Writings of Islamic Revivalism’, in Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, vol. 3, 2 (1992), pp. 183–210 (part I) and vol. 4, 1 (1993), pp. 83–99 (part II).
Tamara Sonn, Between Qur’an and Crown. The Challenge of Political Legitimacy in the Arab World (Boulder, Col., 1990), Chapters 4 and 5.
Bassam Tibi, The Crisis of Modern Islam (Utah University Press, Salt Lake City, 1988).
The cultural perception of anomalies in political and social life as a result of a ‘Western Ma’amura/conspiracy’ dominates the political thought of Arab nationalists and fundamentalists alike; see Bassam Tibi, Die Verschwörung — Mu’amara. Das Trauma arabischer Politik (Hamburg, 1993, new extended edition Munich, 1994).
Christopher Chase-Dunn, Global Formation (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), in particular part II.
Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (eds), The Expansion of International Society (Oxford, 1984).
Bassam Tibi, ‘The Simultaneity of the Unsimultaneous. Old Tribes and Imposed Nation-States in the Modern Middle East’, in Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East, ed. by Philip Khoury and Joseph Kostiner (Berkeley, Ca., 1990), pp. 127–52.
Mathew Horsman and Andrew Marshall, After the Nation-State. Citizens, Tribalism and the New World Disorder (London, 1994).
For more details see Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Berkeley, 1987), Chapter 10, pp. 255–93.
W. M. Watt, Islamic Political Thought (Edinburgh, 1968), p. 13.
Josef van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft im 2. und 3. Jahrhundert Hidschra. Eine Geschichte des religiösen Denkens im frühen Islam, 6 vols, here vol. I (Berlin, 1991), p. 17.
Maxime Rodinson, Mohammed (Luzern and Frankfurt am Main, 1977), p. 279.
Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols (Chicago, 1977).
Lord Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire (New York, 1977).
Wilfred C. Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York, 1978), p. 117.
Hamid Enayat, Modem Islamic Political Thought (Austin, Texas, 1982), p. 3.
Bassam Tibi, ‘Politisches Denken im klassischen und mittelalterlichen Islam zwischen Religio-Jurisprudenz/Fiqh und hellenisierter Philosophie/Falsafa’, in Piper Handbuch der politischen Ideen, 5 volumes, here vol. II, ed. by Iring Fetscher and Herfried Münkler (Munich, 1993), pp. 87–140. For an incorporation of this Islamic tradition into the entire Islamic history of ideas,
see B. Tibi, Der wahre Imam (Munich, 1996), Part II, Chapters 4–6.
’Abd al-Rahman al-Bazzaz, Hadhihi qawmiyyatuna (This is our Nationalism), 2nd ed. (Cairo, 1985), p. 185.
Leonard Binder, Islamic Liberalism (Chicago, 1988), Chapter 4 on ’Abd al-Raziq, pp. 128–69.
See Bassam Tibi, ‘Islam and Secularization’, in Islam and Civilization: Proceedings of the First International Philosophy Conference, ed. Mourad Wahba (Cairo, 1982), pp. 65–80.
Richard Mitchell, The Society of Muslim Brothers (Oxford, 1969).
Bassam Tibi, ‘The Worldview of Sunni Arab Fundamentalists’, in Fundamentalisms and Society, ed. by Martin Marty and Scott Appleby (Chicago, 1993), pp. 73–102.
Leonard Binder, The Ideological Revolution in the Middle East (New York, 1964), p. 131.
Graham E. Fuller, The Center of the Universe. The Geopolitics of Iran (Boulder, Col., 1991).
See Shireen T. Hunter, Iran and the World (Bloomington, 1990)
and John Esposito (ed.), The Iranian Revolution. Its Global Impact (Miami, 1990).
James Piscatori (ed.), Islam in the Political Process (Cambridge, 1983).
The most important effort in this regard is the 778-page volume of The Centre for Arab Unity Studies/Markaz Dirasat al-Wihda al-Arabiyya (ed.), al-Qaumiyya al-’Arabiyya wa al-Islam (Beirut, 1981, 2nd ed. 1982).
Bassam Tibi, ‘The Iranian Revolution and the Arabs’, in Arab Studies Quarterly, vol. 8, 1 (1986), pp. 29–44. This article is based on a paper presented to the 1983 Chicago meeting of the Middle East Studies Association of North America/MESA.
See part four in Bassam Tibi, Die Verschwörung (reference in note 8), pp. 273 ff. For a historical overview of the crusades and their topicality, see Karen Armstrong, Holy War: The Crusades and their Impact on Today’s World (New York, 1991).
Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, in Foreign Affairs, vol. 72, 3 (summer 1993), pp. 22–49.
For a full-scale analysis of the differences between Islamic and Western civilisation with regard to the listed five issues see Bassam Tibi, Krieg der Zivilisationen. Religion und Politik zwischen Vernunft und Fundamentalismus (Hamburg, 1995).
‘New Frontiers in Middle Eastern Security’ is a Harvard Project whose directors are Professors Lenore Martin and Roger Owen. For a report on the first conference (Ankara, June 1995) of this project see B. Tibi, ‘Kein Basar für Waffen mehr? Sicherheitspolitik im Nahen Osten nach dem Kalten Krieg’, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 22 July 1995, p. 10.
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Tibi, B. (1997). The Revival of Political Islam: Between Islam and Arab Nationalism. In: Arab Nationalism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376540_13
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