6

NATIONALISM IN THE ARAB

MIDDLE EAST
Resolving some issues

James L. Gelvin

I first became interested in nationalism in the Arab world as the result of a question posed to me
during my comprehensive examinations, the last step before I began my dissertation research.
The question, which I had anticipated, was as follows: “What were the origins of Arab national-
ism” (as the topic was identified in those days)? The only response I could think of was, “I don’t
know, but I can give you the ‘up the Mississippi story’ that’s in the literature.” And so I did.
My questioner was on the same wavelength as I was, and knew immediately what I meant.
The “up the Mississippi story” refers to the commonplace description of the origins and early
evolution of jazz: born in New Orleans, jazz followed the African-American migratory path
north, passing through St. Louis/Kansas City, then Chicago, and eventually spreading east to
New York, with each stop along the way contributing something new or adding embellishment,
until there was jazz—no longer just Dixieland—in all its sophisticated glory. It is a story of linear
evolution, and like most such stories it is triumphal.Thus, what the story lacks in rigor, explana-
tory power, and nuance, it makes up in minimalism and appeal.
Similarly, the story of “Arab nationalism.” By the time I took my “comps,” the topic was old
and seemingly settled. In my dissertation, I traced the framework and narrative of the story as
far back as 1920, when Stephen P. Duggan of the Institute of International Education delivered
an address to the American Historical Association. In the address, he outlined the evolution of
nationalism in Syria from the late nineteenth century through the first months of the French
occupation.1 Duggan began by tracing the auspicious origins and early promise of “Arab nation-
alism” from the nineteenth century Arab literary renaissance and the appeal of “the principles
of liberty, equality and fraternity under a national and representative government” (p. 238). He
then pursued his narrative through the false hopes of the Syrian-Arab Congress of 1913, the
Arab Revolt, the Anglo-French Declaration of November 1918, and the King-Crane Commis-
sion. He recounted the initial setbacks Arab nationalism faced—repression by the Committee of
Union and Progress (which necessitated the defensive politicization of the movement through
secret societies), the wartime suffering of the inhabitants of Greater Syria, and the passion of the
Syrian martyrs. Because it was written in 1920, his story concludes with betrayal and, ultimately,
disaster: the wartime agreements, Zionism and the Balfour Declaration, British abandonment
and French occupation.
The kernel of Duggan’s narrative can still be found in historical accounts. It certainly lies at
the heart of the most influential English-language work on the topic, The Arab Awakening by

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George Antonius, written in 1939. As late as 1988—the year of my comps—Albert Hourani

noted that Antonius’s work was “still present in the minds of later writers on the same range of
subjects, most of whom find it necessary to define their areas of agreement and disagreement
with it” (1981, pp. 201–202).
By the time Hourani wrote those words, Antonius’s framework and narrative had been
revised a number of times, most notably by C. Ernest Dawn, Philip S. Khoury, and Rashid Kha-
lidi. Their joint efforts produced a narrative that begins with an intellectual awakening in the
nineteenth century, ascribed variously to Christian participants in the nahda (commonly defined
as the Arab literary renaissance), to Islamic modernists who sought to make Islam compatible
with Western concepts and modes of thought, or to both. The result was Arabism—a sort of
ethnic pride rooted either in the Arabic language or, over time, the role played by Arabs in the
formation of “Islamic civilization.”
While at first, the narrative continues, Arabist views were held by only a tiny fraction of
intellectuals and belletrists; by the early twentieth century, they came to be adopted by a fac-
tion of urban notables who were passed over for position by the Ottoman government, as well
as by a newly emergent professional strata seething with their own status resentments. Arabism
was a logical choice, the argument goes, because of an increasing identification of the Ottoman
imperial government under the Committee of Union and Progress with things Turkish. This
“othered” Arabs and rendered the Arab-Turkish cleavage the fundamental fault line in the Arab
provinces. By the time the entente powers had dismantled the Ottoman Empire after World
War I, Arabism had morphed into full-fledged Arab nationalism, embraced by elites who used
it in their competition for clients among the urban masses. In the words of C. Ernest Dawn, the
Arab nationalist movement remained “led by the urban aristocracy and moulded in their image”
until the 1930s or even later when, as a result of social and demographic pressures, nationalism
diffused throughout the population with what Elie Kedourie has described as “revolutionary
abruptness” (Hourani 1993, p. 100; Kedourie 2004, p. 213).
The framework in which this narrative is situated borrows from two sources: assumptions
associated with a traditional history-of-ideas approach and those associated with social history.
From the former, the narrative presupposes both the evolution of ideas in a linear and progres-
sive manner, and their instrumentality; hence, the trajectory that derives Arab nationalism from
Arabism and Arabism from Islamic modernism and/or the nahda, and hence the commonplace
but teleological identification of Arabism as “protonationalism.” (The term “protonationalism”
is, of course, associated with the great Eric Hobsbawm, who popularized it in an uncharacteris-
tic moment of inattention to the implications of what he was saying [2012, 46ff].) From social
history, the narrative draws heavily from assumptions associated with Albert Hourani’s politics of
notables model. The model was derived from a mid-twentieth-century structural–functionalist
framework and the attendant notion of a social order defined and held together by a uniform
set of “core values” and organized through ties of patronage (Gelvin 2006).
It should be obvious that situating the origins narrative in a combined history-of-ideas/
structural-functionalist framework is not without its problems. Among those problems are the
following:

• The narrative is unabashedly idealist. The narrative situates nationalism within an autono-
mous realm of ideas and locates the source of ideological change within the self-enclosed
debates held among a small circle of cultural producers.
• The narrative is crudely instrumentalist. It assumes, for example, notables turned to Arabism
because they were excluded from positions of power and prestige. Arab nationalism was
then deployed by those notables for advantage in their internecine squabbles.

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• The narrative is elitist. It treats non-elites as purely passive ideological consumers and/or
the targets of elite manipulation.
• The narrative equates the origins of Arab nationalism with the origins of nationalism
in the Asiatic Arab world. It thus presumes that Arab nationalism has a privileged claim on
the allegiance of the Arabic-speaking population of the region. It also presumes that by
providing an explanation for the origins and evolution of Arab nationalism, one is, in effect,
providing an explanation for the origins and evolution of nationalism in the Arab world. It
does not. But as a consequence, the narrative discounts the authenticity and legitimacy of
other nationalisms, such as territorially based nationalisms, that have emerged there.
• By presenting Arab nationalism as just the next logical step after Arabism, the narrative con-
flates two entirely different categories of phenomena—one that might be termed politi-
cal, the other cultural. There is, after all, a difference in uncovering or taking pride in the
achievements of your ancestors and demanding sovereignty over some piece of territory
based on that uncovering or pride.
• Finally, there is the “religion problem.” Because the narrative differentiates between nation-
alist and religious movements, it isolates each from the other and reifies the boundaries
separating what it identifies as two dissociated phenomena. Most importantly, the narrative
disengages religion from the very historical processes that made secular nationalist move-
ments meaningful to the inhabitants of the region in the first place. I shall revisit this prob-
lem ahead.

Making connections
While at the time of my comps, I was put off by the narrative’s idealism and, thanks to the Sub-
altern School, its elitism, I did not give much thought to the other problems with it, nor was
I ready to offer up a counter-framework and counter-narrative. That would come later, mainly
as a result of two milestone events—the renaissance of nationalist studies and the reintegration of
the history of the Arab world into its Ottoman context—and my own foraging in social theory,
particularly my immersion in the work of Michel Foucault.
Beginning in the 1980s, a number of high-powered scholars turned their attention to the
question of nationalism, its origins in global history, and its historical trajectory. Among them
were the “holy trinity” of Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, and Eric Hobsbawm. While the
three differed among themselves on significant details (reasons for the appearance of national-
ism, its first site, how and why it leap-frogged from location to location), they did manage to
popularize constructivist ideas in the scholarly community.
Constructivism—think of an “imagined community” rather than an awakened nation—
offered a direct challenge to the teleological pretensions of nationalist narratives in which par-
ticular national identities and national forms appear as the inevitable and singular expressions of
national destiny. In place of the assumption that national identities are primordial, constructivism
suggested that such identities are circumstantial; rather than privileging any particular nationalist
representation, constructivism alerted historians and social scientists to the volatility and diver-
sity of nationalist representations that coexist within a social space at any given time.
Over the course of the following decade, the study of nationalism expanded dramatically, in
part because scholars sought to debunk the trio’s theories or apply them to their own areas of
expertise, in part because there were new platforms for their work (the first issue of the journal
Nations and Nationalism, for example, appeared in 1995), and in part because the nation-state
problem that had appeared settled (at least, in the wake of the Helsinki Accord of 1975, in

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Europe) suddenly exploded once again into the public consciousness: During the period from
the 1990s to 2011, the international community witnessed the construction of the greatest
number of new states (thirty) since the end of the Period of Decolonization, mainly as a result
of the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. In some cases, scholars sought to understand
the nationalisms that spawned those new states; in other cases, they sought to understand the
process by which those new states spawned nationalisms—or at least sought to.
While only one new state (Yemen) emerged in the Middle East during this time, a number
of historians of the region were no less affected by the scholarly attention social scientists who
focused on other regions were paying to nationalism and by the constructivist current they fol-
lowed. Envisioning nationalism as a “site where different representations of the nation contest
and negotiate with each other,” as Pasenjit Duara put it (1995, p. 8), rather than as a reification
of some immutable and undifferentiated ideal, offered a challenge to the privileged position
held by Arab nationalism in the historiography of nationalism in the region. It defied historians
to examine the variety of nationalist sentiments—elite and popular, communal and linguistic,
local and regional—that have emerged in the region over the course of the last century on
their own terms. According validity to alternative constructions of nation and nationalism also
provided the opportunity to reintegrate the activities and aspirations of previously marginalized
social strata into a narrative that had focused almost exclusively on the activities and aspirations
of “Westernizing elites.” In sum, foregoing the a priori culling of nationalist forms or groups of
nationalists enabled the reintroduction into the study of nationalism in the Arab Middle East
diverse and heterogenous constructions of nation and nationalism that are structurally and ideo-
logically dissimilar to those advocated by those Westernizing elites and anticipated by Eurocen-
tric social science categories.
The 1980s was also the decade during which historians began to take the Ottoman legacy
in the Arab Middle East seriously, instead of restricting it to such superficialities as “the domes
and graceful slender minarets of mosques in the Ottoman style,” or “the formal and elaborate
manners of the old families of Istanbul and the provincial capitals,” as Albert Hourani once put
it (1981, pp. 2–3). Indeed, it became the rule rather than the exception for historians of the
region to undertake a serious study of Ottoman history, learn Ottoman Turkish, and frequent
the Ottoman archives in Istanbul and elsewhere alongside the Arab and European archives they
traditionally visited. The recontextualization of Arab history was, to a large extent, driven by a
remarkable cohort of mostly younger scholars, including Ehud Toledano, Jane Hathaway, Dina
Rizk Khoury, Eugene Rogan, Sarah Shields, and Ussama Makdisi, among others. While, at the
time, the work of none of the aforementioned addressed the problem of nationalism directly,
they nonetheless had a profound effect on the way I began to think about it.
Take, for example, Hourani’s politics of notables model, which, as I stated earlier, provided
(and, to a certain extent, still provides) an essential building block for the most common nar-
rative about the origins and early evolution of “Arab nationalism.” The model presupposes a
tripartite social structure in some cities of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire which
consisted of representatives of the imperial center, sent out to the provinces as agents of the
central state; the native, urban-based inhabitants of the provinces; and an intermediary layer
of indigenous notables, whose function it was to advise the Ottoman representatives while at
the same time cultivating ties of personal dependence with the hoi polloi whose interests they
claimed to represent. It also presupposes two self-contained ethnies (to borrow a term from
Anthony Smith [1988, 13ff]), “Ottoman” and “Arab,” with the latter becoming the source for a
home-grown protonationalism.
Aside from the fact that it is surprising that any historian could accept the possibility of a
“patronage system”—the generic category into which Hourani’s politics of notables fits—after

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E.P. Thompson’s devastating critique of the formulation (1978, p. 137), we now know that the
worlds inhabited by representatives of the imperial center and local notables were anything but
self-contained. Local elites did not spring fully formed from indigenous society and insinuate
themselves into a social order imposed from above; rather, the Ottoman impress created those
elites and the world they came to inhabit. In other words, the formation of local elites and their
incorporation were one and the same process. All of a sudden, the road to an Arab identity grew
more complex.
Finally, Foucault. At first sight, it might seem strange that Foucault’s ideas would have any
impact on my or anyone’s study of nationalism in the Arab Middle East, or, for that matter, on
the study of nationalism in any other place. Setting aside the oft-mentioned Eurocentricity of
his work, to the best of my knowledge Foucault never explicitly wrote on the subject of nation-
alism. But during the 1980s and 1990s, the pairing of Foucault and the study of nationalism
became logical as a result of two factors.
The first was the intersection of Foucault’s method in general with ongoing trends in nation-
alist studies, particularly constructivism and the ascendancy of the “modernist camp” at the
expense of the “primodialist camp” among scholars of nationalism. For the now-dominant
modernists, the invention of “the nation” represented a fundamental break with the past, an
entirely different structuration of the social ordering from any that had preceded it. That which
created nations was nationalism, now defined as a particular form of discourse nested within, and
substantiated by, a distinctly modern epistemic experience.
But if nations and nationalism were constructs whose appearance was unprecedented, how
then is one to account for their appearance and diffusion without resorting to the idealism of a
Kedourie (1961, 13ff) (whose one-word answer to the question was “Kant”) or the reduction-
ism of a Gellner (1993, 19ff) (whose one-word answer was “industrialism”)?
The answer for many was that the appearance of nationalism was inextricably linked to the
emergence in Europe of what Foucault described as raison d’état as a new rationale for statecraft
(Burchell et al. 1991; Foucault 1979). This new rationale engendered new practices of govern-
ment which not only made it seem that the state was a real and bounded object (Mitchell 1991),
but endowed the states in which it was employed with unparalleled capabilities. Marshall Hodg-
son called these capabilities “social power”: the ability of the state to mobilize and harness the
energies of its citizens (Hodgson 1993, p. 28).
The new rationale for statecraft also engendered a new mode of conceptualizing the politi-
cal order, which, ultimately, took the form of nationalism. The key concepts here are twofold:
First, there is population, the construct whose management not only provides the ultimate end
of government (Foucault’s “state of prosperity” [Pasquino 1991]), but one which also provides
the conceptual underpinning for the idea of “nation.” The second concept is “government”—
defined here as the “conduct of conduct” (Foucault 1991 p. 100)—which puts in force a regi-
men that fosters a distinct set of practices among those designated as “population.” It is through
the participation of “all and each” in these practices that the concept of population/nation could
become both generalized and lived reality. In sum, pace Kedourie and every other idealist who
has taken a swing at the concept of nationalism, at its core, nationalism is not an idea; it is a set
of practices that is narrativized in a formulaic manner by those disposed to do so.
Foucault’s work provided much of the foundation for my rethinking nationalism, in general,
and nationalism in the Middle East, in particular, but it was still lacking. The remainder of my
argument drew from the work of Charles Tilly and Timothy Mitchell. Tilly clarified for me
the process by which the structure of the absolutist state of Europe fundamentally transformed
the logistics of governance and provided the incubator not only for the modern state, but for
“the modern” itself. His work also gave “street cred” to the more abstract, but less historically

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informed, work of Michel Foucault. (Interestingly, of the three social theorists whose work
was foundational to my thinking on nationalism, only Tilly directly addressed the problem of
nations and nationalism. Unfortunately, I did not find what Tilly wrote about nationalism to
be particularly helpful or as insightful as his work on state formation. [See, inter alia, Tilly 1991;
1994]). Mitchell (1991) provided the concept of “structural effect”—the conceptual universe
created and reinforced by social practice. “Nation”—which might be defined as “population” as
it is narrativized and travels through time—is one such “structural effect.”
I was not alone in going down the path I chose. Take, for example, Eugene Rogan’s (2002)
Frontiers of State in the Late Ottoman Empire, which locates the social and cultural changes that
made a Jordanian nation-state possible in Ottoman attempts at social engineering during the
mid- to late nineteenth century. Then there is Ussama Makdisi’s (2000) The Culture of Sectarian-
ism, which attributes the emergence of sectarianism in nineteenth-century Lebanon to contin-
gent events unfolding within a transformed social imaginary—a culture of sectarianism. Makdisi
finds the roots of this new social imaginary in a combination of colonial meddling and Ottoman
administrative restructuring. Finally, there is Selim Deringil’s (1999) The Well-Protected Domains,
which focuses on the new disciplinary and representative regimen imposed by the Hamidian
imperium through a process he calls fine tuning.
“Fine tuning,” he writes, “involved the meticulous inculcation, indoctrination, enticing,
frightening, flattering, forbidding, permitting, punishing or rewarding—all in precise doses—
which had been the stuff of empire since Caesar crossed the limes. . . . The most important
aspect of fine tuning,” he goes on to write, “is that it is a process through which the legitimation
ideology of state is promoted and state policy is imposed on society. Legitimation involves the
process of making state policy and resembles, ‘That which is inscribed into the nature of things
and is perennial,’ as Ernest Gellner puts it.” As a result of the ensuing “disruption of much of
the traditional fabric of society,” Deringil continues, “the state now came to demand not pas-
sive obedience but conformity to a unilaterally proclaimed normative order” (1999, pp. 10–11).
Deringil’s coinage of the phrase “unilaterally proclaimed normative order” makes up for the
unfortunate misstep of proposing the continuity of the concept of empire “since Caesar crossed
the limes.” The modern Hamidian state’s only relationship to ancient Rome is that we use the
word “empire” to refer to both—the entire point of Deringil’s book. As a matter of fact, the
modern Hamidian state’s only relationship to the early-modern Ottoman Empire is the fact that
it, too, was ruled by a member of the house of Osman.
Like Rogan and Makdisi, Deringil is pretty much describing what a number of scholars now
accept as what might be ironically called the Ottoman roots of “Arab nationalism.” Like Rogan
(but unlike Makdisi), Deringil does not cite Foucault. But the fingerprints are there: the work of
these and other scholars cannot be separated from broader trends in cultural history and nation-
alist studies, and it was mainly through cultural history and nationalist studies that the ideas of
Michel Foucault began to permeate Middle East historiography.

The Ottoman roots of “Arab Nationalism”

I published my first book, Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics at the Close of Empire
(Gelvin 1998), along with a number of articles on the topic of nationalism, during the 1990s.
The book and several of the articles concerned a single case study: the emergence of popular
forms of nationalism in Greater Syria between the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the imposi-
tion of the French mandate. I viewed what took place during the period as an experimentum
crucis (critical experiment), similar in intent to the sort of experiments carried out in the hard
sciences. I wanted to establish beyond doubt that the existing framework for studying the origins

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of nationalism in the Arab world could not possibly be correct because it could not explain the
eruption of popular protest that broke out in Greater Syria during those twenty-two months.
Nor could the narrative in which that framework is embedded account for any aspect of those
protests.
During the same period, I also published a number of articles and chapters in edited vol-
umes of a more theoretical nature about nationalism (Gelvin 1994, 1999, 2004). Nevertheless,
like the Terminator, the old framework which was used to explain the origins of nationalism
in the Arab world refused to die. Some authors, such as Youssef M. Choueiri (2001), simply
ignored the problems with it and continued to write about nationalism using a framework
that would have been familiar to Duggan and Antonius. Eliezer Tauber (1993) added epicycles
to the geocentric Arab nationalist universe: he retained the key elements of the narrative—
particularly its idealist and elitist biases—but proposed three additional Ur-nationalisms—
Syrianism, Lebanonism, Iraqism—in the region alongside Arab nationalism. Others, mostly
critics of the concept of Arab nationalism and those who believed in it, have continued in the
cranky, idealist tradition associated with Elie Kedourie, in whose writings, as Zachary Lock-
man put it, “Arab nationalism was little more than a fraud perpetrated by a handful of confused
and frustrated intellectuals, aided and abetted by British colonial officials” (1997, p. 271). Mar-
tin Kramer’s (1996) cringe-inducing polemic “Arab Nationalism: Mistaken Identity,” certainly
belongs in this category.
I therefore decided to publish my framework in a succinct form in the Pensée section of the
International Journal of Middle East Studies to call attention to it and invite comment (Gelvin
2009). The article reads, in part, as follows:

Over the course of the past decade and a half, a number of scholars—many
unselfconsciously—have drawn from and contributed to an altogether different frame-
work which avoids the problems of the standard narrative. Rooted in cultural history
and nationalist studies with a strong dose of Foucault, this framework provides the
foundation for a new “grand narrative” of the origins and evolution of nationalism in
the Arab Middle East (and elsewhere). While only occasionally explicitly rendered, the
framework consists of three propositions.
(Gelvin 2009, p. 11)

Proposition 1
1 There is a difference between a “culture of nationalism” and the nationalist movements
that spawn in that culture. “Culture of nationalism” refers to a social imaginary inhabited
by populations of those who view the assumptions associated with nationalism as self-
evident and part of the natural order. Those assumptions are the following: all humanity
is naturally divided into unified societies (nations), each of which has a discrete identity;
nations can be identified by certain characteristics (religion, language, common history),
which all its members share; only national sovereignty can ensure that the interests of the
nation and its citizens are protected; nations enjoy a special relationship with a particular
territory which is the repository for that nation’s history and memory; and nations retain
their essential characteristics as they travel through time. Situating nationalist movements
in the region within the broader framework of a culture of nationalism undercuts the
notion that Arab nationalism could simply evolve out of Arabism by pointing out the
revolutionary nature of the new order in which nationalisms are embedded (Gelvin
2009, p. 11).

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Proposition 2
2 A culture of nationalism spread among the populations of the Middle East, as it spread
among populations elsewhere, through their engagement in common practices associ-
ated with modern states and through their internalization of the organizational rationale
underlying those practices. Thus, starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, the
disciplinary and representational regimens imposed by the Middle Eastern state (Otto-
man, Egyptian, Qajar) reinforced the notion that populations were part of unified socie-
ties, that those societies had identities of their own, and that each individual’s efforts
would contribute to a common project. The spread of a culture of nationalism points to
the underlying efficacy of attempts made to restructure the Middle Eastern state, even if
specific programs misfired. Recent research in Mount Lebanon, Jabal Nablus, and Egypt,
among other places, has demonstrated the speed with which even peasants responded to
(and attempted to manipulate) the new dispensation. Besides the policies of indigenous
states, there were other factors behind the spread of a culture of nationalism in the region.
In some parts of the region, colonial powers imposed practices and structures that directly
contributed to its spread; in others, mostly outlying areas (Arabia, for example), its spread
occurred later as a result of state-building within the context of the operant world system
of nation-states. It bears mentioning that a narrative that associates the spread of national-
ism with practical activity resolves the problem of idealism and, since all elements of the
population were simultaneously exposed to the same disciplinary regimen, that of elitism
(Gelvin 2009, p. 11).

Proposition 3
3 Nationalist movements are distinct political movements that draw from the assumptions
of nationalism and thrive in an environment in which a culture of nationalism has taken
root. While the diffusion of a culture of nationalism is an epochal event in the history of
a region, nationalist movements themselves are ephemeral phenomena. Beginning in the
second half of the nineteenth century, a variety of political entrepreneurs in the region—
from declining elites to “organic intellectuals” to government bureaucrats to emergent
elites—habituated to a culture of nationalism, began advocating political doctrines that
cohered with that culture. Each of these entrepreneurs cherry-picked from a list of possible
national characteristics—language, religious affiliation, citizenship, and residence in some
bounded space—to distinguish their conception of nation from others. Thus, a variety of
nationalisms—religious and secular, civic and ethnic—appeared episodically. Their success
or failure depended entirely on contingent factors. Viewing nationalist movements in this
way enables us to avoid the teleology of the earlier narrative that gives pride of place to
secular Arab nationalism, demystify nationalist movements that privilege Islam as a national
marker, and restore agency to its rightful owner. All these nationalist movements are iso-
morphic, making their study, in the words of Fred Halliday, a problem of “comparative
contingency.” This explains the ease with which the same individuals who at one point
espoused Ottoman nationalism could become loyal Syrians and then Palestinians, depend-
ing on circumstances, or how advocates of one or another brand of secular nationalism in
the 1960s could, over time, transfer their loyalties to nationalisms which privilege Islam
as a national marker and base social reconstruction on so-called Islamic principles. Just as
important, viewing nationalist movements in this way demonstrates just how unexceptional
the history of nationalism in the region has been (Gelvin 2009, pp. 11–12).

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Two aspects of the framework have gone as yet unmentioned, but are worth pointing out.
First, the framework transforms the timeframe under consideration, shifting its scope from his-
torical time to epochal time—a timeframe, familiar to Marxists, in which revolutionary, long-
term, and irreversible changes take place, such as the transformation of a social order from one
that is feudal to one that is capitalist to one that is socialist. It is for this reason that I find the
origins question far more intriguing than the subsequent formulation and playing out of various
nationalist doctrines, which take place in historical time and within the constraints imposed by
the epochal transformation. Although I had once contracted with Cambridge University Press
to write a history of nationalism in the Arab Middle East, I could never get past the first, “Ori-
gins,” chapter. I kept thinking that down the road I would have to parse the writings of Satic
al-Husri and Michel Aflaq—an exercise I find pointless, if not mind-numbing.
In addition to transforming the timeframe, the framework moves the timeline for the
origins story back from the World War I era (albeit with “protonationalist” antecedents that
stretch back to the second half of the nineteenth century) to the beginnings of the tanzimat
(the so-called “period of reform,” which scholars date back, variously, to 1806, 1826, and
1839). During the tanzimat, subjects of the sultan became Ottoman citizens for the first time.
Through this process, the empire took a giant step toward creating a culture of nationalism
within its effective boundaries. The imperial government articulated this transformation in
the two foundational documents of the new order, the Hatt-i Sharif of Gulhane (1839) and
the Islahat Fermani (1856), which promised the safety of “life, liberty, and property” to all
inhabitants of the empire, along with equality for all religious communities. It substantiated
(in both senses of the term) those promises through attempts to regulate, discipline, and regi-
ment imperial citizens. It did so by establishing a set of common social practices and norms,
including conscription, standardized education, legal codification, and rudimentary economic
planning (Gelvin 2011, pp. 58–69).
The Hatt-i Sharif of Gulhane and the Islahat Fermani provided the first basic pronouncements
of what might be called a new “political sociability” (as François Furet labeled it) or a new “civic
order” (a term that was first used by historians of France but later effectively employed by Eliza-
beth Thompson in her description of post-World War I Lebanon) in official Ottoman discourse
(Furet 1981, p. 37; Thompson 2000, p. 1). Political sociability and civic order refer to the set of
presumptive obligations, responsibilities, and rights that united government with “citizens” and
“citizens” with each other. In other words, tanzimat and post-tanzimat developments brought
a new notion of citizenship which found adherents quickly, particularly when it came to the
“rights” (as opposed to the “obligations”) part of the bargain. The spread of this new notion of
citizenship was surprisingly rapid and expansive, although uneven in the far-flung empire: As
Beshara Doumani has documented, as early as 1841—two years after the promulgation of the
Hatt-i Sharif—peasants around Nablus began petitioning the sultan in Istanbul for protection
from their landlords using a rights-based discourse (Doumani 1995, p. 175).
Because it is a derivative of what Foucault called the modern episteme (Foucault 1994), the
“culture of nationalism,” proved to be remarkably resilient in the Ottoman Arab territories, as
elsewhere within and without the region, where it was introduced as a result of popular or state
initiative, imperialism, or simply as the price of survival in a world system of nation-states which
brooked no outliers. When compared to the extraordinary social and political changes that the
Ottoman Empire had to effect for a culture of nationalism to emerge within its domains, the fact
that Ottoman and post-Ottoman citizens would assert one or another nationalist creed down
the road is of negligible importance.
Alongside reconceptualizing nationalism as a set of narrativized practices, “culture of nation-
alism,” as defined previously, is the contribution to nationalist studies about which I am proudest.

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Political Islam and the phantasmagoric demise of “Arab Nationalism”

In addition to my work on the origins of nationalism in the Arab Middle East, I became
intrigued with one other facet of the nationalism question in the region: nationalism and reli-
gion, specifically the relationship between nationalism and political Islam. For me, it was a criti-
cal problem because it spoke to an issue that has plagued Middle East studies since its inception:
Middle East exceptionalism.
I became interested in the Middle East during the final years of the 1970s, at a time when
two disparate and seemingly countervailing events revolutionized Middle East studies. The first
was the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, a work so well known inside and outside the
field that it is unnecessary to rehash its arguments here. Suffice it to say that its appropriation
of diverse and sometimes contradictory methodologies, and Said’s inability to choose between
writing a cultural or intellectual history (and, in the end, attempting to write both at the same
time), render its argument ambiguous and its meaning obscure. According to one possible read-
ing, if taken to its logical conclusion, Said’s argument implies the impossibility of attaining his-
torical knowledge at all. For those of us still committed to the historical project, however, there
is a very different takeaway: If there are universal “laws” in the social sciences, those laws must,
indeed, be applicable universally. This means an end to Middle Eastern exceptionalism. One of
the most influential proponents of this view has been Roger Owen, who chose to view the
history of the region through the lens of an established social science field, political economy,
at a time when others were convinced that the key to explaining the region was the heritage of
Oriental despotism, patrimonialism, Islam, or some other nostrum.
The second event, which occurred the same year as the publication of Orientalism, was the
outbreak of the Iranian Revolution. For many observers, the revolution belied the notion of
universally applicable laws by accrediting Islam—specifically Shici Islam—with instrumentality.
The contortions through which Theda Skocpol, for example, went to save her comprehensive
theory of revolution (rather than just situating it historically, which would have solved her
problem) demonstrate the difficulties the revolution presented to social scientists who remained
faithful to the foundations of their craft (see Skocpol 1994). Just as important, the Iranian Revo-
lution was the first in a series of episodes that put “political Islam” on the front burner for area
experts and the general public alike. In the wake of the revolution, it became a commonplace
that political Islam had replaced “Arab nationalism” as the paramount ideology in the Arab Mid-
dle East. Elie Kedourie appeared vindicated.
My initial work on Islam and its relationship to politics did not concern its relationship to
nationalism per se. That came later, after I had explored how Western epistemic assumptions
had entered into the discourse of even religious scholars who condemned such borrowings as
“unislamic.” In 1999, I collected all the available issues of a Damascene periodical, al-H ․ aqaʾiq,
spanning the years 1910–1911. The periodical was the organ of a group of anti-Salafi ulama
who called themselves mutadayyinun (the “very pious”). The mutadayyinun claimed to act as
spokesmen for Islamic orthodoxy. They launched their journal to expose the crimes of the
mutafarnijun (the “overly Frankified”) and to agitate for a return to “traditional Islam”—an Islam
that followed the normative schools of law. According to the mutadayyinun, the mutafarnijun were
introducing into the Ottoman Empire practices borrowed from the West and were thus abetting
a Western conspiracy against the empire and Islam.
While reading al-H ․ aqaʾiq, it became clear to me that despite their claim to be upholders of
tradition, the mutadayyinun relied on the same epistemic assumptions as those they castigated.
They could not help it, since they grew up and lived in a provincial capital of an empire that
was in the midst of a full-on engagement with, for want of a better phrase, “the modern.” For

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example, the mutadayyinun based their defense of traditional values on the assertion that the
Islamic nation, like any other nation in the modern world, could only progress if it remained
true to the religion, customs, and mores which defined it and which provided the most power-
ful bonds of association for its citizens. They also assumed the existence of universally applicable
“norms of Civilization.” And they believed that the world was divided into distinct cultural units
whose paths to progress differed, that the “East” and “West” represented two such units, and
that in addition to whatever spiritual dimension Islam held, it also functioned as the “cultural
marker” that distinguished the “East.”
Unbeknownst to the mutadayyinun, then, they were, in fact, engaged in the process of invent-
ing a religio-political synthesis coherent with contemporary social and political structures and
institutions.This is the reason I prefaced an article I wrote on the topic, “‘Modernity,’ ‘Tradition,’
and the Battleground of Gender in Early Twentieth-Century Damascus” (Gelvin 2012) with a
quote from Aziz al-Azmeh:

I take it as an accomplished fact that modern history is characterized by the globaliza-

tion of the Western order. Despite protests of a bewildering variety against this accom-
plished fact, it remains incontestable, especially as, with few exceptions of an isolated
and purely local nature, these protests have taken place either in the name of ideologies
of Western provenance—such as national independence and popular sovereignty—or
substantially in terms of these ideologies, albeit beholden to a different local or specific
repertory.
(Al-Azmeh 2009, p. 97)

This statement comes at the beginning of an essay al-Azmeh wrote, titled “The Discourse of
Cultural Authenticity.” In an accompanying essay in the same volume, al-Azmeh explains that
the sort of Islamic revivalism that is manifest in the contemporary world hinges upon a con-
ception of history that has been “directly derived from Romanticism or its social and cultural
conditions”—a conception of history that has no roots in the Islamic historical tradition:

History in this context is seen as that of the unique historical subject and of other self-
enclosed subjects. Each, and specifically Islam and the West, whatever these may mean,
is self-enclosed, impenetrable in its essence, and is a substance presupposed by history
rather than being its product.The passage of time is an alternation between true histo-
ricity manifested in might, and historical desuetude manifested in subjugation. Might
results from cohesiveness and unity, and if this unity is lost the body national will
lose its spirit or general will. . . . There is no positive response to such weaknesses and
destruction save that of revivalism: the retrieval and restoration of the original qualities
that made for strength and historical relevance.
(Al-Azmeh 2009, p. 84)

More than forty years ago,Tom Nairn (1975) wrote that all nationalist movements are “Janus-
faced.” In other words, they simultaneously represent themselves as the heirs to an ancient and
distinctive national history and as fit, if not entitled, to participate on an equal basis in the
world system of nation-states. Contemporary Islam can be mobilized to provide that ancient
and distinctive national history, as Hamas—which views Palestine as an Islamic waqf (religious
endowment)—does. But that is only one facet of the relationship between Islam and nation-
alism. More often than not, contemporary Islamic movements inhabit an ideological niche
in a broader spectrum of beliefs that complements and buttresses the cosmology which also

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nourishes nationalism. In other words, it should not be surprising that protesters who chanted
“Raise your head high, you’re an Egyptian” in February 2011 might vote for the Muslim Broth-
erhood thirteen months later.
Political Islam did not replace nationalism, nor, in a world of nation-states, could it. Hassan
al-Banna, the founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, understood this clearly. In an inter-
view with a British newspaper, al-Banna asserted, “[We are] neither politicians nor a political
party but simply nationalists working for the welfare of Egypt and the restoration of usurped
Egyptian rights” (The Times 1946, p. 1). Notice how al-Banna conjoins his movement’s cultural/
social aims with its support for his nation’s political rights. Sixty-five years later, the organization
he founded went on to express its grievances against the government of Hosni Mubarak in the
language of human rights (Gelvin 2015)—while its leadership included ardent devotees of neo-
liberal economic policies.Was this “mere” opportunism? Maybe. But as I have written elsewhere,

Whatever role opportunism might have played in encouraging decisions made by

Islamists during the past several decades, the fact remains that the diffusion of inter-
national norms of human and democratic rights provided points of reference for the
political field in which they have had to operate.Viewed from a slightly different angle,
opportunism might be seen as the price of admission to the political sphere which, in
turn, exacts its own toll from participants. It does this in the form of shaping the prac-
tices, expectations, and, ultimately, the ethos of those who seek inclusion. And some
Islamists—at least on an individual level—adjusted well to the new political field in
which they had to operate.
(Gelvin 2015, p. 125)

Indeed, every aspect of the Arab uprisings and protests of 2010–2011, from the demands
for individual human rights and social justice to the call for democratic transition within the
framework of the existing nation-state system, provides a litmus test demonstrating the validity
of al-Azmeh’s insight about the globalization of “the Western order.” Lest there be any doubt,
even the ISIS caliphate had a flag, a modern (if poorly run) functionally ordered administrative
system, and a national anthem (The Guardian 2014) (which had to be sung a cappella because of
the purported prohibition against Muslims using musical instruments). The rise of Islamic poli-
tics, often cited as evidence of Middle East exceptionalism, in reality demonstrates the opposite:
just how unexceptional, on the most fundamental level, politics in the region really is.

Note
1 Duggan’s speech was later published under the title “Syria and its Tangled Problems” in Current History
(1920).

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