Middle East

Nationalism is generally regarded as a recent development in the Middle East, a contingent phenomenon produced by the unique conditions of the modern era. Prior to the nineteenth century, concepts of collective identity and allegiance appear to have been defined primarily on the basis of lineage, locale, or religion—communities of sentiment and solidarity either smaller or larger than the nationalisms that subsequently emerged. For the region's agricultural and pastoralist majority, living in largely self-contained village or nomadic communities, one's clan, tribe, or village are presumed to have been the primary objects of self-identification and affiliation. For the area's literate minority, usually urban residents and immersed in a milieu dominated by religion, collective identity was defined by a combination of locale (loyalty to one's city), polity (being a member of the ruling elite), and most vitally religion (self-definition as Muslim, Christian, or Jew). Ethnic or linguistic concepts of identity, on the other hand, were conspicuous by their absence. Terminology illustrates the point. Prior to the twentieth century the word Turk denoted a rural resident of Anatolia, not a member of the educated multiethnic elite of the Ottoman Empire. In Arab usage the term Arab referred to the wild Bedouin of the desert, not the area's sophisticated urban population.

The Emergence of Modern Nationalisms

The nineteenth century was the seedtime of nationalism in the Middle East. The region's geographic, linguistic, and religious heterogeneity has provided the basis for numerous and competing nationalist movements.

Fueled by their religious distinctiveness and their contacts with the European milieu where nationalism was becoming the hegemonic referent for collective identity, some of the region's Christian minorities developed nationalist movements prior to the region's Muslim majority. Most prominent in this regard were the Maronites of Mount Lebanon and the Armenians of eastern Anatolia, among whom constructs emphasizing their historical separateness and right to political autonomy took hold in the nineteenth century. Thanks to European assistance, Lebanon gained autonomous status within the Ottoman Empire by the 1860s. Such was not the case in historic Armenia, where an active nationalist movement came into conflict with the Ottoman state as well as with the area's Turkish and Kurdish population in the later nineteenth century, and where fear of nationalism led to the mass expulsion and massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman government in the early twentieth.

In both Egypt and Iran, distinct geographical areas existing as autonomous polities with their own ruling structure (Iran since the sixteenth century, Egypt since the early nineteenth) led Westernized Egyptian and Iranian intellectuals to assert the existence of historically unique Egyptian and Iranian "nations" by the later decades of the century. Egyptian nationalism took political form by the later 1870s, when indigenous Egyptian elites sought greater control over an originally Ottoman ruling family and the European financial domination that dynastic extravagance was producing; their movement's slogan "Egypt for the Egyptians" succinctly expresses its overall thrust. Active nationalist activity in Iran dates from the 1890s and was produced by much the same combination of dynastic incompetence and foreign economic penetration; in the Iranian case it generated a formally successful Iranian constitutional movement in the early years of the twentieth century.

For the Turks of Anatolia and the Arabs of the Fertile Crescent, both living under Ottoman rule through the long nineteenth century, the causes producing nationalism were parallel. A precondition for modern Turkish and Arab nationalism was the development of a firm sense of ethnic identity. This was stimulated in the Turkish case by the discoveries of European Turkology, the uncovering of the pre-Islamic history of the Turkic-speaking peoples in Central Asia and beyond that fostered identification with a historic ethnie distinct from both the Muslim community and the multiethnic Ottoman Empire, in the Arab case by the process known as the "Arab Awakening," the blossoming of Arabic literature and history that occurred in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. As elsewhere in the Middle East, increasing elite contact with Europe and a growing awareness of European ideas also played a role. Nationalism is a modular concept, "available for pirating" (to pirate Benedict Anderson's phrase) by all those impressed by Europe and the world supremacy its nations were able to achieve in the modern era.

The catalyst turning a heightened sense of ethnic identity into visible Turkish and Arab nationalist movements was the trajectory taken by the Ottoman Empire over the course of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, the empire's territorial crumbling as European powers established their control over its African dominions and the peoples of the Balkans gained independence raised the possibility of a similar dismemberment of its Asian heartlands, thereby generating a search for an alternative base for viable community. On the other hand, the Ottoman government itself assumed a more reactionary character by the later decades of the nineteenth century. For educated Turks and Arabs, who were absorbing the values of individual liberty and participatory politics from their European mentors, the Ottoman Empire increasingly came to be seen as an undesirable framework for modern life.

Turkish and Arab ethnic nationalism became active movements only in the early twentieth century, specifically in the "Young Turk" era (1908–1918). Among Turks new organizations with an explicitly Turkish emphasis (the Turkish Society, formed 1908; the Turkish Hearth Clubs, formed 1912) emerged; in the press, extravagant ideas of uniting all Turkic-speaking peoples in a ethnically based "Turanian" state were voiced; on the governmental level efforts at increased centralization emphasized the primacy of the Turkish language within the state and sometimes gave precedence to ethnic Turks (although not to the degree once assumed). Similar organizational and intellectual trends occurred in the Arabic-speaking provinces of the Fertile Crescent: new Arab societies with a political agenda (the Ottoman Administrative Decentralization Society, 1912) emerged; demands for Arab autonomy were expressed in the press; and an Arab Congress was held in Paris in 1913 to promote Ottoman decentralization. The continued drive for centralization being undertaken by the Young Turk regime ran counter to what was originally an Arab demand for provincial decentralization. By the eve of World War I, a new trend was developing in the Arab provinces as prominent individuals and secret societies began to think of Arab independence as the only way to avoid subjugation within what politicized Arabs were coming to see as an oppressive "Turkish" state.

Modern Jewish nationalism (Zionism) did not require a similar process of the rediscovery of national distinctiveness. A sense of collective uniqueness and solidarity existed among Jews well before the nineteenth century. This sense was solidified by Judaism's liturgical language (Hebrew), the rich tapestry of distinctive customs, and the shared isolation of and discrimination against Jews living in European countries. An active Jewish nationalist movement based on this sense of distinctiveness was produced on the one hand by the gradual process of emancipation and assimilation experienced by Jews in parts of Europe during the nineteenth century, a process of historical change that also involved the acceptance of modern nationalist concepts, and on the other by growing European anti-Semitism, a phenomenon that led Jews to question their future in national states where powerful movements were now defining Jews as an alien element. In direct response to rising anti-Semitism in the Russian Empire, in the 1880s Zionist societies emerged in eastern Europe and began to organize Jewish immigration to Ottoman Palestine. By the late 1890s an international organization of Jews, the World Zionist Organization (WZO; established 1897), had been founded "to create for the Jewish people a homeland in Palestine secured by public law" (its founding declaration), and in the years prior to World War I the WZO worked to encourage Jewish migration and the initial development of distinctive Jewish national institutions in Palestine itself.

World War I and Its Settlement

World War I and its settlement had a crucial impact on nationalism in the Middle East. Ottoman entry into the war on the side of the Central Powers led to Ottoman military defeat. At war's end, the victorious allies began the process of partitioning the Ottoman Empire in accord with secret wartime arrangements. The postwar attempt at Allied domination was unsuccessful in the primarily Turkish-speaking Anatolian portion of the empire, where a vigorous Turkish nationalist movement led by the charismatic General Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk) successfully resisted European domination and in the process abolished the Ottoman Empire and replaced it with the new state of Turkey (1923). Quite a different course of events were obtained in the Fertile Crescent, which Great Britain and France divided between themselves. France received a League of Nations mandate for "Syria" (initially including Lebanon, defined as a separate state in 1920), Great Britain mandates for the territories of "Iraq" and "Palestine" (the latter comprising today's Israel and Jordan). In the process of imperial partition, a nascent Arab nationalist movement that had emerged during the war and established an Arab government in Damascus was crushed by French military action. In Palestine, where the terms of the mandate allowed for large-scale Jewish immigration in order to facilitate the emergence of the Jewish "national home," the postwar settlement also laid the basis for the subsequent emergence of the state of Israel.

The contrast between the course of events in Turkish-speaking Anatolia and in the Arabic-speaking Fertile Crescent deserves emphasis. Turkish nationalism emerged successful out of the turmoil of World War I and its settlement, realizing its goal of the creation of a Turkish national state predicated on the existence of a linguistically based Turkish ethnic community. Nothing succeeds like success; Turkey has remained the object of national self-definition and allegiance for its Turkish-speaking majority ever since its creation in the early 1920s. In the Arab case a nationalist movement similar in genesis and aspiration, but geographically more vulnerable, was eliminated by European force of arms. In its stead the Fertile Crescent was divided into several artificial political units according to imperial fiat. None possessed deep roots; the reality and viability of all were to be deeply contested in the years to come.

Differential Nationalist Trajectories

The several nationalisms considered above have taken very different paths since World War I and its settlement. In Iran the territorially based nationalism that emerged in the nineteenth century remained dominant under the Pahlavi dynasty (1921–1979). It was never fully accepted, however, by more religious Iranians, particularly by the country's powerful Shiite religious hierarchy. In the late 1970s the religious class played a leading role in overthrowing the secular nationalist government of the shahs. In the 1980s the promotion of worldwide Islamic solidarity and international Islamic revolution became the leitmotif of Iranian foreign policy. In the 1990s, as the Iranian revolution moderated, the concept of Iran as a distinct national community again received greater emphasis. The precise nature and implications of Iranian collective identity is a contested issue at the start of the twenty-first century, part and parcel of the struggle between more liberal and more conservative Iranians.

With the creation of a cohesive independent state in Anatolia, Turkish nationalism largely shed the grandiose visions of pan-Turkic unity that had been expressed by some of its early proponents. Reified and promoted by the government of the new Turkish state during the long ascendancy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the 1920s and 1930s, belief in the construct of a Turkish nation centered in Anatolia gradually disseminated beyond the elite circles in which Turkish nationalism had been born. The post-Atatürk decades have seen intensive debate among Turks as to the orientation of the Turkish state, particularly over the question of the role of religion in public life; but the participants in these debates have by and large not challenged the existence of a Turkish nation. The one partial exception is Turkey's marginalized Kurdish-speaking population, among whom demands for cultural and political autonomy surfaced in the later decades of the twentieth century and generated a prolonged civil war in eastern Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Zionist movement realized its main goal with the creation of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948. Some religiously oriented groups have never accepted the legitimacy of a Jewish state created as a result of human rather than divine agency. Moreover, fierce debates over the internal character of the state (for example, the role of religion in public life and the relationship of the Palestinian Arab minority to state institutions), as well as over the territorial extent of the state (the fate of the Palestinian-inhabited territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip occupied by Israel in 1967), have continued to perturb Israeli public discourse. However, these debates occur among a Jewish population the vast majority of whom have accepted Israel as their national community of destiny.

Egypt was granted formal independence by Great Britain in 1922 in response to a nationalist uprising after World War I, and territorially based nationalism remained the dominant political construct in Egypt for most of the three decades of the parliamentary monarchy (1922–1952). Its cutting edge was Pharaonicism, an intellectual movement that posited the existence of a distinctive national character deriving from the ancient Egyptians. From the later 1930s the primacy of this locally based nationalism was challenged by voices that insisted upon Egypt's Arab affiliations and that emphasized the common problem of imperialist domination facing all Arab regions. Thereafter, both Egyptian opinion and Egyptian state policy evolved in a more Arabist direction, especially after the Egyptian revolution of July 1952. Under the leadership of Gamal Abdel Nasser, by the late 1950s Egypt had become the champion of Pan-Arabism. In 1958 it joined with Syria in the major experiment in Arab unity of the twentieth century, the United Arab Republic (1958–1961). The collapse of the UAR when Syria seceded in 1961 in effect marked the turning point in Egypt's involvement in the Arab nationalist movement. A drift away from commitment to Arab nationalism set in Egypt from the 1960s onward. It accelerated under Nasser's successors Anwar al-Sadat and Husni Mubarak, both of whose policies have emphasized Egypt as a separate political entity with its own national interests.

The fate of nationalism in the Arabic-speaking lands of the Fertile Crescent since the post–World War I settlement has been complex. In the interwar era the new states created after the war gradually acquired a degree of reality in the minds of their inhabitants. The effectiveness of state consolidation varied from country to country. It was probably strongest in Lebanon, where spokesmen among the country's slight Christian majority expounded an exclusively Lebanese nationalist ideology focused on the country's long history since the era of the Phoenicians as a uniquely "Mediterranean" nation different from other Arabic-speaking lands. It was probably weakest in Syria, where much of the political elite clung to the vision of the united Arab state that had been destroyed by imperialist partition in 1920. Among Palestinian Arabs a distinctive local identity was on the one hand fostered by the conflict with Zionism, but on the other was undercut as Palestinians sought outside Arab solidarity and support in the same struggle.

The process of Arab state consolidation in the Fertile Crescent was uneven. Continuing foreign domination reinforced the perception that the new states created after World War I were artificial entities established to suit imperial interests. An aura of what-should-have-been hovered over Arab politics in the Fertile Crescent, a belief that Arabs had been swindled out of the unity that was their proper destiny. After World War II this disaffection with existing states and belief in the desirability of their replacement by a state uniting most Arabs blossomed into Pan-Arabism, the drive for integral Arab unity that was a central component of Arab politics through the 1950s and 1960s.

The process of territorial state consolidation was facilitated with the recession of Pan-Arabism from the later 1960s onward. Over the decades the expanding institutions of the territorial state (bureaucracy, schools, vested interests) and its new symbols (flags, monuments, national holidays) bound the population to the state and gave greater substance to what had been artificial entities. At the level of policy-making there has been a clear trend away from the pursuit of Arab unity toward the realization of state interests since the 1960s. Wider Arab nationalist sentiments—belief in the existential reality of an Arab nation transcending existing state borders—have not totally faded. There is also an impressive degree of inter-Arab economic and cultural cooperation that has developed over time under the auspices of the League of Arab States and similar agencies. Pan-Arab issues, especially Palestine, are capable of arousing deep emotions across the Arab world. But, in the shifting relationship between the alternative concepts of local/statal allegiance and a broader identification with an Arab nation based on the bonds of language and history, the former appears to be the more prominent tendency at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

After Nationalism?

A significant challenge to nationalism has emerged in the Islamist movements that have gained prominence in recent decades. At the abstract level, the primacy of the religious bond over loyalty to territory, polity, or ethnie is basic to Islamist ideology. The formulation of Sayyid Qutb, founding father of Sunni Arab Islamism, states the position starkly: "There is no country for a Muslim except that where the law of God is established.… There is no nationality for a Muslim except his belief, which makes him a member of the Islamic community" (Milestones, p. 103). In political terms, a considerable measure of sympathy, mutual aid, and collaborative action have marked the relations between Islamist activists and movements originating in different countries. From the galvanizing impact of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 on Islamist activism elsewhere, through international support for the mujahideen opposing Soviet occupation in Afghanistan in the 1980s, to the international makeup and operations of Al Qaeda in the 1990s and after, a revived emphasis on the Islamic umma (Arabic, "community" of believers) as the most meaningful community of solidarity and destiny for Muslims has reasserted itself in the contemporary era.

But this is not the whole story. Territorial and ethnic nationalism still have their advocates, ideologues, and public figures who question the political salience of the religious bond and who posit that political behavior should be based on non-religious criteria. The current division of the Muslim world into numerous states inevitably influences the practical articulation of contemporary Islamism. Many Islamist activists accept the reality of existing territorially or ethnically based states and operate within the political field determined by state structures, directing their activism toward infusing existing states with a more Islamic content.

By reasserting the centrality of a previously recessive collective identity, the Islamic resurgence of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has complicated but not totally transformed the nationalist landscape of the Middle East. Sentiments of religious solidarity coexist with territorial, local, and ethnic/linguistic nationalism. The result is a complex, crowded, and unstable universe of imagined communities in which individuals are faced with determining the relevance of alternative referents for self-definition, allegiance, and action.

See also Pan-Arabism ; Pan-Turkism ; Zionism .

bibliography

PRIMARY SOURCES

Antonius, George. The Arab Awakening. London: H. Hamilton, 1938. The classic account of the genesis of Arab nationalism.

Haim, Sylvia G., ed. Arab Nationalism: An Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962. A lengthy introductory essay followed by excerpts to the 1960s.

Hertzberg, Arthur, ed. The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959. A lengthy introductory essay and a wide range of excerpts from Zionist thinkers.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Avineri, Sholmo. The Making of Modern Zionism: Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State. New York: Basic Books, 1981. A probing intellectual history.

Dawisha, Adeed. Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Gelvin, James L. Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. A pioneering analysis of the relationship of elite and nonelite Arab nationalism.

Hanioğlu, M. Şükrü. Preparations for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902–1908. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. The continuation of his 1995 work.

——. The Young Turks in Opposition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. A detailed account of the genesis of the main Turkish nationalist movement.

Jankowski, James, and Israel Gershoni, eds. Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Essays suggesting new approaches to the study of nationalisms in the Arab world since World War I.

Khalidi, Rashid, et. al., eds. The Origins of Arab Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Studies of the development of Arab nationalism up to World War I.

Khoury, Philip S. Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus, 1860-1920. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983. A thoughtful exploration of the social basis of Arab nationalism.

Laqueur, Walter. A History of Zionism. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972. A comprehensive political and intellectual history of Zionism to 1948.

Lewis, Bernard. The Emergence of Modern Turkey. London: Oxford University Press, 1961. A classic exploration of Turkish political and intellectual history.

Mottahedeh, Roy. The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. A masterful study of how religious and nationalist thought intertwine.

Qutb, Sayyid. Milestones. Indianapolis, Ind.: American Trust Publications, 1990.

Sternhell, Zeev. The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State. Translated by David Maisel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. A revisionist interpretation arguing for the nationalist over socialist ideas in Zionism.

James Jankowski