Or should Islamism be regarded as nationalism?

Let us take for granted that nationalism is essentially secular (in the sense that it is rooted in human history and society). Can we now argue from the opposite direction and say that some apparently religious move­ments should be viewed as nationalist, and that they are therefore really secular? Many observers of political Islam have adopted this argument, al­though in doing so they are in effect simply reversing the terms of the sec­ularization thesis.

To represent the contemporary Islamic revival (known by those who approve of it in the Arab world as as-sahwa, “the awakening”) as a form of crypto-nationalism,¹⁸ to refer to it explicitly by the term “cultural nation­alism,”¹⁹ is to propose that it is best understood as a continuation of the fa­miliar story of Third World nationalism. That proposal renders the claim by Muslim activists to be part of a historical Islamic tradition specious be­cause, as cultural nationalists, they must be seen as part of something es­sentially (though distortedly) “modern.” However, the fact that those ac­tive in the revival are usually highly critical of “traditional” teachers and practices does not prove that they are really rejecting tradition. Belonging to a tradition doesn’t preclude involvement in vigorous debate over the meanings of its formative texts (even over which texts 'are formative) and over the need for radical reform of the tradition. The selectivity with which people approach their tradition doesn’t necessarily undermine their claim to its integrity. Nor does the attempt to adapt the older concerns of a tra­dition’s followers to their new predicament in itself dissolve the coherence of that tradition—indeed that is precisely the object of argument among those who claim to be upholding the essence of the tradition.

All of this is not to say that there is nothing in common between the

18.

19. Luciani, reviewing the effect of the Islamic resurgence on modern Mid­dle Eastern politics, observes that “modern Islamic thinking, in avowedly different ways, offers radical answers to contemporary issues. These answers are, in a sense, a form of cultural nationalism, in which religion gives more substande to the re­jection of Western domination” (G. Luciani, ed., The Arab State, Berkeley: Uni­versity of California Press, 1990, p. xxx).

motives of Islamists and of Arab nationalists. There are overlaps between the two, notably in their similar stance of opposition against “the West,” which has been experienced in the Middle East in the form of predatory nationalisms of the great powers. Because, as individuals, Islamists and na­tionalists share this position they are sometimes led to seek a common al­liance—as happened at the Khartoum international conference of Islamists and Arab nationalists in the aftermath of the Gulf War.^[116] However prag­matic and brittle such alliances turn out to be, they presuppose differences that the would-be allies believe should be bridged.

The differences spring from the Islamist project of regulating con­duct in the world in accordance with “the principles of religion” {usul ud- diri), and from the fact that the community to be constructed stands counter to many of the values of modern Western life that Arab national­ism endorses. Both these conditions define what one might call contem­porary Islamic worldliness. The basic thrust of Arab nationalist ideology is of course supra-denominational (despite its invocations of Islamic history and its concessions to Islamic popular sentiment), and it is committed to the doctrine of separating law and citizenship from religious affiliation and of confining the latter to the private domain.

For nationalism the history of Islam is important because it reflects the early unification and triumph of the Arab nation; in that discourse the “Arabian Prophet” is regarded as its spiritual hero.^[117] This is an inversion of the classical theological view according to which the Prophet is not the ob-

Secularism, Nation-State, Religion 197 ject of national inspiration for an imagined community, but the subject of divine inspiration, a messenger of God to mankind and a model for virtu­ous conduct (sunna) that each Muslim, within a Muslim community, must seek to embody in his or her life, and the foundation, together with the Qur’an, of din (now translated as “religion”). Nor is Islamic history in the classical view an account of the Arab nation’s rise and decline. Classical Is­lamic chronicles are not “history” in the sense that nationalism claims “it has a history.” They grow out of hadith accounts (records of the sayings and doings of the Prophet) on which the sunna is based, and they articu­late a Quranic world view as expressed in the political and theological con­flicts among the faithful. At any rate it is easy to see that while the “Arab nation” is inconceivable without its history, the Islamic umma presupposes only the Qur’an and sunna.

The Islamic umma in the classical theological view is thus not an imagined community on a par with the Arab nation waiting to be politi­cally unified but a theologically defined space enabling Muslims to practice the disciplines of din in the world. Of course the word umma does also have the sense of “a people”—and “a community”—in the Qur’an. But the members of every community imagine it to have a particular character, and relate to one another by virtue of it. The crucial point therefore is not that it is imagined but that what is imagined predicates distinctive modes of be­ing and acting. The Islamic umma presupposes individuals who are self- governing but not autonomous.

The fact that the expression umma arabiyya is used today to denote the “Arab nation” represents a major conceptual transformation by which umma is cut off from the theological predicates that gave it its universaliz­ing power, and is made to stand for an imagined community that is equiv­alent to a total political society, limited and sovereign like other limited and sovereign nations in a secular (social) world.²² The ummatu-l-muslimin (the Islamic ummd) is ideologically not “a society” onto which state, econ­omy, and religion can be mapped. It is neither limited nor sovereign, for un-

22. The reference here is to Benedict Anderson’s definition of the nation: “it is an imagined political community—imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” {Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nation­alism, London: Verso, 1983, p. 15).

like Arab nationalism’s notion of al-umma al-’arabiyya, it can and eventu­ally should embrace all of humanity. It is therefore a mistake to regard it as an “archaic” (because “religious”) community that predates the modern na­tion.^[118] The two are grammatically quite different.

I do not mean to imply that the classical theological view is held in all its specificity by individual Islamists. AU Muslims today inhabit a dif­ferent world from the one their medieval forebears lived in, so it cannot be said of any of them that they hold the classical theological view. Even the most conservative Muslim draws on experiences in the contemporary world to give relevance and credibility to his or her theological interpreta­tions. As 1 indicated above, people who have been called “Islamists” are in many ways close to nationalists even though nationalism had no meaning in the doctrines of the classical theologians.

Both Arab nationalism (whether of the “liberal” or the “socialist” va­riety) and Islamism share a concern with the modernizing state that was put in place by Westernizing power—a state directed at the unceasing ma­terial and moral transformation of entire populations only recently organ­ized as “societies.”^[119] In other words, Islamism takes for granted and seeks to work through the nation-state, which is so central to the predicament of all Muslims. It is this statist project and not the fusion of religious and po­litical ideas that gives Islamism a “nationalist” cast. Although Islamism has virtually always succeeded Arab nationalism in the contemporary history of the Middle East, and addressed itself directly to the nation-state, it should iiot be regarded as a form of nationalism.^[120] The “real” motives of Is­lamists, of whether or not individuals are “using religion for political ends,” is not a relevant question here. (The motives of political actors are, in any case, usually plural and often fluctuating.) The important question is what circumstances oblige “Islamism” to emerge publicly as a political discourse, and whether, and if so in what way, it challenges the deep structures of secularism, including its connection with nationalist discourse.

From the point of view of secularism, religion has the option either of confining itself to private belief and worship or of engaging in public talk that makes no demands on life. In either case such religion is seen by secularism to take the form it should properly have. Each is equally the condition of its legitimacy. But this requirement is made difficult for those who wish to reform life given the ambition of the secular state itself. Be­cause the modern nation-state seeks to regulate all aspects of individual life—even the most intimate, such as birth and death—no one, whether religious or otherwise, can avoid encountering its ambitious powers. It’s not only that the state intervenes directly in the social body for purposes of re­form; it’s that all social activity requires the consent of the taw, and there­fore of the nation-state. The way social spaces are defined, ordered, and regulated makes them all equally “political.” So the attempt by Muslim ac­tivists to ameliorate social conditions—through, say, the establishment of clinics or schools in underserviced areas—must seriously risk provoking the charge of political illegitimacy and being classified Islamist. The call by Muslim movements to reform the social body through the authority of popular majorities in the national parliament will be opposed as “antide­mocratic,” as in Algeria in 1992 and in Turkey in 1997. Such cases of de­privatized religion are intolerable to secularists primarily because of the motives imputed to their opponents rather than to anything the latter have actually done. The motives signal the potential entry of religion into space already occupied by the secular. It is the nationalist secularists themselves, one might say, who stoutly reject the secularization of religious concepts and practices here.

The main point I underline is that Islamism’s preoccupation with state power is the result not of its commitment to nationalist ideas but of the modern nation-states enforced claim to constitute legitimate social identities and arenas. No movement that aspires to more than mere belief or inconsequential talk in public can remain indifferent to state power in a secular world. Even though Islamism is situated in a secular world—a world that is presupposed by, among other things, the universal space of the social that sustains the nation-state—Islamism cannot be reduced to nationalism. Many individuals actively involved in Islamist movements within the Arab world may regard Arab nationalism as compatible with it, and employ its discourse too. But such a stance has in fact been considered inconsistent by many Islamists—especially (but not only) outside the Arab world.²⁶