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Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, by Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, editors
Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski
Coming to terms with nationalism is a vexing project. Between the totalizing insistence of nationalist ideologues on the immemorial and monolithic reality of their nation, and the expansive and contingent view offered by Zachary Lockman in his contribution to this volume--that "nationalism always means different things to different people in different contexts"--a wide range of diverging perspectives about the nature, evolution, and historical role of nationalism exist. In part this is because of the protean nature of the phenomenon; in part it is due to the different prisms through which observers have viewed nationalism over time.
Until recently, scholars have tended to approach nationalism from either of two perspectives. An idealist emphasis on the cognitive and affective aspects of nationalism can be traced back to the time of Ernest Renan's Qu'est que c'est une nation? (1882). 1 In Renan's famous phrase, nations are "a daily plebiscite," the product of the subjective collective memory of communities rather than the result of objective "facts" such as kinship, geography, history, language, religion, or economic interests. Renan's positing of "large-scale solidarity" or shared "moral consciousness" as the fundamental criteria of national existence1 was accepted and reiterated by numerous later writers on nationalism. For Arnold Toynbee in 1915, nationalism "like all great forces in life is nothing material or mechanical, but a subjective psychological feeling in a living people." 2 Hans Kohn's influential The Idea of Nationalism (1944) defined the phenomenon as "first and foremost a state of mind, an act of consciousness." 3 When Karl Deutsch's Nationalism and Social Communication (1953) redirected scholarly attention to the social dynamics of nationalism--the modes and agencies of communication that create and disseminate national solidarity--he nonetheless remained within the perceptual paradigm. 4 Fully a century after Renan, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983) continued to treat nationalism in primarily cognitive terms: "Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined." 5 The alternative approach to nationalism has been to emphasize its political character. In 1912 Max Weber recognized that, while nationalism was based on "a common bond of sentiment," nationalism's "adequate expression would be a state of its own." 6 Elie Kedourie's Nationalism (1960) argued that nationalism had substantively resulted in a "politics in a new style," specifically "an ideological style of politics" that in his view was inherently destructive of civic order. 7 While viewing the genesis and contribution of nationalism in very different terms, Ernest Gellner began his study of the subject with a political definition of nationalism: "Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent." 8 Among recent analysts, John Breuilly has been perhaps the most insistent on the essentially political character of nationalism: "Nationalism is a form of politics. Before trying to theorise about the 'real' purpose or cause of this form of politics--before trying to go 'behind' nationalism in search of some non-political base which supposedly gives rise to nationalism--one should try to work out precisely what is the form of politics we call nationalism, its political context and its political modes." 9
New Directions in Recent Theory
In the past two decades, an explosion of new theoretical writing on the subject has vastly expanded the analytical framework in which nationalism is considered. The intellectual and political dimensions of nationalism of course continue to receive attention; but the phenomenon has been situated in a wider socioeconomic, cultural, and psychological field. Two sets of contrasting models dominate recent discussion about the nature of nationalism. One pits what has been variously termed a "primordialist" or "perennialist" paradigm against a "modernist" interpretation. Where the former views modern nations as ineluctable outgrowths or adaptations of existing ethnic communities or ethnies, the latter model conceives of nations as totally modern constructions, if not inventions, erected de novo as a result of the massive processes of change of the past two centuries. Anthony Smith's metaphors of "gastronomy" versus "archeology" capture the distinction between the two approaches: where the modernist model views nationalism as an act of creation analogous to making a "meal out of different ingredients," the primordialist/perennialist model resembles archeology in seeing nationalism as the excavation of successive layers from the past that form the basis for collective identity in the present. 10
The other set of contrasting models turns on a methodological distinction. The "realist" perspective holds that nationalism is produced by and anchored in objective socioeconomic conditions and material interests; the "semiotic" or "postmodernist" school treats nationalism as a set of signs and an entirely discursive construct. Despite their differences, the primordialist/perennialist and modernist models discussed above are both "realist" in their assumption that nationalism is a tangible reality embedded in concrete historical circumstances (ancient in the case of the former, recent in the case of the latter). Scholars who opt for a semiotic approach interpret nationalism as a continuing discourse about such conditions, and hence resort to hermeneutic tools rather than empirical historical analysis to decipher a nationalism's provenance and character.
Whether primordialist or modernist, realist or postmodernist, recent theoretical analyses of nationalism have unquestionably enriched our understanding of a multifaceted subject. Among modernists, Ernest Gellner's logically compelling if perhaps overschematized explanation of the genesis of nationalism roots the phenomenon in the replacement of older localized and isolated forms of community (village; tribe) by mass urban society, in the spread of literacy among a heterogeneous urban population, and in the inevitable conflicts over resources among differently socialized ethnic groups coexisting in a larger and more complex industrial society. 11 Probably the most widely cited of modernist studies is Benedict Anderson's analysis of the psychological transformations involved in the creation of the new type of imagined community known as the nation. Anderson's complex situating of the origins of modern nationalism in the conjunction of three historical processes--the decline of older forms of broader community (universal religion and dynastic state); the emergence of new ways of conceptualizing time and space (as exemplified in the newspaper and the novel); and the solidification and spread of vernacular languages through print-capitalism--stands as the most comprehensive and stimulating recent etiology of modern nationalism. 12 The primordialist approach takes much of its inspiration from the emerging subdiscipline of sociobiology, with its emphasis on the role of kinship in determining animal and by extension human behavior. 13 John Armstrong's detailed analysis of the enduring force of ethnicity in Christian and Islamic history, and Anthony Smith's overview of the character of historical ethnies and the ways in which modern nations have built their solidarity on preexisting ethnic ties, represent the more tempered and historically based perennialist variation that draws attention to the importance of communal memory, myth, and symbolism in the formation of modern nations. 14 Not all recent work fits neatly into the primordialist or modernist categories. John Breuilly's systematic comparison of the political conditions in which different nationalisms have emerged emphasizes how the nature of the state and elite competition for the control of state institutions have shaped the specific trajectories taken by different nationalist movements. 15 Eric Hobsbawm's and Terence Ranger's concept of "invented tradition"--how nationalist ideologues and political leaders consciously create a reservoir of legitimizing symbols and ceremonies sometimes through the reinterpretation of existing beliefs and customs, sometimes out of whole cloth--offers a useful analytical compromise between the extremes of primordialism and modernism. 16 Hobsbawm's more recent historical examination of Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 provides a subtle discussion of the changing concept of the nation over time, as well as of the complex and not totally polar relationship between class and nation, socialism and nationalism, in modern Europe. 17 Liah Greenfeld's detailed analysis of five major nationalisms (English, French, Russian, German, and American) emphasizes the manner in which these individual nationalisms derived their particular character from the crisis of identity experienced by their elites during the process of modernization. 18 With reference to non-Western nationalisms of the colonial era, Partha Chatterjee's recent work on nationalism in India suggests the need to distinguish between the political realm where nationalist discourse is heavily influenced by metropolitan precedents and where nationalists perforce contend for control of the new colonial state, and the cultural realm where a quite different and more autonomous set of new "nationalist" patterns, institutions, and values can emerge. 19 The semiotic or postmodernist approach to nationalism assumes the nation to be a discursive entity created by narrativity. As Homi Bhabha writes, "[t]he nation's 'coming into being' as a system of cultural signification, as the representation of social life rather than the discipline of social polity, emphasizes th[e] instability of knowledge . . . . The emergence of the political 'rationality' of the nation as a form of narrative--textual strategies, metaphoric displacements, sub-texts and figurative strategems--has its own history." 20 Scholars working in this tradition focus on the "narrativistic constituents" of nationalism, the textual structures, tropes, and forms of emplotment characteristic of different nationalist narratives. 21 Both because the phenomenon of nationalism itself is so varied and because the substantive findings of recent scholarship sometimes pull in different directions, the overall contribution of the new literature on nationalism is difficult to summarize. One clear contribution by modernist writers such as Gellner and Anderson has been to sharpen our appreciation of how intimately nationalism is related to the many sweeping nonpolitical changes of the modern epoch such as printing, literacy, urbanization, changing social roles, and even new ways of comprehending space and time. At the same time, the work of scholars such as Armstrong and Smith provide examples of the indisputable significance of existing ethnic bonds and of the centrality of (reinterpreted) traditions in the construction of modern nations. A less ideologically colored approach to the relationship between the concepts of nationalism and socialism has softened the presumed incompatibility of these two forms of ideology and social organization. The inclusion of non-European (both American and non-Western) examples in recent scholarship has eroded the earlier overemphasis on language as the primary national bond and also points to the need to distinguish between the political trajectory of nationalism on the one hand and its cultural articulation on the other.
More than anything else, recent work has disaggregated nationalism. Concepts such as a nationalist "psyche" or "mind" have been dismissed as essentialist reifications that distort the complexities of history. Quite different causal tracks underlying the emergence and spread of specific nationalisms have been delineated; the presence of numerous and shifting bases for individual nationalisms have been identified. The pretensions of nationalists themselves to speak on behalf of the nation are no longer taken at face value, as such factors as ethnicity, regional loyalty, class, gender, religion and subculture are acknowledged to have produced competing and sometimes drastically different concepts of nationalism within the body of a single "nation." Contingency, multiplicity, and fluidity are the principles underlying contemporary scholarship on nationalism.
Nationalism in the Arab Middle East
A noteworthy feature of the new scholarship on nationalism is its relative neglect of nationalism in the Arab Middle East. With the partial exceptions of the sociological analyses by Gellner and Smith, which contain occasional references to Arab societies, and the historical discussions by Armstrong and Breuilly, which include specific Middle Eastern case studies, nationalism in the Arab Middle East has received little attention in the recent theoretical literature on nationalism.
For its part, scholarship on modern Arab history has not taken full advantage of the insights offered in recent theoretical work. Accounts of nationalism in Arab Asia and Egypt, the classical centers of "Arab" nationalism, have most often chronicled the evolution of nationalist movements, especially vis-ˆ-vis the backdrop of the struggle against European imperialism, or have described nationalist ideology as articulated by intellectuals and party or regime spokesmen. 22 Models offered to account for the emergence and spread of nationalist sentiment and activism have on the whole been reactive (a response to European imperialism and the collapse of the Ottoman/Islamic order), imitative (the fascination of leading intellectuals with European culture), or diffusionist (the gradual spread of nationalist concepts from their European homeland to the Middle East). Much less attention has been paid to the aspects of the phenomenon that bulk largest in the new theoretical literature (e.g., the social and psychological bases of nationalism; the dissemination of new identities within society; the non-elite dimensions of nationalism).
Only in the past few decades have empirical studies of nationalism in the Arab Middle East begun to draw from the new theoretical scholarship. The main thrust has been to cultivate a polycentric or "peripheral" perspective on nationalism, as scholars attend to the numerous regional, confessional, generational, and socioeconomic factors that have shaped the many temporal and spatial variants of nationalism. As scholars trace the diverse histories of different forms of nationalism in Arab societies, the notion of a homogeneous and hegemonic Arab nationalism so often projected by ideologues is being decentered. The genesis and evolution of nationalism is increasingly being viewed as a multifaceted process whose roots lie in the socioeconomic processes of the modern era and whose meaning extends beyond elites to broader sectors of society. 23 Temporally, the primary focus of much of the existing scholarship on nationalism in the Arab Middle East has been on its genesis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A valuable collaborative volume on this early phase of the history of Arab nationalism was published in 1991. 24 As yet, however, there has been no work of synthesis in which the new theoretical insights have been applied to the broad range of Arab nationalisms as they developed from the World War I period onward.
This volume is an initial attempt to fill this lacuna. The authors of its fourteen essays were invited to rethink their work on aspects of nationalism in the Arab world in terms of the new approaches to nationalism that have been suggested in recent decades. Each essay stands alone as a study of a specific facet of nationalism in the Middle East. Most, however, revolve around certain broad themes. The essays can be read most productively if considered in light of those themes.
Narrativity I. Mechanics of Historiography: How Academics Construct Nationalist History
Several essays in this volume concentrate on metahistorical issues of historiography and scholarly interpretation of Middle Eastern nationalisms. Israel Gershoni attempts a comprehensive survey of the two successive narrative approaches prevailing in Western scholarship about nationalism in the Arab Middle East, the first in the 1950s and 1960s, the second from the 1970s onward. Employing conceptual tools suggested by Hayden White, Gershoni identifies the main paradigms, tropes, and rhetorical strategies characteristic of the earlier narrative that treated Arab nationalism as a unitary and hegemonic ideology and the later more nuanced peripheralist approach concerned with the detailed analysis of local, regional, and communal variants of Arab nationalism in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent. He also shows how the political fortunes of Arab nationalism itself impinged on its emplotment by academics. When Arab nationalism dominated political discourse and the aspiration for integral Arab unity seemed a realistic possibility in the 1950s and 1960s, essentialist interpretations of the phenomenon as a uniform hegemonic construct were prevalent. With the relative eclipse of pan-Arabism in the 1970s and 1980s, a more pluralist perspective emerged in which localized subnationalisms (territorial, communal, and state-oriented) are discerned as having constituted formidable alternatives to the concept of one indivisible Arab nation. With this demonstration of the inquirer's imbrication in the object of his study, Gershoni calls for greater awareness by researchers regarding their own susceptibility to how contemporary currents can influence their reading of the past. To this end he suggests that a polycentric approach, with its greater attention to communities and movements outside the presumptive mainstream of Arab nationalism, be expanded.
After examining some of the central historiographical debates found in the current theoretical literature on nationalism, Fred Halliday suggests "comparative contingency" as a useful framework for the study of modern nationalisms. Beyond identifying the general historicity of a given nation and understanding both the specific factors contributing to its formation and the specific ideological content of its doctrines, Halliday insists upon the need for close attention to the instrumentality of nationalism; how the nationalism in question corresponded to or conflicted with the values and interests of particular social and political forces, and thus how it was used, resisted, or changed in the hurly-burly of political life. He then applies this approach of comparative contingency to the case of the Yemen. His historical discussion on the one hand demythologizes the essentialist and teleological claims of official Yemeni nationalist ideology; on the other, it demonstrates the manner in which Yemeni nationalism consists of a constantly shifting field of pre-Islamic, Islamic, local, and regional elements that have been utilized in different ways by different Yemenis at different times.
Gabriel Piterberg's contribution focuses on the way in which Egyptian academics have based their nationalist narratives on presumed dichotomies (objective/subjective, material/ideological, content/form, East/West). Drawing on the work of Hayden White, Benedict Anderson, and Timothy Mitchell, he proceeds to problematize the apparently self- evident quality of such dichotomies and thereby to undermine the assumptions underlying much of nationalist historical narrative. The subject of his exercise in deconstruction is the writings of several leading Egyptian historians on Egyptian nationalism. With close attention both to narrative structure and the use of language, Piterberg shows the extent to which their narratives are premised on the culturalist and essentialist axioms of European Orientalism concerning Egypt's Islamic/Ottoman past and are influenced by the assumptions of the territorial nationalism they purport to describe. The Egyptian historical narrative presented by these authors is intended to shape, transmit, and perpetuate a territorialist collective memory and imagined community.
Narrativity 2. Mechanics of Ideology: How Nationalists Construct History
While the first three essays engage in this self-analysis of the state of the historiographic art, others consider the modes of presentation employed by nationalists to portray history in their own image. William Cleveland reconsiders the foundational text for the study of Arab nationalism, George Antonius's The Arab Awakening (1938), in terms of recent analyses of nationalist narrative, imagery, and symbolism. Although ostensibly a work of scholarship, the book was clearly drafted with an eye to informing British public opinion and thereby influencing British policy towards Arab nationalism. Cleveland's close reading of the text dissects the various ways in which Antonius tailored his historical references and framed his narrative mindful of its impact on this target audience. Postulating three essentialistic criteria for nationhood (ethnicity, shared tradition, and language), Antonius reasons that since the Arabs possess these features they merit national existence, i.e., political sovereignty. Antonius supplies ample "evidence" of the national consciousness of the Arab masses and of their involvement in the national project; his account also makes emotional and effective use of the symbols and tropes of nationhood (maps and flags, martyrs and historical destiny). Cleveland's essay presents The Arab Awakening as a textbook example of a historian's imagining of the nation. His concluding section indicates that there is considerable evidence that Western policy-makers were influenced by it and thus that, beyond its historiographical importance, the book also contributed to the later political trajectory of Arab nationalism. Reeva Simon examines both the intellectual content and the practical aspects of a different attempt at Arab nation-formation--the efforts of the new monarchical regime in Iraq during the interwar period to establish the ideological dominance of a unitary Arab nationalism over an ethnically diverse Iraqi population. She identifies the state educational system as the primary agency through which Arab nationalism was imposed on the populace by an educational establishment which took Sati` al-Husri's twin criteria of nationhood--language and common history--as gospel. Simon emphasizes the failure of this imposition of nationalism from above. Attending to the voices of communal identity ignored in the official Arab nationalist ideology (those of Shi`ites, Kurds, Christians, Jews), she demonstrates the limited and sometimes destructive results of the Iraqi state's attempt to create a hegemonic sense of nationhood in an ethnically divided country.
Beth Baron approaches nationalist imagining from a different angle. The specific concern of her essay is how nationalist iconography in Egypt employed the image of the woman to symbolize the Egyptian nation and what the changing ways in which the image of women were used by nationalists has to say about both nationalism and the position of women in Egypt. She excavates the complex sources of the various images of women found in nationalist painting, sculpture, and caricature and suggests the different ideological purposes that female imagery served (inculcating a romantic attachment by males to the nation when portrayed as a woman; invoking notions of the need to defend the honor of a feminine Egypt). Baron details how the symbolic portrayal of Egypt as woman differed from period to period as well as how it was manipulated differently by sundry groups. Originally the imitation of European examples, the increasing frequency with which Egypt was portrayed as a woman was intimately linked to the social emancipation of women in Egypt, particularly to the unveiling (=liberation) of elite women. By the 1920s, two images predominated. Where the image of Egypt as a peasant woman was wielded to advance a nationalist and populist agenda, the image of Egypt as a modern woman was part and parcel of the Westernizing project of the Egyptian elite of the interwar era. By limning the array of uses and intentions involved in forms of visual nationalist narration, Baron uncovers the dissonance among competing visions of the nation.
Discursive Competition: The Interplay of Rival Nationalist Visions
Baron's essay analyzing the different and sometimes incompatible uses of female imagery by Egyptian nationalists points to a central theme of many of the contributions to this volume. The twentieth-century Arab world provides ample evidence of the coexistence and competition of alternative understandings of communal identity. The narratives that nationalist ideologues create are seldom uncontested. Deployed against rival nationalist visions, they bear the scars of combat. The emphasis on diversity in recent empirical studies of Arab nationalism is an attempt to give full historical weight to the interplay of nationalist discourses both within and among Arab communities.
Two essays have the competition among rival nationalist conceptions as their primary focus. Donald Reid's examination of the scholarly discipline of Egyptology in the early twentieth century analyzes the efforts of indigenous Egyptian students of ancient Egypt to find a place in the Egyptological sun, and the tensions between the national prejudices of Egyptologists and the ostensibly international values of their profession. It is a complex story rich in ironies about both the institutional politics of an academic discipline and the abiding presence of nationalism in the world of scholarship. Reid shows how difficult it was for indigenous Egyptians--presumably the descendants of the ancient Egyptians whose achievements Egyptology extolled--to win the respect of their Western "colleagues" and to rise to prominence in a theoretically internationalist profession. Woven into Reid's analysis of Egyptology is a discussion of the place of Pharaonic referents in Egyptian nationalism itself, how Egyptian nationalists appropriated Egyptological assets in order to build a new community of memory. Many forces in Egyptian society were involved in disseminating an awareness of Pharaonic symbolism in early twentieth-century Egypt: from above, educational works and curricula, museums, stamps, money; from below, tour guides, merchants in archeological artifacts, laborers at Pharaonic digs. Based in the first instance on the results of Egyptology but radiating well beyond the scholarly realm, ancient Pharaonic referents and symbols became an enduring part of the complex national identity of modern Egyptians.
The discursive competition of different national orientations in Egypt in the 1950s are the subject of James Jankowski's essay. Examining first the interplay of Egyptian, Arab, and Islamic strands of identity in the nationalist outlook of Jamal `Abd al-Nasir (Nasser), he argues that the nationalist perspective of the leader of the post-1952 regime remained primarily Egyptianist in the early years of the Egyptian revolution. When a Nasserist commitment to Arab nationalism did emerge (the mid-1950s), it remained closely linked to his anti-imperialism and his perception of the utility--indeed the necessity--of Arab solidarity for the achievement of Egyptian national goals. During the same period, the religious referent was secondary in both Nasser's political vocabulary and his hierarchy of politically meaningful loyalties. Next tracing the political adoption of Arab nationalist policies by the Egyptian government between 1952 and 1958, Jankowski shows the gradual, hesitant, and only partial commitment of the leaders of the new regime to Arab nationalism up to the formation of the United Arab Republic in 1958. He concludes by emphasizing the importance of existing state structures--what Sami Zubeida and Roger Owen have termed the "political field" created by the colonial state--as a determinant of nationalist political behavior in the Arab world.
Polycentrism
One of the key insights of the new theoretical literature on nationalism is an emphasis on the simultaneous presence of various national (and other) identities both in individuals and communities, an idea that challenges the exclusive and absolute claims made by nationalist ideology on identity and allegiance. Rashid Khalidi's contribution to this volume discusses the coexistence of multiple foci of self-definition and loyalty among Palestinian Arabs early in the twentieth century, and goes on to delineate the process whereby a specifically Palestinian Arab identity coalesced and became prevalent as a result of political circumstances during and after World War I. Multiple religious, dynastic (e.g., Ottoman), local/regional, and ethnic Arab affiliations overlapped in the consciousness of articulate Palestinians before World War I. Khalidi argues that it was the political upheavals (Ottoman defeat; the failure of an indigenous successor-state uniting ex-Ottoman Syria to survive; the inauguration of British rule over a territorially distinct Palestine; the intensification of the Zionist presence and challenge under a British umbrella) and the corresponding politicization of Palestinians due to unsettled conditions between 1914 and 1923 that combined to establish the local hegemony of a specifically Palestinian national identity in the wake of the Great War. On the one hand, Khalidi's paper indicates the limitations of a unidimensional model of nationalism based on an idealized version of the Western experience prevalent in the older theoretical literature on nationalism; at the same time, its thesis of a paradigm shift in Palestinian political consciousness occurring under the impact of a decade of turmoil suggests the kinds of conditions in which national identity undergoes rapid change.
Khalidi's is not the only possible perspective on the evolution of the "peripheral" nationalism of the Palestinians. Musa Budeiri also takes issue with monolithic definitions of identity among Palestinians; like Khalidi, he shows how kin, faction, village, region, religion, and Arabism combined in different quantities at different times to form the multidimensional identity of Palestinians. But, viewing Palestinian identity over the (relatively) longue durŽe of the twentieth century, he accords religion, and specifically Islam, a more prominent place in the national identity and political behavior of Palestinians. In his view the symbols and mythology of Palestinian nationalism under the British Mandate were suffused with Islam; even when a discrete and largely secular Palestinian national identity did coalesce, a process he dates to the 1960s, it did not replace an Islamic orientation for most Palestinians. Thus the prominence of Islamicist movements today on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip comes as no surprise; Islam has always provided much of the vocabulary of Palestinian activism. Budeiri's explanation of the persistence of Islam in Palestinian nationalism relies in part on the notion of the centrality of the existing "political field," but in the Palestinian case in negative terms. It is the absence of a Palestinian territorial state--both the object and the agent of nonreligious forms of nationalism elsewhere in the Arab world--that has fostered the continuing salience of Islam in Palestinian political life.
Emmanuel Sivan's contribution addresses a phenomenon in comparison to which Arab nationalism itself appears peripheral--the contemporary Islamic movement and how its ideologues view Arab nationalism. His analysis of Islamicist attitudes towards Arab nationalism indicates a visceral rejection of Arab nationalism due to its secularist content, its putative provenance in the West, its quasiracist division of the Islamic community or umma along bogus ethnic lines, and (not least) the persecution its adherents have inflicted on Islamicists themselves. However, Sivan also notes the ways in which Islamicist ideologues partially take account of and allow for identities other than their primary religious one, including state nationalisms and local allegiances. Leading figures in the Islamic movement do acknowledge the value for Arabs in identifying with a specifically Arab culture and history, albeit not with a secular and chauvinist Arab nationalism. This qualified endorsement of plural identities by Islamicist spokesmen testifies to the importance of the polycentric approach in understanding Middle Eastern identity, national and otherwise.
Sivan's contribution is methodological as well as substantive. His primary source for Islamicist attitudes about Arab nationalism is the distinctly contemporary one of audiocassettes. In addition to what these convey about Islamicist ideas, he suggests that this oral medium of communication has added a new dimension to public discourse. Beyond the immediacy and directness of a message delivered via cassette, which increases its affective quality, oral media such as cassettes can transmit concepts of identity and loyalty without recourse to literacy, thereby opening new horizons for the dissemination and popularization of nationalist (or in this case antinationalist) ideas. The emphasis of Gellner and Anderson on the crucial importance of print media and standardized language in the history of nationalism may now have been overtaken by technology. The new oral and visual means of communication developed in recent decades (radio; television; their associated audio- and videocassettes) have created a new non-literate option for transmitting messages that can circumvent the formal literate culture in which nationalism was traditionally expressed. Whether orality is connected specifically to the diffusion of populist Islamic concepts of identity and loyalty while written communication is inherently suited to the dissemination of linguistic (Arabic) nationalism is a possibility that needs further research.
Nationalist Diffusion from the Bottom Up: Other Voices
Previous scholarship on nationalism in the Middle East focused on the role of the elites presumed responsible for the formulation of nationalist concepts and perceived as the agents of nationalism's dissemination. As Philip Khoury begins his essay, "[t]he study of Arab nationalism, as an ideology and as a system of political and social mobilization, has until recently concentrated on grand narratives constructed by and about elites." While summoning scholars to add subaltern groups--peasants, workers, minorities, women--to the Arab nationalist picture, Khoury also cautions that this must be done appropriately. Rather than aspiring to a new grand narrative in which the histories of subaltern groups are squeezed into a new, seamless, undifferentiated account, he instead urges, in the fashion of Jean-François Lyotard, the construction of numerous micronarratives in which each strain of subnationalism would retain its historical specificity. 25 Family, town, village, religion, class, profession, and gender all inflected Arab nationalism, and thus there is no single nationalist narrative whether elites or subalterns are at issue.
The final three essays of this volume are concerned with the recovery of recessive strains of Arab nationalism emanating from groups below the dominant elite. Thus James Gelvin identifies and dissects populist nationalism in Syria within the new Arab state headed by Amir Faysal in the post-World War I years. Previous studies of Faysal's regime have dismissed the forms of mass sentiment and mobilization examined by Gelvin as "mob" activity; in contrast, Gelvin stresses that what he terms this "other Arab nationalism" was an authentic form of nationalist expression that must be taken into account if nationalism in the Arab world is to be properly understood. He approaches Syrian populism from an unusually broad perspective, placing it in the context of long-term historical change in Syria and evaluating it in the light of recent scholarship on similar populist phenomena elsewhere in the world. Gelvin analyzes how the growth of market relations and rapid urbanization spurred the growth of "horizontal" organizations with improvised egalitarian structures that for the first time gave subaltern strata the power to pursue their agendas. Laboring groups, popular committees, and declining elites such as the `ulama manifested quite a different nationalist profile than the dominant elites; reticent about the benefits of capitalism in light of their own recent experience, they tended to see the future in terms of an idealized communal past. As with other examples of populist nationalism, they constituted themselves as "the nation" as against the more Westernized, politically dominant "antination" represented by the Syrian and Hijazi elite.
Zachary Lockman contemplates the seemingly self-defeating and antinationalist behavior of Arab laborers in Mandatory Palestine as they, against the counsel of Palestinian nationalist intellectuals situated outside the labor arena, periodically sought to make common cause with Jewish labor as represented by the Histadrut labor union. Lockman emphasizes the simultaneity of the disparate and even conflicting identities found in individuals. Borrowing from Michel Foucault, he argues that nationalism is not a thing but a set of forces that derives meaning from its relative position within a discursive field. 26 Lockman shows that the form of nationalism that emerged among the Palestinian working classes had rather a different cast from that manifested higher on the socioeconomic ladder. Elite formulations of nationalism in Palestine conceptualized Palestinian identity as an absolute category that brooked no divided loyalties and that applied similarly to everyone encompassed by its definition of "Arab." Insofar as working class Palestinians were less influenced by abstruse definitions than by the tangible bonds of kinship, locale, and religion as well as by the imperatives of economic survival, their outlook and behavior sometimes compromised the pristine ideals of Arab nationalism as defined by the Palestinian elite. Thus their sense of nationalism paled before their resentment over the influx of Syrian and Egyptian workers into Palestine who wished to take advantage of the relative prosperity of the Mandate and who threatened to displace local workers. Elitist intellectual constructions of Arab nationalism, univocal and totalizing, brands such Palestinian workers as dupes or collaborators betraying their authentic national interest. In doing so, they provide a measure of the extent to which essentialist constructions make nationalism's "complexity, contestation, and constructedness disappear."
Philip Khoury's own contribution explores the tension and rivalry between older and younger strata within the interwar Syrian elite. Taking the competition among various nationalist organizations and movements in Mandatory Syria in the mid-1930s as his subject, he analyzes the triumph of the National Bloc--a party previously tarnished by policies viewed as collaborationist with the French and whose leadership was composed of absentee landlords and commercial bourgeoisie--over the League of National Action based in a younger and more ideological demigeneration of Syrians. His conclusion is that the National Bloc's pragmatic responsiveness to the needs of the nonliterate urban and rural masses made it more attractive than the doctrinaire League with its ruminations over future Arab unity. In his earlier work Khoury had represented this openness and flexibility on the part of the National Bloc as a deleterious form of "factionalism" that had hampered its effectiveness as a nationalist organization. Khoury has reconsidered this view, now interpreting the Bloc's "factionalism" as a form of pluralism that enabled it to meet the needs of a variety of constituencies. The National Bloc's political longevity was less an indication of the weakness of Arab nationalism in Syria than a demonstration of the complex reality of Arab nationalism. This is a fitting note to end an overview of our collection of essays: the multivalence of National Bloc politics was precisely what enabled it to succeed against rivals wedded to a vision of national homogeneity and uniformity.
Broader Implications
The essays in this volume are not the last word on the subject of nationalism in the Arab Middle East. Geographically, they focus more heavily on certain regions than on others. Topically, they treat particular nationalist moments or movements while neglecting other, equally worthwhile, dimensions of the subject. Their findings are often suggestive rather than definitive, opening new doors to the understanding of nationalism rather than serving to close debate on the topic.
Nonetheless, beyond their individual value as case studies of specific aspects of the history of nationalism in the Arab Middle East, these essays also serve more general purposes. On one level, their novel approaches and fresh conclusions can make a contribution to defining the agenda for further research on the place and meaning of nationalism in modern Arab history. More broadly, although their purpose is to illuminate the history of nationalism in the Arab Middle East through drawing on insights found in the new theoretical literature on nationalism, they simultaneously contribute to the current scholarly effort to rethink nationalism as a central phenomenon of the modern era. Considered collectively, the essays indicate the need to question earlier models that framed nationalism in the Arab world in homogeneous terms. Certainly in the Arab Middle East, nationalism has everywhere been layered and inflected by multiple influences and identities. Regional, statal, religious, and class considerations have tugged in different directions, in the process making nationalism in Arab societies a complex field of relations and interactions. The traditional dichotomy of Arab nationalism around two major poles, be they unitary "pan-Arab" versus local or regional nationalisms, religious versus secular allegiances, territorial versus ethnic/linguistic affiliations, or "traditional" versus "modern" forms, by no means exhausts the collage of variants of identity and loyalty found in the Arab Middle East in our century. Such dichotomies cannot reflect the shadings and interpenetration of different kinds of Arab communal expression and action.
Similarly, the essays serve to deflate essentialist notions to the effect that nationalism once constituted stabilizes in a fixed dogma and set of practices. Constantly in motion, Arab nationalism has been incarnated in different modes at different times. The fluidity of national loyalties among Arabs is striking. The relationship among variant forms of Arab nationalism has undergone dramatic shifts from period to period. The story of nationalism in the Arab Middle East is largely one of contestation and the clash of rival national identities and agendas; correspondingly, writing the history of Arab nationalism consists of explicating the interplay among alternative nationalist visions and programs. Arab nationalism was and is a dynamic construct, and is most fruitfully studied as such.
Several essays problematize the premise that nationalism emanates exclusively from elites and is imposed from the top down upon society. They demonstrate the active nature of the reception of nationalism by various non-elite strata and the reciprocal influences in the production and reproduction of nationalist ideas and behavior. They indicate that we have much to learn about nationalism not only through examining elites, regimes, ideologies, and movements but also through studying subaltern groups, popular organizations, and mass culture.
Various essays draw attention to the rich assemblage of agencies through which nationalism is articulated and disseminated. Beyond drawing their data from "canonical" forms of nationalist expression such as nationalist tracts, the press, and speeches by nationalist leaders, contributors demonstrate the importance for our understanding of nationalism of hitherto relatively neglected sources such as visual materials, institutional arrangements in which nationalist attitudes are embedded (e.g., archeology), and newer forms of communication such as audiocassettes. The diverse sources utilized in the essays in this collection do not exhaust the portfolio of relevant sources for the study of nationalism: literature, music, and contemporary popular art forms such as film, radio, and television also have much to say about nationalist imaginings. Just as nationalist attitudes are in constant evolution, so too are the instruments that carry the nationalist message: today spoken Arabic [`ammiyya or other forms of "middle language"] as conveyed by radio, television, cartoons, or cassettes have supplemented and possibly even replaced the paramountcy of the written word [fusha or formal literary Arabic] as the main vehicle of collective self-definition in the Arab world.
Perhaps the primary thrust of this volume is to confirm the multifaceted character of nationalism. Nationalism is simultaneously real and imagined, authentic and invented, concrete and discursive. Through the programs and operations of Ministries of Education and National Guidance as well as via nonofficial organizations, movements, and spontaneous groupings, "imagined" concepts of the nation acquire a tangible existence and a practical character that shape society and inform behavior. The differentiation between imagination and reality in the study of nationalist thought is specious; nationalist imaginings become part and parcel of nationalist reality, and attempts to separate them only obscure an understanding of the phenomenon.
While taking nationalism as their object of inquiry, the essays also point to the need to decenter nationalism within the scholarly enterprise. Now, at the close of a century in which nationalist forms of speculation and activity dominated public life in the Arab world, we are increasingly aware that nationalism has not been the exclusive motor of communal identity and activism in Arab societies. The analysis of nationalism has to be folded into a broader scholarly project that gives due attention to the study of local community structures, class and gender divisions, religious and other forms of communal belonging, and to the interplay among all of these. At the same time that nationalism is a "field," it is part of a larger field that encompasses much that is not explicitly "nationalist." Comprehending nationalism requires situating it in this broader context of only tangentially nationalist or non-nationalist forces.
Thus the essays assembled in this volume do not afford any sense of closure on the subject of Arab nationalism. Rather, they suggest new avenues for research that can contribute to a fuller--but probably never a complete--understanding of one of the most complex and dynamic facets of Middle Eastern history.
Notes
Note 1: Ernest Renan, Qu'est que c'est une nation? (Paris, 1882), 26-29. Back.
Note 2: Arnold Toynbee, Nationality and the War (London, 1915), 13. Back.
Note 3: Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York, 1944), 10. Back.
Note 4: Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication (Cambridge, MA, 1953). Back.
Note 5: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (2d. ed.; New York, 1991), 6. Back.
Note 6: Max Weber, Vorhandlungen des Zweitens Deutschen Soziologentages (TŸbingen, 1913), 50. Back.
Note 7: Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (2d. ed.; New York, 1961), 9, 18, 49. Back.
Note 8: Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, 1983), 1. Back.
Note 9: John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (2d. ed.; Chicago, 1994), 14. Back.
Note 10: Anthony D. Smith, "Gastronomy or Archeology? The Role of Nationalism in the Construction of Nations," paper delivered at the seminar on "Rethinking Nationalisms," Weiner Library, Tel Aviv University, 23 March 1993; see also his "The Myth of the 'Modern Nation' and the Myths of Nations," Ethnic and Racial Studies 11:1 (January 1988), 1-26. Back.
Note 11: Gellner, Nations and Nationalism. Back.
Note 12: Anderson, Imagined Communities. Back.
Note 13: For an example of the biologically based approach, see Pierre Van den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon (New York, 1979). Back.
Note 14: John Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill, 1982); Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (New York, 1986). Back.
Note 15: Breuilly, Nationalism and the State. Back.
Note 16: Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983). Back.
Note 17: Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge, 1990). Back.
Note 18: Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1992). Back.
Note 19: 1 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London, 1986); idem, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, 1993). Back.
Note 20: Homi K. Bhabha (ed.), The Nation and Narration (London, 1990), 1-2. Back.
Note 21: . Ibid., 2. For other examples of this approach, see Hayden White, Metahistory (2d. ed.; Baltimore, 1993); Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978); idem, The Content of the Form (Baltimore, 1987); Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman (eds.), Modernity and Identity (Oxford, 1992); Itamar Even-Zohar, "Polysystem Studies," Poetics Today 11:1 (Spring 1990). Back.
Note 22: The following are leading examples of the primarily ideological approach to Arab nationalism: William L. Cleveland, The Making of an Arab Nationalist: Ottomanism and Arabism in the Life and Thought of Sati` al-Husri (Princeton, 1971); idem, Islam Against the West: Shakib Arslan and the Campaign for Islamic Nationalism (Austin, 1985); C. Ernest Dawn, From Ottomanism to Arabism: Essays on the Origins of Arab Nationalism (Urbana, 1973); idem, "The Formation of Pan-Arab Ideology in the Interwar Years," International Journal of Middle East Studies 20 (1988): 67-91; Sylvia G. Haim, Arab Nationalism: An Anthology (Berkeley, 1962); Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939 (Oxford, 1962); Majid Khadduri, Political Trends in the Arab World: The Role of Ideas and Ideals in Politics (Baltimore, 1970); Hazem Zaki Nuseibeh, The Ideas of Arab Nationalism (Ithaca, 1956); Fayez A. Sayegh, Arab Unity: Hope and Fulfillment (New York, 1958); Bassam Tibi, Arab Nationalism: A Critical Enquiry, trans. Marion Farouq-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett (New York, 1981). Back.
Note 23: Important examples include Amatzia Baram, Culture, History, and Ideology in the Formation of Ba`thist Iraq, 1968-1989 (London, 1991); Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882-1954 (Princeton, 1987); Ralph M. Coury, "Who 'Invented' Egyptian Arab Nationalism?" International Journal of Middle East Studies 14 (1982): 249-281 and 459-479; Israel Gershoni, The Emergence of Pan-Arabism in Egypt (Tel Aviv, 1981); Israel Gershoni and James P. Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900-1930 (New York, 1986), and Redefining the Egyptian Nation, 1930-1945 (Cambridge, 1995); Nels Johnson, Islam and the Politics of Meaning in Palestinian Nationalism (New York, 1982); Philip S. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920-1945 (Princeton, 1987); Muhammad Y. Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism (New York, 1988); Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, 1918-1929 (London, 1974); idem, The Palestinian Arab National Movement, 1929-1939: From Riots to Rebellion (London, 1977); Reeva S. Simon, Iraq Between the Two World Wars: The Creation and Implementation of a Nationalist Ideology (New York, 1986). Back.
Note 24: 24. Rashid Khalidi, Lisa Anderson, Muhammad Muslih, and Reeva S. Simon (eds.), The Origins of Arab Nationalism (New York, 1991). Back.
Note 25: 25. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, 1984), 9-23. Back.
Note 26: 26. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1970), 71-76. Back.
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