Day 18

This sense of nationhood, or “becoming national,” emerges out of a variety of developments. Benedict Anderson traces it to the birth of “print capitalism” in Europe, first in Latin and then in more local vernaculars, and the emerging “possibility of a new imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation.” Similarly, Ernest Gellner maintains that the spread of industrial social organization creates a certain level of homogeneity throughout society and in cultural norms, thus resulting in the emergence of the phenomenon of nationhood and, consequently, nationalism. Similar material and cultural developments facilitated the social construction of nationality in the non-Western world as well, although here the deliberate role of individual personalities, whose resistance to colonial domination was often inspired in the name of a nation, was also important.
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Earlier, from approximately the mid-1500s to the mid-1800s, Ottoman nationalism—or, more accurately, Ottomanism—held sway throughout Ottoman territories, articulated in and dictated from Istanbul. By most accounts, Ottomanism was successful in instilling a communal sense of belonging to an expansive umma (Muslim community) and in maintaining loyalty to the Ottoman state and to the sultan. But by the mid-nineteenth century, as the influence and intrigue of European powers in Ottoman territories gradually increased, especially in the Balkans, the sense of national belonging as articulated from Istanbul—of belonging to an imperial, caliphal, Ottoman nation—began to decline. In its place, more localized forms of nationalism, revolving around locally more resonant symbols and less expansive territories, emerged. At this stage Ottomanism was gradually supplanted by Turkish nationalism in Anatolia and by Arabism elsewhere in the empire. The rise and nature of Arabism, or Arab nationalism, differed from region to region in intensity, origin, and precise character.
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Political manifestations of Arab nationalism were eclipsed for a few years by the more powerful forces of European colonialism, which, among other things, redrew the map of the Middle East for their own administrative and political convenience. Nevertheless, during the period of European political and military domination, and largely in reaction to it, a number of Arab intellectuals began articulating nationalist ideals and sentiments through the publication of books and journals. Once European colonialism started retreating in the 1940s, Arab nationalism regained the opportunity to assert itself politically, this time in a much more vocal and virulent manner. The Europeans had created new Arab countries, leaving behind new states for each country, and now the stewards of these new states called on their respective nations to awaken to their full national potential. By the mid-twentieth century, there were such brands of nationalism as Egyptian, Iraqi, Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian, and Libyan. Turkish and Iranian nationalisms had emerged a few decades earlier, articulated by the Kemalist and Pahlavi states, respectively. Hopes of resurrecting earlier, territorially more expansive conceptions of Arab nationalism—what came to be known as “Pan-Arabism”—lingered, at times motivated by more immediate political considerations. They led to territorial and political unions of Egypt and Syria (1958–61), as well as an ambitious proposed federation of Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Sudan in 1971 and another proposed union of Syria and Iraq in 1979, neither of which materialized.

~~The Modern Middle East -by- Mehran Kamrava