The decline of secular nationalism in the Middle East

When?

Monday 2 November 2009, 17:00 to 18:30

Where?

Room 04AD00 (AD building, ground floor) University of Surrey

Open to:

Staff, Students, Public

Speaker:

Prof Sami Zubaida

Prof Sami Zubaida, Emeritus Professor of Politics and Sociology, Birkbeck College, London

The national 'renaissance' in the various Middle Eastern territories starting in the nineteenth century were, for the most part, secular and secularising. Religious reformers, while stressing the pertinence of a modenrised Islam to modern national issues, participated in this secularisation by emptying much of the religious content in favour of compatibility with national modernity, using for instance the concept of Maslaha, public interest, as a permissive device to get around awkward Shari`a restricitons. Secular nationalism was dominant for much of the twentieth century, at most paying lip service to religion as heritage and symbol. Islamic populist nationalism, as in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, was one strand among many. The middle decades of the twentieth century saw the articulation of nationalism to various ideologies, liberalism, fascism, then leftist and Marxist strands, particularly with the rise of the non-aligned Third World liberationsim and its closeness to the Soviet camp. These articulations gave Middle Eastern nationalisms a universalist dimension of liberationism, including the Palestianian struggle. The transformations in the closing decades of the century and to the present time have seen a progressive abandonmnet of this universalism in favour of ethno-religious identifications. Islamic 'umma' nationalism has become ever more hegemonic, in Egypt, for instance, forcing secular nationalists into its orbit. US military adventurism and the 'war on terror' feed this trend. Resistance to religious hegemony is most evident in Iran and Turkey, affected by different dynamics than that of much of the Arab world.