Abdel Nasser and Sayyid Qutb are not rivals in everything, this is how political Islam meets Arab nationalism :E-International Relations
In 1952 in Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power during the Free Officers coup with the support of the Muslim Brotherhood, to become an Arab national hero later. By 1954, Nasser had abolished the Brotherhood and brought the Islamist movement into question. This incident sums up both the brutality and contradiction of the relations between Islamism and Arab nationalism. However, this contradiction is at first very puzzling; Indeed, a general historical and conceptual overview seems to indicate a clear incompatibility and opposition between these two great political ideologies of the twentieth century.
It should be noted that Arab nationalism was defined in this text as the belief that all Arabic speakers constitute a nation and should be united and independent, and the term Islamism was used as a synonym for political Islam; That is, the political ideology that seeks to establish an Islamic state on the basis of Islamic law. Arab nationalism and Islamism share a history of violent confrontations over the past century. Moreover, this confrontation seems - logically - to stem from a fundamental ideological hostility. According to Benedict Anderson's book Imaginary Societies, nationalist ideology replaces religion and is secular in nature or at least represents a challenge and competing focus of loyalty toward religious identity or authority. Moreover, Peter Mandaville argues that this ideology - which equates sovereignty with the nation - is in conflict with the conservative Islamic principle of "governance for God" which defines sovereignty as the exclusive king and authority of God.
Sayed Qutb (right) and Gamal Abdel Nasser
Therefore, everything had to oppose them, leaving no room for contradiction. But how if they are really two separate ideologies "hermetic", can someone explain their intriguing common pattern of emergence; If their intellectual roots grew in the late nineteenth century and their first important political manifestations appeared in the period between the two world wars? How can the many connections between ideologists (supporters of an ideology) and ideologies be explained? If we examine this point further and disagree with the opposing view, then the claim that Arab nationalism and Islamism are in fact “two sides of the same coin” would have been fulfilled. In this perspective, the two movements would be just two different "expressions" of one thing; This was identified as a rejection of Western influences, ie, successively European colonial powers first and American hegemony later.
In assessing and adjudicating these claims, this article will attempt to avoid methodological caveats. On the one hand, he refused to reconsider ideologies, i.e. view them as fixed and unchanging sets of ideas, as this article will acknowledge the importance of historical, political and social dynamics in their formation. As Dale Eckelman says, "these paradigms do not exist as things that can be taken out of social and cultural contexts." This element will be of particular relevance to the question of identity here defined as a social construct built implying the existence of the 'other', in the sense ascribed to it by anthropologist Frederick Barth, author of Identity Without Discrimination (1969). On the other hand, this article seeks not to lose sight of the fact that these ideologies are not empty things; Although it changes over time and is shaped by non-ideological factors, it has content, a detailed world view in one way or another, and is ultimately about values and goals that one cannot consider irrelevant and important.
Within this framework, the following question will be addressed: Are Islamism and Arab unity two separate and opposing ideologies, or are they one phenomenon that takes two different forms? First, this article will invalidate the “opposition” viewpoint, showing instead that the two movements are intertwined and intertwined in different ways. Second, it will prove that both can indeed be correctly defined as reactions to the West driven by identity. But then he will argue that viewing them as mere different forms of this rejection might overlook the ideological content of both, and would amount to confusion between the original and the basis according to Descartes' terms. Hence, this article will carry the view that Islamism and Arab nationalism are closely interrelated movements in that they are simultaneously united and different in their relation to the West: both emerged as a rejection of the West, but each bases its struggle and stance on fundamentally different ideological foundations.
Complex pattern of social interaction
An investigation of the intellectual and political history of Islamism and Arab nationalism paints a picture of a wide variety of modes of social interaction and certainly refutes the naïve opposition paradigm. More precisely, it signifies two closely related paths that shape each other through a variety of relationships, ranging from symbiosis to instrumentalization.
First, as a preliminary observation, one may point out that the two original doctrines are far from being completely alien to one another, and that the early founders did not design them in a spirit of confrontation or incompatibility. On the side of pan-Arabism, the ideological founder of the Ba'ath Party, Michel Aflaq, noted: "The power of Islam has been revived to appear in our days in a new form, namely, Arab nationalism." He also advised Arab Christians to know Islam and to love this new religion for what it is, as he put it in his own words: The "most valuable ingredient" is nationalism. Similarly, on the Islamic side, Rashid Rida - himself who considered the caliphate a necessity - argued that Muslims could perceive the moral order of Islam within the borders of the nation-state. In fact, during the war years, minority radical movements - such as Hizb ut-Tahrir - were actually seeking to bring the nation together under the rule of the Caliphate.
Second, the political history of the two movements does not mean in any way that it is more purely confrontational than their intellectual origins. In fact, the struggle for power that permeates politics, Islamism, and Arab national relations has been - at times - a mutual foundational struggle. Many have highlighted the critical role Islam and Islamists played in nationalist movements and state-building endeavors - from the interwar era to early World War II - as a conscious basis for mobilization or as an active force in the making of state power. Conversely, these state-building processes also affected the practice and concept of Sharia, as happened in Malaysia or the Arabian Peninsula. These quasi-symbiotic interactions took the form of exploitation or - at least - of political dynamics where each side was able to use the other as a tool to achieve its own goals.
Thus, the use of Islam by Arab nationalists goes beyond, for example, the religious regime has been used as a tool to mobilize local and regional support for its Arab socialist agenda - notably through Al-Azhar University - which is used as a means of spreading Arab legitimacy; or as Saddam Hussein repeatedly invoked religion to mobilize Arabs during the 1991 Gulf War; Thus, Islamism was itself used as a tool by the nation-state, and this is what happened at the moment of the re-emergence of Islamism after the seventies of the last century. In Pakistan and Southeast Asia for example, Islamization did not arise only as a challenge to the state, but in fact strengthened the post-colonial states - especially Pakistani and Malaysian - by providing them with an ideological tool that they previously lacked. The strong state approach of Islamists in the Middle East exemplifies the reverse dynamic.
Saddam Hussein
What emerges from this analysis is that the opposition and conflict approach appears to be a fallacy; Islamism and Arab nationalism are not two contradictory ideologies that are completely inseparable and have nothing to do with each other except opposition and conflict. Such a view obscures the complex and intertwined histories of these two highly developed movements, which in many respects can be seen as a mutual basis. However, invalidating this view necessarily means that the opposite is true. In other words, saying that the model of opposition and conflict is often inaccurate is a certain thing on the one hand, while claiming that political Islam and Arabism are two forms of the same thing "two sides of the same coin" is another matter, of course. The question one should attempt to answer now is whether it is possible to go beyond this diversity of interactions described above and identify a unifying element that justifies such a claim.
A common rejection of the West
It will first be seen that both Islamism and pan-Arabism emerge as a reaction to the Western penetration of the region and have similar social functions in this respect. To some extent, the two movements can be correctly seen as forms of this rejection. The first indication of a strong common element is the following observation: Arab and Islamic unity seem to have an inverse relationship: when one rises, the other declines, and when one dominates, the other marginalizes. It can be said that this relationship dates back to the early twentieth century, before the First World War. According to Karen Doisha, the Islamic identity was much stronger among Arabs than the new and marginal concept of the Arab nation.
This relationship was reversed only after World War II, specifically at the beginning of the fifties; Where Arab nationalism overcame Islamism; Arab nationalism was seen as linked - realistically - in local regions, language, history, and experience rather than the abstract and dispersed nation. Islamism almost “disappeared” from the international relations scene, while Arab nationalism rose and reached its zenith in the 1960s under the leadership of Nasser and the projects of the United Arab Republic. The decline of pan-Arabism after 1967 saw the re-emergence of Islamism and the reverse equilibrium began to take shape. To explain this astonishing relationship, one must understand what links Arab nationalism and Islamism. Hence, attention to their common origin; This origin is found in the rejection of the European colonial power that is at the heart of the emergence and spread of the two movements.
As for Islamism, one of his early ideologies, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, described "European imperialism" as a shared experience among Muslims, and sought to mobilize anti-colonial sentiment around a renewed sense of the nation's consciousness. Likewise, Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, was concerned with the cultural westernization of the Islamic world and the loss of Islamic traditions. According to Arshin Adeeb Moghaddam: “It is not too exaggerated” to generalize this to the modernist Islamists from Abduh to Khomeini, Sayyid Qutb, Abu Al-Ala Mawdudi, Hassan Al-Banna and Muhammad Iqbal; For them, Islam was the solution to the social, political, economic and cultural decline of the nation compared to the West. For Reinhard Schulze, even the concept of the Islamic state is a reaction to the Western nation-state, and for many authors, Islamism is also a response to the emergence of Zionism, which is considered a Western project.
Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani
The same analysis can be carried out exactly on Arab nationalism, which also sees itself as a means to roll back Western hegemony in the region. A clear example of this is the "foundational" event of Arab unity: Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956, an act that directly targeted former European colonial powers, followed by massive Arab anti-Western demonstrations followed by demonstrations in Libya, Morocco, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Yemen . It is thus clear that both movements emerge from the same matrix of anti-Western identity. In other words, it is not only identity-based movements that have built this identity against the "other" itself: the West. Thus, they necessarily share basic characteristics: they have the same goal - they are seen as the legitimate source of defining collective identities - which implies a fight for one thing: "authenticity", or as Dawisha puts it. Thus, their successes or failures are subject to the same standards because they are able to deliver on the same promises. It seems that this framework can only explain and explain the inverse relationship shown above. For example, one could make some of the most decisive promises in terms of their bearing on the fate of the two ideologies, including the liberation of Palestine and better economic equality. Thus, their successes or failures are subject to the same standards because they are able to deliver on the same promises. It seems that this framework can only explain and explain the inverse relationship shown above. For example, one could make some of the most decisive promises in terms of their bearing on the fate of the two ideologies, including the liberation of Palestine and better economic equality.
The re-emergence of Islamism stemmed from the failure of Arab nationalism to liberate Palestine in 1967, after the losing June war against Israel. At the moment, Islamism is winning the ideological battle over the same issue it lost after World War II: the ability to represent a credible anti-Western force; Criticizing Arab nationalism for being a mere imitation of European institutions, it was then able to establish itself as an original and unparalleled approach to getting rid of Western influence. A similar argument can be made in the field of political economy: when Arab nationalist forces in the 1970s - facing the economic crisis - proved unable to fulfill their socialist promise of economic equality, Islamism emerged as an alternative, and a new Islamic model of socio-economic justice was proposed.
It may be tempting to conclude from this apparent system of “talkative pots”** that Arabism and Islamism are in fact two sides of the same phenomenon or “two sides of the same coin,” and this phenomenon is the rejection of the hegemony of the West. Although the two movements are different expressions of anti-Western opinion, placing them only within this framework would be unsatisfactory. Such a model would completely ignore the actual content and internal intellectual motives of both ideologies; Elements that are of great importance both in terms of their relationship with each other or in terms of their impact on regional and global international relations.
Divergent ideological tools
In other words, they are both reactions of the West, but these reactions are themselves fundamentally different. In fact, they do not reject the same elements of Western hegemony. They do not fight the West on the same level, and in a way they are not opposed to the same West. While Arab nationalism is fighting a military and political force, Islamism is fighting ideological influence and influence. The 1967 transition moment was instrumental in this respect; When Islamists criticized the failure of Arab nation-states to defeat Israel, this criticism addressed not the incompetence of Arab nationalism or even the irrelevance of the Arab nationalist project at the center of the attack, but rather the so-called “moral bankruptcy” of secular nation-states built on the Western model. Considering this criticism a purely opportunistic position dictated by a power struggle would undoubtedly be a fallacy and reduce the credibility of this criticism.
As John Esposito explains it: "For Qutb - as for Al-Banna and Mawdudi - the West is the historical and entrenched enemy of Islam and Islamic societies, whether it is a political or religious threat. The obvious danger of the West lies in its control over the Muslim elites who rule and direct by standards alien to them." As a result, criticism of Islamism has not only been associated with complaints against Arab nationalist regimes, but has mainly provided a moral indictment of post-Enlightenment political theories. Indeed, this Arab nationalist concept as a product of Western ideologies is justified. The founder of Arab nationalist thought, Satih al-Husari, borrowed from the writings of the German Nationalist School of the Romantic era, and the birth of Arab nationalist sentiment is framed in Woodrow Wilson's terms, as a struggle for "self-determination".
Important manifestations of this ideological gap can be found in national education policies; In the new post-independence nation-states, secular education is strongly promoted, as is evident in Egypt where the school population expands by 800,000 in the years around 1952. A basic ideological divide seems to be forming here: it implies that although Islamists And Arab nationalists are fighting the West alike, for neither are leading the same battle.
On the one hand, as Hedley Poole puts it, "[Arab nationalism] has been on the pain of accommodating Western norms and values while using them to fight the West as a political and military force but not as a civilization. In this sense, Arab nationalism embraces Western ideas." The Arab nationalists' adoption of national liberation discourse, commitment to socialism and the promotion of European forms of state perfectly illustrate Paul's view. On the other hand, Islamism presents itself as a rejection of Western ideas (which Sayyid Qutb described as “this individualism that lacks a sense of interdependence, that animal freedom that is called tolerance”), and Islamism calls for the construction of an alternative political system based on Islamic values . In many respects, Islamism is the ideological weapon of "Islamic modernity" directed against the West. Arab nationalism did not possess such a weapon and does not seek to possess one.
Thus, the view that defines Arab nationalism and Islamism - regardless of their ideological content - as two essential phenomena of the same anti-hegemonic dynamic is incorrect. Such a definition would amount to an overly functional sociological approach, which would somehow rip ideas off ideologies. Conceptually, that definition would commit the fallacy that Descartes warns about in his Discourse on Style: to confuse the origin (in this case, the reaction to the Western penetration of the Middle East) with the base (that reaction).
In addressing the question of whether “Arab nationalism and Islamism are two sides of the same coin,” this article began with an assessment of the opposing position, that is, one who sees these ideologies as two completely different things related only to confronting each other. A variety of interactions and connections are found between these two ideologies, and this claim has been invalidated. A unified model and common origin for these two ideologies were then demonstrated but found to be insufficient to proceed in agreement with the motives discussed. In other words, this article came to the conclusion that Arab nationalism and Islamism - closely intertwined with their origins - emerge from the same anti-Western identity matrix, but the tenor, means, and meanings of this rejection are fundamentally different.
In general, the answer to this article revolves around the issue of the relationship of these movements to the West, which links these two ideologies to each other and distinguishes them from each other. In this sense, the coin analogy may not be inaccurate after all. If it is more than just “two sides” of one thing, it describes two different things made up of the same material and oriented in radically different directions, and may in fact constitute a perfectly fair picture of the relations of Islamism and Arabism.( Alaa Abu Rumaila )
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