Arab Political Thought Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Like all intellectual landscapes, the history and trajectory of Arab political thought must be contextualized within specific cultural, social, legal, and religious periods. Arab political thought has evolved against the backdrop of three dramatic settings: the rise of Islam and the eventual absorption of many Arab lands into the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922); the Wester n setting and the colonial experience; and the postcolonial setting and modern Arab statehood. The five phases of Arab political thought include the pre-Ottoman phase; the early Ottoman phase (1299–1798); the liberal phase (1789–1939); the nationalist phase (1940–1967); and the contemporary, postnationalist phase.

Pre-Ottoman Arab philosophers were heavily influenced by both the rise of Islam and the translation of Greek works into Arabic, and they were concerned with questions of political organization and the nature of sovereign power. Al-Farabi developed a theory of the state that was to be adopted in Europe more than seven centuries later. He argued that under unjust conditions, people would gather together and agree to renounce rights to a sovereign who served as a protector of the community. He also argued that to live peacefully, groups needed to be formed along recognizable bonds, such as geography, culture, or language. AlGhazali advanced these ideas and contended that the innate human need for belonging would naturally produce forms of social and political organization bound by laws and a sovereign power. More than a hundred years later, Ibn Jama’a wrote that a sovereign could only maintain power through force and that the people would only accept the rule of the sovereign if the sovereign could exercise this force. This period was characterized by concerns over questions of sovereignty, power, and political organization and, in particular, with how these questions could be reconciled with various schools of Islamic jurisprudence.

The early Ottoman phase was shaped by the influential Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun. In his work, he related the rise of the state to that of society. According to Ibn Khaldun, as society developed throughout history it needed increasingly complex forms of organization. The state, he believed, was inseparable from society. Arab thought during this phase was predominantly concerned with questions of political and religious authority and the obligations of the sovereign to society. Sayyid Murtada al-Zabidi, for example, drew an important distinction between the legitimacy of the caliphate, which was earned by religious merit, and the sultanate, which was earned by force. Because the Ottoman empire was a Sunni Muslim state, questions concerning the application of Islamic law, the treatment of non-Muslim communities, and intra-Muslim relations with other non-Sunni sects dominated Arab political thought during this period.

The liberal phase witnessed the secularization of Arab political thought and reflected the Arab experience with European colonialism and modernity. This period was defined by the emergence of nationalist thought, which asserted that the commonalities of certain groups meant that they formed a political community. Three conceptions of political community are identifiable in this period: religious, territorial, and ethno linguistic nationalism. This liberal phase served as the midwife to more complex forms of Arab nationalism that dominated Arab political thought until 1967. Arab nationalism articulated Arabs as a single cultural, social, ethnic, and linguistic community that should be brought under the organization of a central Arab state and drew on various ideological currents, including fascism and socialism.

The contemporary phase of Arab political thought is defined by three factors that emerged in the aftermath of the defeat of Arab armies by Israel in the 1967 war: the collapse of socialism as an ideological model; the discrediting of secular Arab nationalism that had emerged during the liberal phase; and the reintegration of religious discourse into mainstream Arab political thought. This contemporary phase, characterized by modern, independent Arab states, is further defined by growing social, economic, and geopolitical trends in the Arab world, including growing population rates, the presence of Israel, increasing Western encroachment, the rise of Islamism, and the persistence of authoritarianism.

Bibliography:

Abu-Rabi‘, Ibrahim M. Contemporary Arab Thought: Studies in Post-1967 Arab Intellectual History. London: Pluto, 2004.
Browers, Michaelle. Democracy and Civil Society in Arab Political Thought: Transcultural Possibilities. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2006.
Choueiri,Youssef M. Arab Nationalism: A History—Nation and State in the Arab World. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000.
Hourani, Albert H. Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.