Pan-Arabism And Pan-Islamism Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Since the advent of Islam, Arabs have been torn apart between their ethno tribal loyalty and their devotion to their faith. In pre-Islamic Arabia, poetry glorified tribal loyalty, the Arabic language, tradition, and history. However, the arrival of Islam on the Arabian Peninsula’s scene altered the sociopolitical and cultural context of Arabia.

Muhammad And Early History

The prophet Muhammad (570–623 CE) delivered a message that suggested universal applicability, and called on Arabs to spread their religion to foreign lands. Islam replaced narrower loyalties with fealty to the ummah (global Muslim community) inspired by its universal mission. When Muslim Arabs displayed distinctively Arab culture in a racial fashion, the Prophet condemned it as “bigotry. «The Quran states:

We . . . made you into nations and tribes, that you may know each other (not that you may despise each other). Verily the most honored of you in the sight of Allah is (he who is) the most righteous of you. And Allah has full knowledge and is well acquainted (with all things). (49:13)

During the era of the righteous caliphs (632–661), Islam continued to be favored over Arabism. Abu Bakr, close companion to Muhammad, fought Arabian tribes in the war of apostasy in the name of Islam. Arabian tribes believed that their loyalty was to the Prophet himself, and Islam had died with his death. However, Abu Bakr presented them with Islam as an enduring framework of governance, culture, and spirituality. The second caliph, Omar, expanded the realm of Islam, and argued that Muslim Arabs shouldered the greatest responsibility toward both Islam and Muslims. The third caliph, Othman, continued his predecessors’ policies, but favored his relatives, most of whom were previous enemies of the prophet Muhammad. His nepotism led to widespread corruption in the government prompting disillusionment in the Muslim community. Othman was subsequently brutally murdered at the age of eighty-two. His assassination was indirectly responsible for the creation of the Sunni-Shiite divide.

Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali, the revered Shiite martyr, succeeded Othman; he too was killed in 661. As Roy Andersen and colleagues observe, “The death of Ali was a turning point for Islam. The last of the Prophet’s close personal followers was now gone. The initial unity of Islam was forever shattered” (28). Ali was succeeded by a cousin of Othman, named Muawiya, who declared Ali an illegitimate caliph for failing to prosecute his cousin’s murderers. Those who supported Ali called themselves as partisans of Ali or Shi’at Ali, while those who supported Muawiya called themselves Sunna, or followers of the path.

Muawiya moved the capital of the Islamic Empire to Damascus, Syria and made it the center of Arab culture. He reversed Islam’s views with regard to the concept governance and the ummah (nation) and narrowed it down to its Arab context (i.e., pre-Islamic Arabia). Under the Umayyad rule, Arabism flourished once again; Arabs were privileged, favored, and empowered by a wealthy royal court. Within less than a century, from 661 until 750 CE, Islam conquered two major contemporary empires, the Persian Empire and the Byzantine Empire. It later expanded further into Europe, central Asia, China, and Africa.

Decline And Revival

The collapse of the Umayyads in 750 gave birth to the Abbasid dynasty, which built the city of Baghdad and made it the center of their civilization. Though the Abbasids gave special attention to Arabic language and history, the general posture of their civilization was Persian, and multicultural, not Arab. This trend lasted from 750 until 1258, when the Islamic world succumbed to the Mongol invasion and the emerging threat of the crusaders. The decline of Arabism continued and was highlighted by the emergence of the Ottoman caliphate in Turkey, which marginalized the role of Arabs in the state, a condition that continued until the early years of the twentieth century.

For the thirteenth century until the twentieth century, pan-Arabism faced progressive erosion. The final blow came on the hands of Western colonialism, which countered pan-Arabism as well as pan-Islamism with its Westernization model of development and subordination.

In the nineteenth century, an Arab reform movement attempted to reconcile Western principles of nationalism with Islam, reviving pan-Arabism in its Islamic context. They also believed that reviving Arab culture and language was essential to resisting colonialism.

The collapse of the Islamic caliphate in 1923 ended the political reality of the Islamic ummah. However, the collapse of the caliphate in response to Turkish nationalists suggested a new purpose for pan-Islamism. Muslims have become accustomed to the idea of being under different types of political arrangements, but they consider Islam as the unifying element to Muslims worldwide.

The modern Islamic movement in the Arab world and the Indian subcontinent followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In 1928, Hasan Albana, an Egyptian schoolteacher, began preaching about the necessity of Islamic revival and the reactivation of Islam’s role in the state and society. In less than a decade, Albana managed to establish the most powerful Islamic organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been integral to the politics of the Islamic world over the past eighty years. The Muslim Brotherhood, in its early years, was targeted by colonial powers, Britain in particular. The suppression of the group resulted in the assassination of Albana in 1949, but the group has remained influential to the present day.

Split Between Pan-Arabism And Islamist Arabism

After World War II (1939–1945), a split emerged between Islamist Arabism, and the national socialist interpretation of pan-Arabism. At the time, socialism appeared to be on a collision course with Islam. Arab leftist forces waged a war against colonialism primarily on nationalist ground, highlighting the influence of ethno nationalism on the Arab national liberation movements in the postwar period. Egypt took a leading role when the Free Officers toppled the monarchy, and Abdel Nasser declared himself as the undisputed leader of Arab nationalism. He sought to control and exterminate the Muslim Brotherhood, though it was instrumental in the success of the military coup against the monarchy.

During Nasser’s rule from 1956 until 1970, Islamists went underground to avoid the wrath of nationalism for no avail. The execution of Islamic philosopher Syyaid Qotb in 1964 represented the triumph of Arab nationalism over Islamism. However, it proved to be detrimental not only to Nasser and Egypt, but to the larger world as well. The resentment to the unjust execution of Qotb fueled bitterness among Islamists toward the nationalist state and created an extreme reaction that inspired current Islamically inspired terror. As American political scientist Monte Palmer explains:

The message of Arab nationalism was both simple and powerful: The Arabs are one people united by a common history, a common culture, a common language, and for the most part, a common religion. Once powerful, the Arabs were now fragmented into a multitude of petty countries manipulated by Western imperialists and Israel. All that was required for a resurgence of Arab power was the reunification of the Arab people into a single state. (52)

Animosity and distrust between Nasserism and Western imperialism were mutual. Foreign policy scholar Shibley Telhami describes it neatly, stating, “During that period the United States and the West viewed secular national movements in the Middle East as the primary destabilizing political force in the region” (27). Nasser and Arab nationalists had also made the liberation of Palestine the cornerstone of their movement, and Arab masses believed in them. However, the utter defeat in the Six-Day War (1967) undermined Arab nationalism and its leaders. Since the late 1960s, a movement calling for a return to Islam has thus occurred. This led to the resurgence of Islam as a political force, expressed through the Islamic revival movement.

The Islamic revival movement was critical of pan-Arabism and held it responsible for the humiliating defeats in the wars with Israel. Therefore, Muslims across the world began a movement of return to the tenets of Islam. The mosque became the center of Muslims’s lives. The Islamic movement led the Islamic project, and called for Islam as the only “solution” to challenges confronting Arabs and Muslims. In order to ensure the success of the Islamic project, the movement provided its own educational systems, an economic base, global charitable networks, and active political parties. The movement flourished in the 1980s, particularly in response to the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989) in particular. Islam was a close ally to the West, and Islamists assisted in securing the defeat of the former Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Islam was very effective in mobilizing global support for the Jihad Movement in Afghanistan, which rejected communism. However, the collapse of the Soviets put Islam in a direct collision course with the West.

Since 1991, the interests and objectives of Western civilization and Islam have diverged. Both the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1990) and the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent clash of civilization discourse underlined the weaknesses of the nationalist paradigm when Arabs not only sided with foreign forces, but also killed fellow Arabs. The most striking example was Syria’s membership in the international coalition put together by the United States to fight a fellow Baathist Arab country, Iraq. Subsequently, some leading Islamists such as Hassan Turabi of Sudan called for serious dialogue among Islamists and nationalists. His call was well-received but did not lead to significant support to mend the historical division between the two sides. Given the limitations of nationalism for resolving enduring problems such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, governance, and development, Islam will continue to represent the most comprehensive framework for interpreting contemporary Arab-Islamic politics and culture.

Bibliography:

Abdullah Yusuf Ali. The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an. Beltsville, Md.: Amana Publications, 2004.
Andersen, Roy R., Robert F. Seibert, and John G.Wagner. Politics and Change in the Middle East: Sources of Conflict and Accommodation. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2007.
Goldschmidt, Arthur, Jr. A Concise History of the Middle East. 6th ed. Boulder: Westview Press, 1999.
Qutb, Sayyid, John B. Hardie, and Hamid Algar. Social Justice in Islam. Oneonta, N.Y.: Islamic Publications International, 2000.
Palmer, Monte. The Politics of the Middle East. 2nd ed. Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth, 2007.
Telhami, Shibley. The Stakes: America in The Middle East. Boulder:Westview Press, 2004.

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