ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Criticism of the Idea of Arab Nationalism The First Contradiction The Arab nationalist message seems simple and consistent. The Arabs from the Gulf to the Atlantic are one people united by the ties of blood, history, language, and interests. They ought to be united in one political entity which is socially and culturally modern and progressive.

This programme can be achieved by the Arab nationalists in the face of various imperialist and "reactionary' forces of whom the Islamic movement is the most prominent. Now, the appeal to ties of blood or the argument from ethnography and race has been rather eclipsed by scientific discussions and has largely fallen into disrepute after Hitler.

Still it is not quite clear how one can speak of a pure Arab race after the long process of mingling between the original Arabs of the Peninsula and such peoples as the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Berbers, or Negroes. The Arabic phrase 'ties of blood' comes in conveniently to cover the weakness of the nationalist views on this matter by its double reference to both race and kinship.

The latter is usually the meaning which is immediately suggested by normal usage and saves the nationalists from getting involved in a losing ethnographic debate. The invocation of geographic facts is not of much help in advancing the nationalist argument. The Gulf-Atlantic axis is a rather arbitrary projection which overlooks other areas to which the original Arabs ventured.

Moreover, it is the 'imperialist' view of the Arab-land which the nationalists now come to adopt, rather uncritically in the light of their high-flown anti-imperialist slogans. The crucial fact in this regard is that it was Islam that created this 'grand Arab homeland', as it is called, and which impelled the original Arabs to conquer that area and much more besides it to spread its teachings.

The Arab nationalists perform a sleight of hand in that they arbitrarily carve out of the grand Islamic homeland, which was made possible by the Arabs' spread of their own religion, a small area--the 'Arab homeland' -- which is then separated from the larger body and made to stand against or to take priority of allegiance' vis-a-vis it.

If we adopt the same secularist stance, for the sake of argument, which the nationalists adhere to, we can say that Islam is an Arabic cultural and social phenomenon which has been propagated by the Arabs throughout a large part of the known world at the time.