The Arab nationalists show intense jealousy in guarding the...

The Arab nationalists show intense jealousy in guarding the 'Arab entity' they carved out of the body of Islam from re-uniting with or reverting once more back to that body. All political movements that call even for lukewarm and formal cooperation between Muslim Nation-States are scoffed at by the Arab nationalists as reactionary steps which would only hinder the crystallization of the desired Arab entity.

Even empty organizations run by some Arab regimes in the field of Islamic action are not acceptable to the Arab nationalists. However, the nationalists do not show any reservations in linking or even incorporating that precious Arab entity into other international entities or movements not only in the political but in the cultural and economic spheres as well.

The majority speak, in the current revival of their thought, about a unified front of all the progressive, freedom-loving forces of the world, which primarily include the Soviet Union and its satellites, in addition to the left in Europe and the other continents. Other Arab nationalists speak of close ties between the 'Arab entity' and western Europe as a cultural and political body that balances the two super-powers.

Some of these speak more specifically about a 'Mediterranean' entity which fuses the Arabs and the southern Europeans in a primarily cultural-economic system. This last variety is now adopted by wide sections of the Arab nationalists and it is flagrantly anti-Arab in its implications of merging the Arab identity into an essentially Western culture.

The Egyptian writer Taha Husayn, who first suggested this idea in radical terms in the late thirties, was bitterly criticized by Muslim thinkers for proposing that servile form of Westernization. On the political front, the Arab nationalists envisage merging their cherished entity into such world movements as that of the non-aligned, the Third World, and the 'South'.

These movements are really Western-defined and inspired despite their high-sounding rhetoric about imperialism, a just economic order, etc. The argument that I am trying to put across here is that while the Arab nationalists do not find any problem in cooperating with or even merging into internationalist movements of every kind, they completely stand against any form of Islamic action even if it were mere window-dressing that does not bear upon the existing nationalist entities.