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FROM NATIONALISM to REVOLUTIONARY ISLAM This FROM NATIONALISM TO REVOLUTIONARY ISLAM This study of dominant social movements in the Middle and Near East by a group of social scientists and historians is the first attempt to bring nationalism and the contemporary Islamic movements into a unified thematic perspective. The process of national economic and political integration supplies the unifying context for the analyses of the various social movements to which it gives rise. The examination of nationalism in general, and of the rise of the Arab nationalist movement in Greater Syria in the early decades of the century in particular, is followed by a close analysis of the interplay of ethnic identity and Islam in the local politics of the tribal North-Western Frontier Province of Pakistan. The politicisation oflslam in Algeria, Turkey and Egypt is then explored and explained, together with the characteristics of the emergent Islamic movements. The last three essays cover Shi'ite Islam in Iran since the opening decade of the century, focusing on various components and aspects of the Islamic movement which culminated in the revolution of 1979.. The case-studies thus chart the recent upsurge of revolutionary Islam and the concomitant decline of nationalist movements in the contemporary Middle and Near East. The introduction offers an analytical perspective for the integration of this major theme which is forcefully suggested by the juxtaposition of the essays. St Antony's! Macmillan Series General editor: Archie Brown, Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford Said Amir Arjomand (editor) FROM NATIONALISM TO REVOLUTIONARY ISLAM Anders Aslund PRIVATE ENTERPRISE IN EASTERN EUROPE Archie Brown and Michael Kaser (editors) SOVIET POLICY FOR THE 1980s S. B. Burman CHIEFDOM POLITICS AND ALIEN LAW Renfrew Christie ELECTRICITY, INDUSTRY AND CLASS IN SOUTH AFRICA Robert 0. Collins and Francis M. Deng (editors) THE BRITISH IN THE SUDAN, 1898-1956 Wilhelm Deist THE WEHRMACHT AND GERMAN REARMAMENT Julius A. Elias PLATO'S DEFENCE OF POETRY Ricardo Ffrench-Davis and Ernesto Tironi (editors) LATIN AMERICA AND THE NEW INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ORDER Bohdan Harasymiw POLITICAL ELITE RECRUITMENT IN THE SOVIET UNION Neil Harding (editor) THE STATE IN SOCIALIST SOCIETY Richard Holt SPORT AND SOCIETY IN MODERN FRANCE Albert Hourani EUROPE AND THE MIDDLE EAST Albert Hourani THE EMERGENCE OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST J. R. Jennings GEORGES SOREL A. Kemp-Welch (translator) THE BIRTH OF SOLIDARITY Paul Kennedy and Anthony Nicholls (editors) NATIONALIST AND RACIALIST MOVEMENTS IN BRITAIN AND GERMANY BEFORE 1914 Richard Kindersley (editor) IN SEARCH OF EUROCOMMUNISM Bohdan Krawchenko SOCIAL CHANGE AND NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY UKRAINE Gisela C. Lebzelter POLITICAL ANTI-SEMITISM IN ENGLAND, 1918-1939 Nancy Lubin LABOUR AND NATIONALITY IN SOVIET CENTRAL ASIA C. A. MacDonald THE UNITED STATES, BRITAIN AND APPEASEMENT, 1936-1939 Patrick O'Brien (editor) RAILWAYS AND THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF WESTERN EUROPE, 1830-1914 Roger Owen (editor) STUDIES IN THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HISTORY OF PALESTINE IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES Irena Powell WRITERS AND SOCIETY IN MODERN JAPAN T. H. Rigby and Ferenc Feher (editors) POLITICAL LEGITIMATION IN COMMUNIST STATES Marilyn Rueschemeyer PROFESSIONAL WORK AND MARRIAGE A. J. R. Russell-Wood THE BLACK MAN IN SLAVERY AND FREEDOM IN COLONIAL BRAZIL Aron Shai BRITAIN AND CHINA, 1941-47 Lewis H. Siegelbaum THE POLITICS OF INDUSTRIAL MOBILIZATION IN RUSSIA, 1914-17 David Stafford BRITAIN AND EUROPEAN RESISTANCE, 1940-1945 Nancy Stepan THE IDEA OF RACE IN SCIENCE Guido di Tella ARGENTINA UNDER PERON, 1973-76 Rosemary Thorp (editor) LATIN AMERICA IN THE 1930s Rosemary Thorp and Laurence Whitehead (editors) INFLATION AND STABILISATION IN LATIN AMERICA Rudolf L. Tokes (editor) OPPOSITION IN EASTERN EUROPE FROM NATIONALISM TO REVOLUTIONARY ISLAM Edited by Said Amir Arjomand Foreword by Ernest Gellner in association with M Palgrave Macmillan MACMILLAN © Social Science Research Council 1984 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1984 978-0-333-35369-1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published 1984 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Companies and representatives throughout the world Filmset in Monophoto Times by Latimer Trend & Company Ltd, Plymouth British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Arjomand, Said Amir From nationalism to revolutionary Islam. I. Near East~ History --20th century I. Title 956'.04 DS62.4 ISBN 978-1-349-06849-4 ISBN 978-1-349-06847-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-06847-0 Contents Foreword by Ernest Gellner vii Publishers' Acknowledgement xii Editor's Acknowledgement xiii Notes on the Contributors xiv Notes on Transliteration xvi Glossary xvii Introduction: Social Movements in the Contemporary Near and Middle East Said Amir Arjomand 9 2 Nationalism in the Middle East: A Behavioural Approach Richard Cottam 28 3 Social Factors in the Rise of the Arab Movement in Syria Rashid Khalidi 53 4 Emergent Trends in Moslem Tribal Society: the Wazir Movement of the Mullah of Wana in North-Western Fron­ tier Province of Pakistan Akbar Ahmed 71 5 National Integration and Traditional Rural Organisation in Algeria, 1970-80: Background for Islamic Traditionalism? Peter von Sivers 94 6 Politicisation of Islam in a Secular State: the National Salvation Party in Turkey Binnaz Toprak 119 7 Ideology, Social Class and Islamic Radicalism in Modern Egypt Eric Davis 134 vi Contents 8 The Fada'iyan-e Islam: Fanaticism, Politics and Terror Farhad Kazemi 158 9 Sermons, Revolutionary Pamphleteering and Mobilisation: Iran, 1978 Shaul Bakhash 177 10 Traditionalism in Twentieth-century Iran Said Amir Arjomand 195 References 233 Index 248 Foreword ERNEST GELLNER The central theme of the history of the twentieth century is now totally plain and obvious. In the course of it, industrial/scientific societies, hitherto largely confined to what may loosely be called the North Atlantic world, spread to the rest of the globe. It does not look as if the transformation of the rest of the world will have been completed by the end of the century; but there can be no shadow of doubt that the disruption of the traditional agrarian societies will by then be largely accomplished. The process which we are witnessing is the replacement of agrarian societies by industrial or industrialising ones. What is the difference between them? Agrarian societies contain a majority of direct agricultural producers; they had a fairly stable technological base, cognitive and technical innovation being a rarity rather than a normality; they were generally hierarchical, authoritarian, dogmatic and stability-oriented. They poss­ essed belief-systems claiming absolute and transcendental grounding which were linked to the authority and hierarchy structures of their societies and provided them with their legitimation. Industrial societies are defined by the possession of ever-growing and ever more powerful technical equipment, depending in turn on a form of cognition ('science') committed or doomed to perpetual growth. They employ a diminishing proportion of the population in agriculture. Although their political and cultural superstructure is not hom­ ogeneous, it is marked by at least the potentiality of a certain liberalisation (political and doctrinal pluralism and choice, the replace­ ment of the stick of fear by the carrot of material bribery, and the anticipation of radical enrichment), by a diminution of the chasm between a 'Great' Tradition and a 'Folk' Tradition, a larger population, a much increased social mobility and a tendency towards widespread secularisation. Vll VIJI Foreword So much is obvious and general. But there are great and profoundly important differences within both agrarian (which includes pastoral) and industrial/industrialising societies. Marxism is perhaps the greatest observer-participant in the overall process ~ a belief-system which is both a theory of the process and an important actor within it. Its significance as an actor within the drama can hardly be in dispute. Its accuracy as an account of the whole process is more questionable. Two central ideas within it in particular seem open to doubt. One is the employment of the notions of 'feudalism', 'capitalism' and 'soci­ alism' as designations of types of society, putatively defined in terms of their mode of production. The facts of history have by now forced virtually everyone (including nominal Marxists) to treat agrarian and industrial as the real designations of forms of production: capitalism and socialism are only names of the optional socio-political superstructures accompanying the latter one. (The idea that 'feudalism' is some kind of general matrix of the emergence of industrial societies is similarly questionable, and can only be sustained by extending the meaning of the term so widely that it is deprived of much of its utility.) The second questionable idea is that modes of production, or societies defined in terms of their productive base, uniquely determine the 'superstructure'. In other words, we now need to operate in terms of a simple social typology, agrarian/industrial, which only revived and conquered our speech after the Second World War, and we are quite clear that, whilst each of these types may determine the problems faced by a society, they do not uniquely determine its solutions. Despite the great diversity displayed by ex-agrarian, industrialising societies, one can nevertheless
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