Abstract
The rise of nationality in the Middle East in the late nineteenth century entailed a new way of conceiving the relationship between the individual self and social order, a new way of understanding the integration of individuals into a community that is an autonomous moral unit. This new understanding of social integration served as a primary means for imagining and legitimizing social and political ideals that we regard as characteristic of modern societies. Nationality, however, in this moral sense, did not appear ex nihilo, as a moral framework alien and inimical to existing ways of understanding the self and social order, but was necessarily launched out of existing moral ideals in a manner that made it both intelligible and persuasive. Investigating the relationship between nationality and the ideals of virtue that it drew upon and superseded not only enables us to understand the basis on which nationality emerged in the Arabic public sphere, but the moral logic of nationality as a distinctive ideal of social integration.
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Notes
For the explanations of the necessity of monarchic rule provided by classical Islamic thinkers, see Patricia Crone, God’s Rule: Government in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 259–284.
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© 2010 Yaseen Noorani
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Noorani, Y. (2010). Sovereign Virtue and the Emergence of Nationality. In: Culture and Hegemony in the Colonial Middle East. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106437_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106437_2
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