Abstract
The myriad ways in which religious and ethnic identities interact with state formation in the MENA have been amply demonstrated throughout the history of the region, and in some spectacular ways during the last two years since the eruption of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011. With one exception (namely Turkey), MENA states have discreetly or explicitly employed some sort of religious or ethnic identity in the quest for legitimacy, notwithstanding the significant differences between the strategies they used. The Arab Spring has highlighted the fractured nature of MENA states and the fragility of their state foundations, as countries imploded (such as Libya) or violently unraveled (such as Syria), or lost whatever little cohesion they might have had (such as Yemen), or saw religion dominating new political systems (with Islamists making dramatic gains in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, and, to a lesser extent, Libya), or religion polarizing societies and splitting institutions (as is the case with Bahrain and Syria). This is all in stark contradiction to the initial promise of the Arab Spring of a different order. Indeed, instead of ushering in a new era with some sort of a secular or liberal alternative to the traditional rule of oppressive elites and regimes of military or strongman dictatorships, the Arab uprisings seem to throw the region back into the formative prestate conditions when such identities were the norm in MENA societies that had not yet evolved into recognizable political entities.
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Notes
Fatima el-Issawi, “The Arab Spring and the Challenge of Minority Rights: Will the Arab Revolutions Overcome the Legacy of the Past?,” European View 10 (2011): 249; see also by the same author, “After the Arab Spring: Power Shift in the Middle East? The Tunisian Transition: The Evolving Face of the Second Republic,” in IDEAS Reports—Special Reports, Kitchen, Nicholas (ed.), LSE Ideas, SR011 (May 2012, LSE Research Online), 18–22, accessed September 16, 2012, http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/43456/1/After%20the%20Arab%20Spring_the%20Tunisian%20transition(lsero).pdf.
Sean L. Yom, “Civil Society and Democratization in the Arab World,” Middle East Review of International Affairs 9 (2005): 19–20.
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Muhamamd Khalis Masud, Armando Salvatore, and Martin van Bruinessen, eds, Islam and Modernity: Key Issues and Debates (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009);
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For an interesting discussion of identity and the ethnic dimension of the Christian ethno-national struggle in Lebanon, see Kamal S. Salibi, “The Lebanese Identity,” Journal of Contemporary History 6 (1971): 76–86;
Walid Phares, Lebanese Christian Nationalism: The Rise and Fall of an Ethnic Resistance (Boulder, CO, and London: Lynne Rienner, 1995);
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Ibid., 245. For Hourani’s definition, see Albert H. Hourani, Minorities in the Arab World (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), 1. An interesting discussion showing the complexities surrounding the definition of “minority” as it was introduced into French-mandate Syria is found in chapter 5 of Benjamin Thomas White, The Emergence of Minorities, 131–161 (can be accessed at http://www.academia.edu/793528/The_Emergence_of_Minorities_in_the_Middle_East_The_Politics_of_Community_in_French_Mandate_Syria).
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See, for example, Oren Yiftachel, “The Political Geography of Ethnic Protest: Nationalism, Deprivation and Regionalism among Arabs in Israel,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 22 (1997): 91–110.
Sherry Lowrance, “Identity, Grievances, and Political Action: Recent Evidence from the Palestinian Community in Israel,” International Political Science Review 27 (2006): 167.
Gabriel Ben-Dor, “Minorities in the Middle East: Theory and Practice,” in Minorities and the State in the Arab World, eds Ofra Bengio and Gabriel Ben-Dor (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999), 4.
P. R. Kumaraswamy, “Who Am I?: The Identity Crisis in the Middle East,” MERIA 10 (2006): 1–2.
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Fredrik Barth, “Introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference,” in Selected Studies in International Migration and Immigrant Incorporation, eds Marco Martiniello and Jan Rath (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 407.
Martin van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan (London: Zed Books, 1992). See also
Mesut Yegen, “The Kurdish Question in Turkish State Discourse,” Journal of Contemporary History 34 (1999): 555–568.
See, for example, Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979);
Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (London: Vintage, 1997);
Mohammed Arkoun, “Rethinking Islam Today,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 588 (2003): 18–39.
Sami Zubaida, Islam, the People, and the State: Essays on Political Ideas and Movements in the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 1989), ix.
Tariq Ramadan, “Egypt: Transition to Democracy,” in The Arab Spring: Implications for British Policy, CMEC (October 2011), 14, accessed October 16, 2012, http://cmec.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/CMEC-Arab-Spring.pdf.
Majid Khadduri, The Islamic Conception of Justice (Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).
For a mapping out of ethnic conflict and resolution in the second half of the twentieth century, see Noel Bonneuil and Nadia Auriat, “Fifty Years of Ethnic Conflict and Cohesion: 1945–1994,” Journal of Peace Research 37 (2000): 563–581.
Lisa Anderson, “Absolutism and Resilience of Monarchy in the Middle East,” Political Science Quarterly 106 (1991): 4.
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© 2013 Kenneth Christie and Mohammad Masad
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Masad, M., Christie, K. (2013). State Formation, Religion, and Ethnicity in the Middle East and North Africa: An Overview. In: Christie, K., Masad, M. (eds) State Formation and Identity in the Middle East and North Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137369604_2
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