Abstract
Khaldoun Samman makes a clear argument about not how Western modernity is challenged by political Islam in the 21st century. Rather, the argument centers on how modern varieties of nationalism, including Jewish, Turkish, and Arab nationalism, are rooted in reactions to imperialism, and in that respect are similar to political Islam. Both nationalism and political Islam in the Middle East are products of modernity without industrialization. Samman’s argument is based on previous theories of modernity. It is important to note that ‘modernity’ is a contested term: Shmuel N Eisenstadt claims that we live in an age of multiple modernities, whereas others suggest that modernity is rooted in the processes of industrialization and capitalism, which have created a singular form of modernity based on mass production and mass consumption. Scholars such as Eisenstadt examine modernity in a cultural context. However, these scholars dismiss the conditions and consequences of modernity, and one of the most important consequences is the creation of a nation-state, an event directly related to industrialization. This implies a form of modernity based on mass production and consumption. In order to understand modernity, we need to examine how it manifests at the global level, what Arif Dirlik describes as ‘global modernity.’
Capitalism and industrialization in the Middle East have not occurred as part of an organic process involving parallel social, political, and economic transformations. Instead, nationalisms in the Middle East were formed under colonial and postcolonial conditions, based on external European industrialization. In an organic process, we see the emergence of modern labor-based cities and a working class, the trend of women’s increasing participation in the workforce, massive educational transformation, the establishment of a science-based educational system, and, most important, a system of mass production and consumption. None of these factors were apparent in the Middle East and Muslim-populated societies at the time of the emergence of nation-states, and conditions of modernity have not developed along the same trajectory as it did Europe. In his book, Samman looks at three different cases of modernity, comparing Turkey, Israel, and Arab societies, with the starting point being colonialism. It can be argued that colonialism is a product of modernity, because the European demand for raw materials and labor created a need for new markets to exploit. According to Samman, colonial modernity was established under the postcolonial conditions in Turkey and Arab societies as well as Israel. I do not think we can exclude Israel from the discussion of colonial modernity, because Jews in 18th- and 19th-century Europe were colonial subjects living in Eurocentric lands faced with anti-Semitism. Their experience was not different from Arabs living in Algeria under French colonialism, Palestinians under Israeli occupation, and in the case of the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish republic. Thus, as colonial subjects, Arabs, Turks, or early Jewry did not experience an organic transformation from traditionalism to modernity. In this context, Samman claims that elites in the Middle East are now posing as anti-imperialists, but in practice they are like Orientalists.
Thus, Samman believes that secular Arab nationalist and Islamist movements were trapped within the Orientalist framework embedded in colonial modernity. This argument represents a partial truth regarding the Middle Eastern social and political landscape: under colonial rule, the options for Middle Eastern nations were limited and they could not escape European colonial political, economic, and social relations, which were based on the domination and hegemony of the West. However, Middle Eastern bureaucratic state elites were unlike pan-African nationalists such as Nkrumah, Lumumba, and Njerere. In my view, pan-African nationalist movements were far more successful than Arabs, Turks, or Jews at creating alternative forms of social and political mobilization free from Orientalism. However, they all failed, because modernity is not a European invention; it is based on the capitalist mode of production at the global level.
Samman’s book has a clear thesis and methodology; like any other social theory and political sociology book, it has many contested arguments. Samman’s work could benefit from additional content regarding the Turkish case of modernity before and during the era of Ataturk, in the sense that Ataturk was a clearly anti-imperialist leader with the objective of reproducing elements of European modernity. Thus, Ataturk’s thesis is similar to that of his mentor, Ziya Gokalp, on Turkification, Islamization, and modernization. Samman’s book also does not analyze Arab nationalism through the lens of an anti-imperialist movement. Despite Samman’s view, secular Arab nationalists and Islamists are not replicas of European modernization, but inhabit complex and multifaceted social and political movements that emerged under colonial and postcolonial conditions. Most of them studied either in colonial schools or in Europe, and, therefore, they were not able to escape the conditions of ‘European’ modernity. However, secularists or Islamists in Turkey or Arab societies who studied in Europe are not very different from Jews who faced anti-Semitism. This is in contrast with Samman’s argument that positions secularists and Jews as an extension of European modernity, with Islamists challenging this form of modernity. However, in my view, Zionists, secular nationalists, and Islamists wanted to accept ‘European’ modernity.
Samman asks why they were unable to create authentic forms of alternative modernity in the Middle East; I argue that it was impossible to create alternative and authentic forms of modernity because capitalism, as a global set of economic and political and social relations based on mass production and consumption, was spreading into the modern world leaving no space for alternative forms of modernity and lifestyle. Unlike the Turkish and Arab cases, I think one of the most important colonial cases is the state of Israel. Most of the states in the Middle East exist in the postcolonial era but experience residual colonial problems built into their political and economic structures. Israel is still rebelling against prior and somehow ongoing colonial conditions (i.e. their reliance on the United States); at the same time, we see the regime acting like the French occupation in Algeria or the British occupation in Egypt. The Jews in Israel are now between existing as a postcolonial Middle Eastern state, in the sense of being positioned geographically in the Middle East and having common roots as subjects of colonial Europe, but aligned with European hegemony and interests. Not a healthy social and political condition for any state or society in the era of global modernity.
One of weakest points of The Clash of Modernities is that Samman accepts the multiple modernities thesis, and applies it to the Middle Eastern nation-state building process. However, classical Marxist scholars view modernity as a monolithic concept embedded in capitalism that creates a certain set of conditions, and generates similar consequences in all cases. Thus, contrary to Samman’s argument, none of these nationalisms is an extension of European colonialism, but all are examples of reactionary modernists with nationalist or Islamist ideology. Samman’s book is an important contribution to nationalism and modernity studies in the Middle East and is written with a clear organization, and is an effective history of competing narratives of nationalism and modernity in the Middle East.