State Building, Modernization and Political Islam: The Search for Political Community(s) in the Middle East

Abstract

To appreciate the dynamics involved in identity formation and re-formation is the key to understanding the processes by which nation and state building in the Middle East have adapted to modernization and political Islam. Soltan affirms that four identities–primordial, national, regional and universal– cast the basic scope of Middle East politics. And these, far from facilitating a national consensus or healthy coexistence in each country, have instead found that they interact in an arena of the remnant of the colonial period –the territorial state, whose legitimacy must not only be measured by the commitment to serving much broader Arab or Islamic interests, but whose moral and ideological grounds for existence are often ironically disguised in the supra-national rhetoric of nationalists.The specificity of the Middle East, that is to say the pace and form of its development, the rise of diverse fundamentalist movements, and the historical significance of the globalization process on identity formation, has not benefited greatly by Euro-centric analyses fromthe modernization school. Thus, the author contends that, just as scientific and technological progress continues to set the pace of modernization in the Middle East, needed also is a more comprehensive socio-political approach to fully understand the region’s people’s search for political community in greater terms than security if threechallenges are to be met -democratization, economic development, and bringing peace and stability to the region.