Islam and Competing Nationalisms in the Middle East, 1876-1926 (The Modern Muslim World)

"Opposing a binary perspective that consolidates ethnicity, religion, and nationalism into separate spheres, this book demonstrates that neither nationalism nor religion can be studied in isolation in the Middle East. Religious interpretation, like other systems of meaning-production, is affected by its historical and political contexts, and the processes of interpretation and religious translation bleed into the institutional discourses and processes of nation-building. This book calls into question the foundational epistemologies of the nation-state by centering on the pivotal and intimate role Islam played in the emergence of the nation-state, showing the entanglements and reciprocities of nationalism and religious thought as they played out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Middle East"--Back cover Acknowledgments -- Contents -- List of Abbreviations -- Chapter 1: Introduction -- Part I: Religious (Islamic) Thought, Nationalism, and the Politics of Caliphate -- Chapter 2: Nationalism and Religious Thought -- Eurocentric Context of the Study of Nationalism -- Secularization, Religion, and Nationalism -- Modern Islamic Political Thought, "Islamism" and Nationalism -- Chapter 3: The Politics of the Khilafa, Old and New -- The Emergence of the Caliphate (632) and Ensuing Debates -- Theological Roots of the Late Ottoman Caliphate -- Part II: Official Nationalism and Islamic Identity -- Chapter 4: Ottoman/Turkish "Official Nationalism"--Turkish Nationalism and Its Latency -- The Empire and Official Nationalism -- Contradictory Readings of the Past -- Chapter 5: Abdülhamid II's Pan-Islamism/Nationalism -- Official Language and Turkification -- History of Educational and Linguistic Turkification -- The Trajectory of the Turkification of the Language -- Hamidian Official Nationalism and Language -- Ottoman Intelligentsia and Turkification of the Language -- "The Language of the State"--Hamidian Official Nationalism and Language-based Discrimination -- Nationalism and the Politics of Pan-Islamism -- Part III: Kurdish Nationalism and Exclusionary Islams -- Chapter 6: Exclusionary Islam and Kurdish Nationalism: The Case of the Naqshbandi Sheikh Ubeydullah of Nehri -- The Rise of Sheikh Ubeydullah -- "The Kurds' Religion Is Different"30 -- A Kurdistan-Centered Islamic Revivalism -- The Kurds Under the Gaze of Others -- "The Kurdish Nation Is a People Apart"229 -- Chapter 7: Kurdish Nationalism and Khilafa in Nursi's Pre-exile Writing -- Chapter 8: "Fully-fledged Nationalism in Religious Garb": The Caliphate as the Site of Nationalist Rivalry -- "Non-Kurds to Foment the Kurdish Revolt" -- The Caliphate as a Dilemma -- Chapter 9: Conclusion