Table Of ContentNationalism, Language,
and Muslim Exceptionalism
HANEY FOUNDATION SERIES
A volume in the Haney Foundation Series,
established in 1961 with the generous support
of Dr. John Louis Haney
NATIONALISM,
LANGUAGE,
AND MUSLIM
EXCEPTIONALISM
Tristan James Mabry
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used
for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this
book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written
permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104- 4112
Printed in the United States of America
on acid- free paper PB Dorothy L
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Mabry, Tristan James.
Nationalism, language, and Muslim exceptionalism / Tristan James Mabry. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Haney Foundation series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4691-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Nationalism—Religious aspects—Islam—Case studies. 2. Group identity—Religious
aspects—Islam—Case studies. 3. Language and culture—Political aspects—Case
studies. 4. Islamic fundamentalism—Case studies. 5. Separatist movements—Case
studies. 6. Exceptionalism—Case studies. I. Title. II. Series: Haney Foundation series.
JC311.M24 2015
320.540917'67—dc23
2014030163
CONTENTS
Chapter 1. Introduction 1
Chapter 2. Muslim Nations 17
Chapter 3. National Tongues 34
Chapter 4. Modern Standard Arabs 53
Chapter 5. Tongue Ties: Th e Kurds of Iraq 86
Chapter 6. Natives of the “New Frontier”: Th e Uyghurs of Xinjiang 103
. Hodgson
Chapter 7. Print Culture and Protest: Th e Sindhis of Pakistan 125
Chapter 8. Speaking to the Nation: Th e Kashmiris of India 142
Chapter 9. From Nationalism to Islamism? Th e Acehnese
of Indonesia 159
Chapter 10. Religious Community Versus Ethnic
Diversity: Th e Moros of the Philippines 177
Chapter 11. Nationalism, Language, and Islam 197
Notes 211
Bibliography 223
Index 247
Ac know ledg ments 253
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CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Th e word exceptionalism was born of politics. In its earliest incarnation, the
term was invariably prefaced by the qualifi er American and used by left ist
intellectuals to describe the apparently unique ability of the United States to
avoid class warfare. Muslim exceptionalism, on the other hand, is a much
younger term that fi rst earned currency in po liti cal science in the 1990s (Pipes
1996). Yet it bears a conceptual pedigree that easily predates Karl Marx. Th e
idea that something sets Muslim politics and society apart from the politics
and society of everyone else is the hallmark of Orientalism, a one- way con-
versation started by Eu ro pe an elites in the eigh teenth century (Irwin 2006).
However, following the publication of Edward Said’s withering magnum opus
Orientalism (1978), much self- conscious scholarship may have eschewed the
idea of Muslim exceptionalism for fear of committing academic heresy or even
a “thought crime” (Kramer 2006). Th is is clearly no longer the case.
Even before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the general belief
that all Muslim societies are built on the bedrock of a shared, immutable, and
alien faith infl uenced “dominant attitudes in academia and, with much more
devastating eff ects, in the media” (Filali- Ansary 1999, 18). Th ese attitudes
hardened in the 1990s, when some observers noted that Muslim countries
missed the “Th ird Wave” of demo cratization in the 1980s (Huntington 1991,
281). Moreover, following “the end of history,” that is, the collapse of the Soviet
Union (Fukuyama 1992), and the ideological bankruptcy of communism,
autocratic regimes were replaced with representative governments everywhere,
it seemed, except in the cradle of Islam, the Middle East (Salame 1994). In the
years since 9/11, well- meaning Western proponents of interfaith tolerance—
including academics, journalists, and policy makers—h ave tried to promote
a more nuanced understanding of Islam and (to a lesser extent) the diversity
of the Muslim world. Yet there remains a pers is tent view—o n both sides of
2 Chapter 1
the Atlantic (Nussbaum 2012)— that the politics of all Muslims can be ex-
plained by the infl uence of Islam. Th is is evident not only in some conser-
vative media and foreign policy circles, but also in the world of security
aff airs, where Muslims are perennially viewed with suspicion and alarm
(Croft 2012; Kaya 2012). In short, and despite the best eff orts of many civil
society actors, the view that Muslims are exceptionally problematic pol iti-
cally is at the heart of a contentious and continuing debate (Mandaville 2013;
see also, e.g., Bayat 2013; Strindberg and Warn 2011; Elshtain 2009).
Like Orientalism, the term “Muslim exceptionalism” is applied and inter-
preted inconsistently. One way to parse what is or is not exceptional about
Muslims is to explicitly examine specifi c po liti cal or social variables in contrast
to non- Muslims. Th is approach, adopted by Steven Fish, delivered a number of
conclusions. In a robust comparative study, he argues Muslim societies, when
compared to non- Muslim societies, are more averse to homosexuality and, to a
lesser degree, averse to abortion and divorce. In addition, in societies with pro-
portionately larger Muslim populations, both murder rates and socioeconomic
in e qual ity are lower. Th e caveat to the latter is that gender- based ine q uali ty is
higher. Yet the most signifi cant po liti cal fi nding is that democracy is “rarer” in
Muslim societies (Fish 2011, 255– 56). One conventional explanation for this
fi nding, that is, that Muslims are more likely to fuse religion with po liti cal le-
gitimacy, is empirically rejected. Instead, Fish argues there is no fundamental
diff erence between autocrats in Muslim states and those in non- Muslim states.
In other words, the same institutional impediments to democracy at work in
other developing countries are essentially the same in Muslim- majority states.
Nonetheless, the view that Muslim populations are less likely to endorse
democracy remains conventional even following the events of the so- called
Arab Spring beginning in 2011. Cynics point to the fact that the fi rst elec-
tions following regime change in Tunisia and Egypt returned Islamists as the
victors. Considering the dynamic fl ow of events across the region, the ques-
tion of whether or not democracy will ultimately consolidate, whether or not
peaceful transfers of power to rival parties will occur routinely following future
elections, is not yet known. Th us, a more substantive response to the question of
whether or not Muslim societies are resistant to democracy would benefi t
from observations of the Arab world in years following the Arab Awakening.
Yet despite the eff orts of Fish and other scholars to determine whether Mus-
lims are somehow exceptional, there is another critical question to which the
answer remains empirically unanswered: are Muslims exceptionally resistant to
ethnic nationalism? Th e questions are not mutually exclusive. As a doctrine of
Introduction 3
both pop u lar sovereignty and territorial self- determination, nationalism is es-
sential to nation- state legitimacy. By determining the criteria for who is or is
not a citizen, whether determined by where one is born or to whom, a national
identity enables the state to identify who is or is not a member of the demos.
Th is identity is typically composed of social markers including, but not limited
to, some combination of shared ancestry, religion, culture, and language. Th is
identity defi nes a people, who in turn defi ne a nation, which in turn describes
the extent— and justifi es the existence— of a nation- state. Nationalism is, in
this sense, “the major form in which demo cratic consciousness expresses itself
in the modern world” ( O’Leary 1998, 79; Nodia 1994). Hence, if a state sup-
ports a shared culture that links the identity of otherwise diverse citizens, then
“many of the problems that will normally appear in the eff ort to demo cratize a
multinational community are simply not on the agenda” (Stepan 1998, 223).
Th is is equally applicable to individual freedoms as “it is necessary to solve the
national question before liberal rule can be possible” (Hall 1998, 13). In the case
of American exceptionalism, for example, Samuel Huntington argued that a
threat to the liberal creed that defi nes American national identity is nothing
less than a threat to American democracy (Huntington 2004).
What then should be made of a Muslim national identity? Is there any-
thing like a Muslim demos? Is there a single nation of Islam, or are there many
Muslim nations? And what of the Arabs? Is (or rather was) pan- Arab nation-
alism a doctrine shaped around religion, ethnic chauvinism, neither, or both?
And what is the impact of the Arab Spring vis-à- vis nationalism: will it ulti-
mately lead Arab states toward a stronger shared identity but separate states,
or separate identities and separate nations? Th ese questions draw attention
to a split within the discussion(s) of Muslim exceptionalism: on one side are
proponents of positions that mark Arabs as a special subset of Muslims; on
the other side are observers who ascribe and/or describe characteristics that
apply to any society that surrenders, as it were, to Islam.
In the case of the Arab world, the Muslim exceptionalism thesis does have
some leverage due to the remarkable sociolinguistic phenomenon of diglos-
sia, a situation whereby languages function in separate registers, one Low and
one High, one illiterate and one literate, one ingrained and one acquired, one
vulgar and one offi cial. Arabic diglossia means that the Low vernaculars of
Arab peoples are marginalized in the public sphere in favor of High Arabic,
that is, Modern Standard Arabic, which is the sole offi cial language of the
state and its institutions, most critically those of public education. Th is yields
a population in a state but not of a state, a population part of an amorphous
