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Islam against the West: Shakib Arslan and the campaign for Islamic nationalism

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This book is a non-sympathetic biography of Shakib Arslan (1869-1946), a Lebanese who bemoaning the collapse of the Islamic caliphate in Turkey (1924), became a spokesman in promoting the resurgence of a strong Islamic umrah throughout the Middle East. As the author noted: "Arslan emerged militant in his opposition to western encroachment on Islamic lands and tireless in his crusade to bring the organizing principles of a universalist Islam to the age of emerging nation-states. Organizer, pamphleteer, diplomat, spokesman, and symbol, Arslan became on of the dominant, and most controversial, Muslim political figures" between WWI and WWII. Arslan "served as the Ottoman government's special emissary to Berlin in 1917 and again in 1918." The author noted that the anti-Kemalist Arslan "more than any other figure of the period, exemplified the continuation of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani's message of Islamic-oriented resistance to the [European] outsider. For Arslan, Islamic solidarity was the only legitimate means for the attainment of independence; he eschewed Syrian and even Arab nationalism for the more all-embracing doctrine of Islamic nationalism" (p. xix). Arslan wrote "Why Are the Muslims Backward?", an unsparing critique of the failure of his Muslim-Arabs in achieving political independence. During WWII, while he lived in Switzerland, the German Arab Nazi-propaganda machine quoted his support of Hitler's attempt to `liberate' the Arabs from their British-French overlords in the Middle East. The author concluded of Arslan: "The major criticism leveled at the inter-war ideologues of Ottoman background...like Islamic nationalists like Arslan, is that they had no formula for social change, no understanding of the needs of the masses....He was more a nostalgic cosmopolite than a social reformer, more concerned with cultural integrity than with the reasons for rural poverty" (p. 162).