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| Volume X, Summer 2003, Number 2 |
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| EXCERPT: Islam, Nationalism and Resentment of Foreign Domination |
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| Henry Munson |
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Dr. Munson is chairman of the department of anthropology at the University of Maine.
Islamists generally condemn national-
ism, yet they are often remarkably
nationalistic. One is reminded of the
relationship between Marxism and nationalism. In principle, Marxists condemn nationalism just as vehemently as do Islamists. Yet the revolutions waged in the name of Marxist ideology since World War II were all fueled, in part at least, by nationalistic resentment of foreign domination. Such resentment, among other things, also fueled the principal Islamist movements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In both cases, an ostensibly universalist ideology has actually often had a more parochial nationalist character.
Speaking of the Marxist Sandinista movement in Nicaragua in the late 1980s, Conor Cruise O'Brien writes:
Take the case of Nicaragua. No one who has any feeling for nationalism can spend any time in that country without being aware that nationalism is a driving force behind the reigning political ideology, Sandinismo. The eponymous hero of the movement, Augusto Cesar Sandino, is the classical hero and martyr of a national liberation struggle, and there is a national cult of heroes and martyrs, from him down to the latest victim of the Contras. The Contras and their friends are seen as vendepatrias, people who sell their country, the epithet that Sandino applied to his enemies and which remains the greatest stigma in the vocabulary of the Sandinistas. The Sandinista motto, Sandino's own, is quintessentially nationalist: patria libre o morir [free homeland or death].1
To stress the nationalist dimension of the Sandinista movement is not to deny that it was also a Marxist one. It is simply to emphasize that nationalistic resentment of foreign domination was at least one source of its appeal, along with its rhetoric about helping the poor and creating a more just society. Similarly, in discussing Islamist movements, we need to recognize that at least part of their appeal lies in their articulation of widespread resentment of Western domination as well as resentment of social and economic hardships and perceived inequities. In some cases, Islamists focus primarily on the grievances of a specific nation. In others, the focus is more on the Islamic world as a whole. These resentments play an important role in the rhetoric of many Islamist movements, as I shall illustrate by focusing on the rhetoric of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Hamas and Bin Laden.
1 Conor Cruise O'Brien, God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 70.
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