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July 8, 2026
By Dr. Mohamed Chtatou
Key Takeaways
By Dr. Mohamed Chtatou
Key Takeaways
Identity Politics in the Middle East is Fluid and Instrumentalised — Nationalism, religion, ethnicity, class, and gender are not fixed but continuously renegotiated by state and non-state actors depending on power, legitimacy, and political opportunity.
Modern Constructs Meet Deep Cultural Repertoires — While Arab nationalism and state borders were modern inventions (shaped by colonialism and print capitalism), they draw on pre-existing ethnic, religious, and symbolic resources that give them strong affective power.
No Single Identity Dominates — Secular Arab nationalism declined after 1967, Islamism rose then adapted, and sectarian/ethnic identities persist — all are strategically mobilised rather than primordial, with outcomes shaped by context and elite competition.
Introduction
The politics of identity—encompassing nationalism, ethnicity, religion, class, and gender—provides the affective and normative fuel of political mobilisation across all regime types, and its comparative analysis has generated some of the most vibrant and contested debates in the discipline. Nationalism, as the ideological claim that the legitimate unit of political authority is the nation, was analysed by Anderson (1983/2006) as the product of particular conditions of modernity—print capitalism, vernacular standardisation, and the displacement of religious cosmologies—rather than as the natural political expression of pre-existing primordial communities. Gellner’s (1983) structural account, which derived nationalism from the homogenising cultural demands of industrial society, and Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) constructivist emphasis on the ‘invention of tradition’ converge on the insight that national identities, however experienced as ancient and organic, are modern political constructions whose genealogies are contingent and recoverable.
The Middle East, however, poses a set of complications for this modernist consensus that make it an especially productive terrain for comparative analysis. First, the region’s national boundaries were substantially the product of external imperial cartography—the Sykes-Picot arrangement and the League of Nations mandate system—such that the ‘nation’ frequently postdated, rather than preceded, the state (Hourani, 1991; Fromkin, 1989). Second, Islam supplies a transnational normative vocabulary—the umma, the caliphate, sharī’a—that both antedates and persistently competes with the territorial nation-state as a locus of ultimate political loyalty (Piscatori, 1986; Zubaida, 1993). Third, ethnic and sectarian cleavages—Kurdish, Amazigh, Shi’a, Sunni, Christian, and others—cross-cut and often subvert the nationalist project, producing what Makdisi (2000) termed ‘the culture of sectarianism’ as a durable political technology rather than a residue of primordial hatred. This essay argues that political mobilisation in the Middle East is best understood not as the triumph of one axis of identity over the others but as a continuous, historically contingent renegotiation among nationalist, religious, ethnic, class, and gendered idioms of solidarity, each instrumentalised by state and non-state actors according to shifting configurations of legitimacy and power (Barnett, 1998; Telhami & Barnett, 2002).
Theorising Nationalism: Modernism, Ethno-Symbolism, and Their Limits
The modernist paradigm associated with Anderson (1983/2006), Gellner (1983), and Hobsbawm (1990) treats the nation as an artefact of capitalism, bureaucratic rationalisation, and mass literacy. Anderson’s (1983/2006) concept of the nation as an ‘imagined community’—imagined because its members will never know most of their fellow-nationals yet nonetheless perceive a horizontal fraternity—rests on the technological precondition of print capitalism, which standardised vernacular languages and created the simultaneity of experience that national consciousness requires. Gellner (1983) located the causal mechanism instead in the functional requirements of industrial society, which demands a culturally homogeneous, literate workforce mobile across an anonymous labour market; nationalism, in this reading, is the political roof that industrialism requires. Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) edited volume complements both accounts by demonstrating empirically how ostensibly ancient traditions—kilts, coronations, civic rituals—were frequently fabricated in the nineteenth century to manufacture the historical depth that new political communities required (Chtatou, 2026, June 7).
Against this modernist current, Smith (1986, 1991) advanced an ethno-symbolist corrective, arguing that modern nations, whatever their political novelty, typically crystallise around pre-existing ethnies—named human populations with shared ancestry myths, historical memories, and cultural markers—such that nationalism’s ideological work is one of reinterpretation and mobilisation rather than pure invention. Connor (1994) pressed a related point about the affective, quasi-kinship character of national feeling, cautioning that instrumentalist accounts of nationalism-as-elite-manipulation understate the visceral force such identities exert once activated. The Middle Eastern cases discussed below vindicate elements of both positions: Arab nationalism’s ideologues self-consciously constructed a modern qawmiyya (pan-Arab nationhood) using print media and party organisation in a manner consistent with Anderson and Gellner, yet they did so by reworking pre-existing linguistic, tribal, and religious materials whose symbolic resonance—per Smith and Connor—could not simply be manufactured ex nihilo (Dawisha, 2003; Choueiri, 2000). The analytical task, then, is not to adjudicate definitively between constructivist and ethno-symbolist positions but to trace how political entrepreneurs mobilise available cultural repertoires under specific structural constraints (Chtatou, 2022, January 11).
Religion and the Nation-State: A Structural Tension
A second complication specific to the Middle East concerns the relationship between religion and the nationalist project. Piscatori (1986) demonstrated that Islamic political thought has historically resisted full assimilation into the Westphalian logic of territorially bounded, mutually exclusive sovereignties, since the umma is conceived as a single moral-political community transcending ethnic and territorial particularism. Zubaida (1993) extended this analysis by showing how modern Middle Eastern states have nonetheless successfully appropriated Islamic symbolism in the service of territorial nationalism—Egyptian, Moroccan, and Saudi state Islam each construct a nationally bounded religious authority that domesticates the universalist claims of the umma. Ayubi (1991) characterised this appropriation as constitutive of what he called ‘the over-stated’ Arab state: a state apparatus strong in coercive and symbolic reach yet weak in autonomous legitimacy, compelled continuously to borrow religious authority to compensate for thin nationalist consensus.
Halliday (2000) usefully disaggregated the analytic confusion that often attends discussions of ‘religious nationalism’ in the region, distinguishing between religion as a marker of communal boundary (a functional equivalent of ethnicity), religion as a totalising political ideology (Islamism proper), and religion as a legitimating discourse instrumentalised by incumbent states. These are analytically distinct even though empirically entangled: Ba’athist Syria’s minority-inflected Alawite leadership deployed a studiously secular Arab nationalist idiom precisely because sectarian identity could not supply legitimating universality (Batatu, 1999), whereas Saudi Arabia’s ruling family fused dynastic nationalism with Wahhabi religious authority from the state’s founding (Al-Rasheed, 2010). The variation across cases confirms Barnett’s (1998) broader point that Arab and Middle Eastern politics unfold within a shared normative field—pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, sovereignty—whose meaning is nonetheless perpetually contested and redeployed by rival elites for domestic and regional advantage (Chtatou, 2022, January 11).
Arab Nationalism and Its Vicissitudes
Arab nationalism (qawmiyya) emerged in the late Ottoman period among Christian and Muslim intellectuals of the Levant who sought, per Anderson’s (1983/2006) model, to construct a horizontal fraternity transcending confessional and dynastic loyalty through a shared Arabic print culture (Hourani, 1991; Dawisha, 2003). Its interwar and post-independence apotheosis under Nasserism and Ba’athism reworked this cultural nationalism into a state-centred ideology of anti-imperial liberation, non-alignment, and Arab unity, most spectacularly embodied in the short-lived United Arab Republic (Choueiri, 2000). Yet as Ajami (1978) diagnosed with prescient bitterness, pan-Arab nationalism’s normative claim—that the Arab nation, not the individual territorial state, constituted the legitimate unit of sovereignty—generated a persistent legitimacy deficit for the very states that invoked it, since qutriyya (territorial patriotism) and qawmiyya (pan-Arab nationhood) pointed in mutually undermining directions.
The 1967 defeat is conventionally treated as the watershed moment in this ideology’s decline (Ajami, 1978; Kerr, 1971), discrediting the secular nationalist regimes’ claim to have mastered the instruments of modern statecraft and creating the ideational vacuum into which Islamist movements would later expand (Kepel, 2002). Batatu’s (1999) monumental study of Syria demonstrates how, even as pan-Arab rhetoric persisted, Ba’athist power became increasingly captured by minority-sectarian and rural class networks, such that official nationalist ideology functioned less as a description of the regime’s social base than as a legitimating veneer over what was, in practice, an exclusionary patrimonial order—an early instance of the instrumentalisation dynamic elaborated below (Chtatou, 2025, January 14).
The Islamist Alternative: Religion as Mobilising Ideology
The eclipse of secular pan-Arabism created the political opening that Islamist movements—the Muslim Brotherhood chief among them—were organisationally and ideologically positioned to exploit (Kepel, 2002; Wickham, 2002). Wickham’s (2002) ethnographic study of Egyptian Islamist activism reframes mobilisation theory itself: rather than treating Islamism as a spontaneous outpouring of religious sentiment, she demonstrates how movements like the Muslim Brotherhood built dense networks of social provision, professional syndicates, and moral community that functioned as parallel infrastructures of solidarity where the state had retreated under structural adjustment. Ismail (2003) similarly emphasised the everyday, associational, and disciplinary dimensions of Islamist politics—mosque study circles, dress codes, neighbourhood surveillance of moral conduct—arguing that Islamism’s political effectiveness lay as much in its capacity to reshape the texture of daily life as in its formal ideological claims.
Roy’s (1994) comparative analysis complicated any triumphalist reading of political Islam’s ascendancy, arguing that Islamism as a totalising revolutionary project—aiming at the wholesale Islamisation of state and society—had substantively failed by the 1990s even as ‘neo-fundamentalism,’ a more socially conservative, depoliticised piety movement, continued to expand. This distinction proved analytically prescient: the subsequent trajectories of Islamist parties after 2011, from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s brief and calamitous experience of incumbency to Tunisia’s Ennahda’s pragmatic accommodation with pluralist competition (Cavatorta & Merone, 2015), illustrate the instability of Islamism’s relationship to formal state power, in contrast to its comparatively greater durability as a social and associational force. Kandiyoti’s (1991) work on gender and Kepel’s (2002) transnational history of jihadist trajectories further indicate that Islamist mobilisation itself fractured along multiple axes—reformist versus revolutionary, quietist versus militant, nationally bounded versus transnational—undermining any monolithic characterisation of ‘political Islam’ as a single actor or ideology.
Sectarianism, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Fragmentation
Where Arab nationalism and Islamism each aspired, in different registers, to transcend sub-national particularism, a third body of scholarship has examined how ethnic and sectarian identities have been actively produced and instrumentalised as bases of political mobilisation rather than surviving as inert pre-modern residues. Makdisi’s (2000) genealogy of Lebanese sectarianism is foundational here: he shows that the very category of a fixed, politically salient sectarian identity was itself a product of nineteenth-century Ottoman reform and European intervention, which recast a more fluid social order into administratively legible confessional communities—an argument structurally parallel to Anderson’s (1983/2006) and Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) treatment of nationalism as constructed rather than primordial. Salloukh et al. (2015) extended this analysis to contemporary Lebanon, arguing that the post-civil-war confessional power-sharing arrangement did not merely reflect sectarian identity but actively reproduced and hardened it, since political elites’ access to patronage resources depends on the perpetuation of confessional voting blocs—an instance of what Cammett (2014) termed ‘compassionate communalism,’ whereby sectarian parties furnish welfare goods in ways that entrench, rather than dissolve, communal boundaries (Chtatou, 2026, June 7).
Comparable dynamics obtain for ethnic mobilisation more broadly. Kurdish nationalism, straddling Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, illustrates Brubaker’s (1996) argument that nationalism is best conceptualised not as the property of bounded groups but as a relational, contingent ‘nationalising’ practice pursued by state elites, homeland minorities, and external patrons in dynamic triadic interaction; Kurdish mobilisation has accordingly taken sharply divergent institutional forms—armed insurgency in Turkey, federal autonomy in Iraq, and localised self-administration in Syria—depending on the specific configuration of state strategy and external alliance in each context (McDowall, 2004; Romano, 2006). Amazigh (Berber) mobilisation in North Africa presents a further variant: rather than seeking territorial secession, Amazigh movements in Morocco and Algeria have pursued cultural and linguistic recognition within the existing nation-state, contesting the Arabo-Islamic monopoly on official national identity while working through, rather than against, state institutions (Maddy-Weitzman, 2011; Silverstein & Crawford, 2004). This variation across the Kurdish and Amazigh cases underscores that ethnic mobilisation, no less than religious or nationalist mobilisation, is shaped by the political opportunity structures within which it operates rather than by the intrinsic content of ethnic grievance alone (Wimmer, 2013).
Class, Gender, and the Intersectional Terrain of Identity Politics
Identity politics in the Middle East cannot be reduced to nationalism, religion, and ethnicity alone; class and gender constitute intersecting axes that mediate how the former are experienced and mobilised. Batatu’s (1999) analysis of Syria already demonstrated the inseparability of sectarian and class dynamics, as rural, minority-sect officers used the vehicle of Ba’athist party organisation to displace an urban Sunni landholding elite—sectarian mobilisation, in this instance, cannot be understood independently of the class realignment it accomplished. Bayat’s (2010) concept of the ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary’ similarly reframes subaltern class politics in the region away from formal movements and towards incremental, informal appropriations of urban space and resources by the poor, a mode of mobilisation that operates beneath, rather than through, the nationalist or religious idioms more commonly studied.
Gender constitutes an equally constitutive axis. Kandiyoti’s (1991) edited collection demonstrated that nationalist and Islamist projects alike have relied on the regulation of women’s bodies, dress, and family status law as a primary terrain upon which competing visions of authentic national or religious identity are enacted and contested—the female body functions, in this literature, as a privileged symbolic site onto which anxieties about modernity, authenticity, and communal boundary are projected. Moghadam’s (1993) comparative study extended this argument by tracing how state-led modernisation projects across Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere instrumentalised women’s legal and social status as an index of national progress, only for subsequent Islamist reactions to reverse these very reforms as a means of repudiating a discredited secular-nationalist order. Joseph’s (2000) concept of ‘relational rights’—wherein legal and political personhood in much of the region is mediated through kinship and confessional status rather than direct individual citizenship—further demonstrates how gender, sect, and nationality are structurally co-constituted within the region’s legal and political architecture rather than analytically separable variables (Chtatou, 2025, January 14).
Authoritarian Durability and the Instrumentalisation of Identity
A final dimension concerns the relationship between identity politics and the durability of authoritarian rule that long characterised, and in most cases still characterises, the region. Bellin’s (2004) influential ‘robustness of authoritarianism’ thesis located regime durability primarily in the coercive apparatus’s institutional cohesion and willingness to repress, but subsequent scholarship has argued that coercive capacity alone cannot explain variation in regime survival without attention to how identity cleavages are managed. Anderson (1991) had earlier shown that Middle Eastern monarchies in particular derived resilience from dynastic and tribal legitimating formulas unavailable to republican regimes, which were correspondingly more reliant on the nationalist and populist legitimation whose 1967 collapse Ajami (1978) diagnosed. Brownlee’s (2007) comparative analysis of party institutionalisation similarly demonstrated that regimes which successfully channelled elite competition through ruling-party structures—again frequently articulated through nationalist or religious idiom—proved more durable than those relying on coercion alone (Chtatou, 2026, June 7).
Lynch’s (2006) study of the post-2000 Arab public sphere added a further dimension: the proliferation of satellite television and, later, social media created a transnational discursive space in which pan-Arab identity was reactivated—now channelled through networks like Al Jazeera rather than Nasserist state broadcasting—generating new forms of mobilisation, most consequentially during the 2011 uprisings, that cut across the boundaries of individual authoritarian states even as those states’ formal identity-management strategies remained nationally bounded (Lynch, 2012). The uprisings themselves, and their profoundly divergent outcomes—democratic transition in Tunisia, military restoration in Egypt, state collapse in Libya, Syria, and Yemen—confirm that identity mobilisation is neither uniformly liberalising nor uniformly authoritarian in its effects; rather, as Barnett (1998) and Telhami and Barnett (2002) argued in advance of these events, the political consequences of identity mobilisation depend on the specific institutional and coalitional context into which mobilised sentiment is channelled, not on the intrinsic content of the identity invoked (Chtatou, 2022, January 11).
Conclusion
The comparative study of identity politics in the Middle East vindicates the modernist premise, shared by Anderson (1983/2006), Gellner (1983), and Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983), that nationalism and its cognate identity formations are historically contingent constructions rather than primordial essences—a premise borne out empirically by Makdisi’s (2000) genealogy of Lebanese sectarianism, Batatu’s (1999) account of Syrian Ba’athism, and Dawisha’s (2003) history of Arab nationalism’s rise and decline. Yet the region’s experience equally illustrates the limits of a purely constructivist account: religious, ethnic, and communal identities, once activated by political entrepreneurs, acquire an affective density and institutional entrenchment—through confessional power-sharing, welfare provision, and associational life—that render them resistant to unmaking even after the political conditions that produced them have changed, a durability closer to Smith’s (1986) and Connor’s (1994) ethno-symbolist emphasis (Chtatou, 2022, January 11). The overarching lesson for comparative politics is that nationalism, religion, ethnicity, class, and gender in the Middle East are not competing, mutually exclusive vectors of political mobilisation but a continuously reconfigured repertoire, whose relative salience at any moment reflects the shifting strategic calculations of state and non-state actors operating within specific, historically produced structures of opportunity and constraint (Barnett, 1998; Wimmer, 2013).
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About Dr. Mohamed Chtatou
Dr. Mohamed Chtatou is a Professor of education science at the university in Rabat. He is currently a political analyst with Moroccan, Gulf, French, Italian and British media on politics and culture in the Middle East, Islam and Islamism as well as terrorism. He is, also, a specialist on political Islam in the MENA region with interest in the roots of terrorism and religious extremism.
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