Early Arabist discourse praised Arabs as servants of Islam, pre-dating nationalist reversal

Evidence

Rashı¯d Ridfi a¯ was basically a theologian, not a politician, and his fundamental loyalty was Islamic not Arab. As early as 1900, however, he wrote a series of articles in al-Mana¯r in which he discussed the Turks and the Arabs, comparing the characters and achievements of the two, much to the advantage of the Arabs. While conceding great qualities to the Turks and allowing their important func­ tion in Islam, he insists on the superiority of the Arabs and on the greater significance of their role in the rise and spread of Islam among mankind. It is however because of their service to Islam that Rashı¯d Ridfi a¯ praises the Arabs— not like later nationalist theorists, including even some Christians, who praise Islam as a manifestation of the Arab genius. There is no hint of support for separatism in his writings, which express the attitude of a loyal Muslim to the Muslim state, at that time still the Ottoman Empire. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 850

Categorization

• XREF: Directly qualifies Orientalist narratives that read all Arabist thought as anti-Ottoman proto-nationalism; connects to Said-adjacent work on how ‘Arab’ identity was constructed. — connects to: The term umma was semantically transformed to denote the Arab nation.
• SEED: The conceptual inversion — from Islam as doctrine served by Arabs, to Arabs as genius manifest through Islam — is a clean mechanism piece for showing representation shifts.