Ethnic nationalism reached the Islamic world as foreign import embraced first by Christians

Evidence

The idea of ethnic nationality as the basis of political identity was strictly European and was a product of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, associated with the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars and the romantic movement. Its first expressions in the Islamic world were and for some time remained of foreign inspiration. For a long time the only response in Islamic countries was among the non-Muslim minorities, chiefly Christian. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 831

Categorization

• XREF: Directly corroborates the Said-adjacent thesis that nationalist/identity categories were Western constructions projected onto and adopted by the Middle East.