Middle East political conflict stems from clashing European and Islamic conceptions of sovereignty

Evidence

Underlying all these national, territorial, ethnic and religious differences and disputes, there is the deeper problem affecting the whole area: the unresolved clash of identities, of loyalties, of allegiances. On the one hand, there is the imported, still not fully assimilated European notion of country and nation, and the idea of popular government deriving its legitimacy from the people over whom it rules and operating through some kind of legislative assembly elected by and responsible to the people. Against these, there is a very different tradition of identity defined not by country or nation, which are regarded as minor or insignificant, but by community, by religious belief and practice. In this tradi­ tion, the individual owes his primary loyalty to the community and to the polity that is based on it. Its government is regulated by immutable and eternal divine law, and its ruler is indeed responsible—not to the people, but to God. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1617

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s Said-adjacent ‘Islam-West representation’ cluster: the framing of imported European categories vs. native Islamic tradition is classic Orientalist epistemology — corroborates or invites critique via Said’s contrapuntal reading.
• DEFINE: Defines the two rival bases of political legitimacy (popular/national vs. divine-law communal) that structure the chapter’s whole analysis.