Political Islam rejects popular sovereignty, challenging the nation-state’s primacy

Evidence

At another level, this failure may derive from the fact that Middle East studies accounts of political Islam have failed to take account of the radical nature of the Islamic challenge. This can be seen in the way in which the challenge from political Islam appears to problematize the category of nation-state, whereas most Middle East scholars (e.g., Halliday) have accepted it. The idea of the nation-state is linked to the idea of citizenship in which the citizen’s highest loyalties are to the nation-state, in other words the nation-state incarnates the popular sovereignty. Political Islam apparently rejects the idea of popular sovereignty and instead places faith above any loyalty to the nation-state. Thus, conventional Middle East scholarship, which operates with an a priori acceptance of the tradition of the classical European nation-state, can but see political Islam as a disruptive element as it seeks to renegotiate what had been considered to be part of political common sense. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3530

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: how the analytical toolkits of area studies blind scholars to movements that refuse their core unit of analysis, the sovereignty-embodying nation-state.