Pre-national Middle Eastern loyalty ran to religion, kin, and village, not nation.

Evidence

The territorial and linguistic nation and the nation-state are both alien to the Muslim Middle East, where men’s basic loyalties were determined not by language or fatherland, but by religion. Loyalty to a place was known, but it was to a village or a quarter, not a country; loyalty to one’s kin was ancient and potent, but it was to the family or the tribe, not to the ethnic nation. The ultimate loyalty, the measure by which a man distinguished between brother and stranger, was religion, and political allegiance belonged to the dynastic sovereign of the Islamic state. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1168

Categorization

• XREF: This religion-first hierarchy of loyalties parallels Ernest Gellner’s and Benedict Anderson’s nation-theory debates, and nuances Said’s account of how ‘region’ was invented for the West.