The nation-state has weaker legitimacy in Islam than tribe and faith

Evidence

Throughout Islam the small group and the great faith, the tribe and the urnrnah, have been the principal foci of loyalty and commitment, and the nation state has been less significant. In the Arab world, existing states have legitimacy problems because they are for the most part the arbitrary, if not capricious, products of European imperialism, and their boundaries often did not even coincide with those of ethnic groups such as Berbers and Kurds. These states divided the Arab nation, but a Pan-Arab state, on the other hand, has never materialized. In addition, the idea of sovereign nation states is incompatible with belief in the sovereignty of Allah and the primacy of the urnrnah. As a revolutionary movement, Islamist fundamentalism rejects the nation state in favor of the unity of Islam just as Marxism rejected it in favor of the unity of the international proletariat. The weakness of the nation state in Islam is also reflected in the fact that while numerous conflicts occurred between Muslim groups during the years after World War II, major wars between Muslim states were rare, the most significant ones involving Iraq invading its neighbors. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 474

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader argument about civilizational fault lines — resonates thematically with the earlier ‘universal civilization vs. cultural particularism’ discussion. — connects to: Religion fuses with nationalism only when it legitimizes actual state governance — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 75
• QUESTION: Why were ‘major wars between Muslim states rare’ — Huntington attributes it to nation-state weakness, but oil-rich Iraq did invade neighbors (Iran, Kuwait). Worth interrogating whether intra-Muslim war suppression correlates better with external patron states than with Islamic identity dynamics.