Voluntary civil society had little pre-colonial precedent in the region’s traditional associations
Evidence
My third point is the emergence, under the aegis of the Mandatory govern ment, and more particularly under its civil service, of what we have nowadays got into the habit of calling “the civil society.” This is a term of considerable antiq uity, going back to the Middle Ages, but in its modern sense it has acquired the fairly specific meaning of the network of interacting voluntary organizations. In the traditional society there are two kinds of association: the one the involuntary but strong allegiance that one owed by birth, to the tribe, the sect, the neigh borhood; the other the compulsory allegiance that one owed to the ruler. There was very little between the two. The civil society is a network of groups of people bound together by choice, by a shared interest, a shared program, even a shared hobby. The sports-club is an important part of the civil society. There are begin nings of the civil society in the late Ottoman period, but this too, it seems to me, is one of the major innovations which can be credited to the British Mandate. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 823
Categorization
- XREF: Directly relevant to debates about whether ‘civil society’ in the Middle East is an imported Western category or an indigenous development — a known Said-adjacent flashpoint.
- SEED: Angle: whether the wholesale importation of civil society as a normative political ideal in post-Mandate states misreads how association actually worked in traditional society.
- QUESTION: Lewis says sports clubs exemplify civil society - what about Hajj caravans, guilds, or sufi orders which were neither birth-allegiance nor ruler-allegiance? He may be overstating the vacuum.