ABSTRACT
When the process of secularism was completed in Europe and capitalism had engendered a measure of personal freedom, the nation-state replaced communitarian and feudal systems in the West. In the Islamic world the process was quite different, since the concepts of the state and the community were in sharp contrast to those developed in the West. The major crisis facing the Islamic countries is that, with a very few exceptions, their political systems and their governments are inconsistent and incompatible with the core of their cultural systems and values, that of Islam. The aspect of the nation-state system that has been the most destabilizing of the imported ideologies in the Islamic world has been nationalism. The penetration and the intrusion of the major European powers in the affairs of the Islamic lands had profound impact on the relationship between the state and communication institutions.
