ABSTRACT
In discussions of the modern Middle East, the notions of 'empire', 'imperialism', and 'colonialism' are categories that apply exclusively to the European powers and, more recently, to the United States. The term 'Arab Nationalism' (gawmiya) is a misnomer. It does not represent a genuine national movement or ideal but is rather a euphemism for raw imperialism. There had been no sense of 'Arabism' among the Arabic-speaking populations of the Middle East prior to the 1920s and 1930s, when Arabs began to be inculcated with the notion that they constituted one nation. For successive generations of Islamic rulers, imperial dominion was dictated not by universalistic religious principles but by their prophet's vision of conquest and his summons to fight and subjugate unbelievers. In the long history of Islamic empire, the wide gap between delusions of grandeur and the centrifugal forces of localism would be bridged time and again by force of arms, making violence a key element of Islamic political culture.
