The World-Historical Origins of Pan-Islamic Nationalism in Iran

In examining the world-historical context of the rise of pan-Islamic nationalism in Iran, this paper posits Islamic fundamentalism as a modern and global (rather than premodern and local) movement. Drawing on Polanyi and linking economy, polity, and culture, this study traces the origins of pan-Islamic nationalism in Iran to the transformation of the world-market relations in the second half of the nineteenth century and the rise of the food/agrarian regime after 1870. It shows that the relations of the state and the mercantile classes with the world market led to conflicting developments, viz., the national "contraction" of the state on the one hand and the international "expansion" of commercial classes on the other hand. The latter, in the course of their struggles for state representation, merged with the rising pan-Islamic reaction against European expansion in the "Islamic world." Pan-Islamism, by its capacity for articulating the economic nationalism of the mercantile classes in ethical terms, mobilized the masses of people for the struggle for the nationalization of the state. Hence, as a historical form, modernity and nationalism in the late nineteenth century Iran took a nonsecular character. Later, the Cold War politics revivified the pan-Islamic component of Iranian nationalism, creating the context for the rise to power of fundamentalism in the 1980s. The paper warns against the reification of place and culture rooted in binary conceptualizations of the local and the global phenomena.