Thread by @HusseinAboubak

Islamism, Jihadism, Baathism, Arabism, Nasserism, Khomeinism, Palestine, etc. are all products of mitosis from the same pool of primordial ideational soup that brewed in the Middle East in the early 20th century under influence from Europe. During that period, the ME was /1

downstream from German idealism, romanticism, and their different fascist products. Those ideas mixed with the local culture and produced the same psychological conditions of narcissistic rebellion, romantic theorization, Hegel, and artistic mysticism. Until the early 1950s, I /2

confidently say no ideology was yet differentiated. The heavy influence of Germany can be attested in literature, journalism, art, media, etc. During such period, and before they take their separate ways into Islamism, or nationalism, etc. everyone was just pro-Nazi, /3

antisemitic, and anti-Western. This is the formative era of modern Islam. The first ideological organism to mature out of this primordial soup was the Arab Left that many of its central figures started their lives as committed pro-Nazi ideologues and activists. /4

Eventually, this process is what will create modern Islam as defined by Islamism. This is a story of fascism becoming the liberationist left and then becoming Islam. This is a story of a process and not some divinely conceived and well-defined ideologies of Arab nationalism /5

, Islamism, etc. No one knew what they were doing. It was all a product of an imitative cycle in which everyone wanted to imitate Germany creating a domestic sphere in which almost all Arabs competed with each other in imitating, and over imitating, Germany.

This is just a very bad attempt at a super quick summary of how I think about this.

And I'm starting to suspect this is how the Left evolved everywhere and not just in the ME. People on the Left like to believe and force all of us to believe they are in contrast to fascism. I suspect they were both products of mitosis from the same Hegelian primordial soup

The ME and Islam, or what we came to think of as Islam, may not be that unique after all. On the contrary, it is too familiar for us to recognize.

Btw, this is why you find the most specialized academic writings confusing about the ideological identity of figures such as Haj Al Husseini, Nasser. Where they Arab nationalists? Where they Islamists? Were they opportunists? This due the failure to see it was all the same thing