Introduced with the declarative, “This book is about me”, State, Faith, and Nation is a testament to the productive potential of contingency not just in history but also in scholars' careers. Anscombe's self-professed specialization in the “modern Middle East” notwithstanding, he was hired twenty years ago as an Ottomanist by the American University in Bulgaria, “because [he] had a plausible claim to expertise in Ottoman history” (p. 1). The statement is only part self-deprecation, which is Anscombe's wont. It also hints at sterile categorizations in the field: between Ottoman and Middle East, empire and nation-state, or Balkans, Arab lands, and the “core regions”. Especially rare is scholarship that brings together the Arab provinces and the Balkans in the same analytical field.
The book is divided into three parts. Part I, titled simply “Ottoman Empire”, is a broad survey of the long nineteenth century, but not an ordinary primer. Anscombe's unconventional readings turn the certainties of modernization theory on their head. For instance, Anscombe sees the reigns of Selim III (1789–1807) and Mahmud II (1808–39), ordinarily hailed as the onset of institutional reform and modernity, as marking “the veritable financial, military, political, and moral collapse of the venerable Ottoman state” (p. 11). Mahmud II in particular, he argues, flouted Islamic law, undermined the moral basis of the state, and alienated the population. Nor were the subsequent Tanzimat reformers, contrary to standard depictions, the beacons of a Western modernity grounded in secularism. “The state did not seek westernization … or secularization. It sought to retain its identity as an Islamic state and to keep shariʿa as the touchstone of laws” (p. 12). These interpretations resonate with recent critical views of the inexorable march of Western modernity everywhere. Anscombe sees the Tanzimat reforms as analogous to “industrial espionage” (p. 93), not a programme aimed at becoming or acting more Western, even though this distinction remains blurred.
Anscombe elaborates on his chief arguments pertaining to the imperial period in chapter 4, “The reconstructed Muslim state”. He unconventionally couples up the Tanzimat and Hamidian periods (1839–1908) as the era of the reconstruction of a “modern but still Islamic state ” (p. 96). Here Anscombe engages with the study's pivotal theme, the tripartite relationship between state, religion and nation. He takes issue with nationalist myths: a developed (or subjugated) nationalism did not exist anywhere; indeed, the empire neither “confronted a successful, or even significant, nationalist rebellion … prior to First World War” (p. 107), nor did it implement ethno-nationalist policies. It would be wrong to ascribe nationalist motives to autonomist movements and “every peasant jacquerie” (p. 145). Finally, most individuals and groups characterized as nationalist were not indigenous to the site of the presumptive nation (e.g. heterochtone Greeks in the Greek independence movement in the 1820s, Serbian agents in Bosnia in 1875, Russian Turks in Istanbul, etc.). Related to these exogenous influences is Europe's role in intervening actively to assist Christian rebellions and/or weakening the Ottoman defences. Christian Europe's enmity was instrumental in elevating Islam in the state–society relationship. The Islamic state unravelled following defeat in the First World War accompanied by the increasing disregard of the Young Turk governments for “the moral brake that religious scruples exerted upon state action” (p. 120).
Anscombe launches Part II, on the creation of the post-Ottoman states, with equally incisive observations, treading into the vexed territory of the Ottoman legacy. Nationalists everywhere tend to view the nation-state experience as a cathartic liberation from the Ottoman Empire and its culture. Some invoke an insidious Ottoman legacy only to vindicate such atrocities as the carnages in the post-Soviet Balkans. Conceding a credible Ottoman legacy only to Turkey, Anscombe foregrounds the contingencies of nation and state-building and argues that “political choices made in the early post-Ottoman period” (p. 6), and not ancient hatreds incubated within the Ottoman system, were responsible for contemporary problems. In taking apart nationalist myths, he asserts that “almost none [no nation-state] was created by its people's struggle to achieve independence” (p. 141).
Despite the vast chronological differences in the onset of post-imperial existence within the broader region and the significantly varied contexts of independence, Anscombe constructs a cohesive comparative framework for thematic analysis. All states had new rulers with a propensity for violence, and all confronted legitimacy issues. The Balkan states were compromised by the role foreigners had played in their independence. In Turkey, Mustafa Kemal had capitalized on Muslim allegiances in rallying the people of the Empire's unoccupied regions, but then forged and imposed a secular ethnocentric identity with repressive measures. In the Fertile Crescent, the post-imperial indigenous elites chafed under semi-colonial arrangements in a “political purgatory” (p. 197) wrestling to forge nation-states. As in the Balkans, in the Arab Middle East too legitimacy was compromised by foreign agency, be it that of Great Powers who imposed boundaries and dominated institutions or indigenous political elites (e.g. the Hashemites in Iraq).
Anscombe investigates the relationship between state-building and nation-building as well as the dialectic between religion and nation. Depending on place and time, religion stood in a constitutive or competitive capacity with respect to the nation. He is careful, however, not to reduce religion to an instrumental role. He emphasizes two points. First, the part religion assumed in nation-building was contingent on novel exigencies and circumstances and not a vestige of the Ottoman order such as the millet system. Second, the new elites struggled to reorient the traditionally potent religious identification of anational populations towards the state.
In the Balkans “questions of nation and religious identity survived in suspended animation during Communist years” (p. 219). In the Arab states, the postcolonial weakness of political authority, the non-hierarchical organization of Sunni Islam in some countries and sectarian heterogeneity in others, and the strength of popular forms of Islam all militated against the harnessing of religion by the nation-state. In Turkey, the broad legitimacy the Kemalists enjoyed in the founding of the state allowed it to take control of religious institutions until the last decades of the last century, when groups motivated by the quest for authenticity and social justice managed to challenge Kemalist laicism in an Islamist idiom.
In Part III, “Contemporary post-Ottoman states”, Anscombe focuses on the ruptures of the last three decades and the parallel salience of religion. In the post-Communist scramble, ascendant legitimacy-seeking elites (especially in former Yugoslavia) revived linkages between religious and political identity that had been forged in the early post-Ottoman period. Irredentism became an important element in this quest leading to the bloodbaths of the 1990s. This decade was an important juncture for the Arab states as well. The First Gulf War, the new unipolarity in international relations, and concomitant globalization, coupled with impasses in the Palestine Question, further undermined the solidarity of Arab states, as the gap between popular sentiment and the regimes widened in individual countries. In Turkey, the global and regional dislocations coincided with the political and social ruptures that followed the military rule of the 1980s, including the Kurdish insurgency. The legitimacy deficit in the reconstituted political arena attenuated state authority everywhere and created political, moral and ideological vacuums into which religion moved as “the glue to hold society together” (p. 255).
State, Faith, and Nation is an engaging and erudite book that will be as accessible to a general readership as it will be stimulating to students of the Middle East and the Balkans. The prose is readable, witty and provocative. Anscombe has digested several bodies of historiography and introduces some new insights from research in British and Ottoman archives. Many of us preach about bridging historiographies and moving beyond established nation-centric narratives. Anscombe accomplishes this masterfully.
