Quote Originally Posted by TheCurmudgeon View Post
I have only gotten to page 44, but what I find interesting is the connection between religion and nationalism in general. for example, if the colonial powers had not "created" states like Egypt would the connection between religion and government not been created by the Muslim Brotherhood?

Is religious identity politicized in the process of creating a national identity?

My answer is "yes", particularly since values are tied so closely to political legitimacy and religion provides a ready-made set of values to work from or to build on.
That’s a very post-Aquinas view of politics. Politics and the Political were understood by the likes of Aristotle to be the relationship of humans being to one another. That definition of man as Bios Politikos was perverted when Aquinas and his ilk translated it incorrectly (or not, depending on their purpose) into Latin as homo est naturaliter politicus, id est, socialis (man is by nature political, that is, social) thereby turning the relationship between people into something that is purely social whilst politics became merely an administrative function or process divorced from the wider populace (almost said society then, which would have been falling into that trap!). The separation of religion from politics or church and state is a peculiarly Western European, post-protestant phenomena/mania.

Nationalism is a phenomena that occurs, at least if Anthony Smith and his like are to be followed (and I think they are), when ethnic groups want control of a specific territorial space. An ethnie or ethnic group is one which has shared traditions, language, culture, dress, etc (but not race, which is a useless biological fallacy which see here, here or even here for instance). To say that Muslims have “conflated” or “perverted” Islam from a religious force into a political one is to ignore Islamic history, philosophy and theology (it is also to ignore how that conceit came to be fixed in our minds too). It also runs fowl of trying to understand or comprehend the Other is terms familiar to the self (ethnocentrism). The role of the Church and Orthodox Christianity in the Byzantine Empire, for instance, (one thinks of the causes of the Council of Nicea) is a non-Muslim/Islamic example of religion as a “political” force (isn’t it interesting how when we say “politics” we “naturally” mentally shear it away from everything else, like when we say religion, or economics, etc. Post-Enlightenment “Political science” really does strait-jacket our imaginations!). Indeed, anything, in Aristotelian terms, that concerns the relationship of beings with one another is political (pace Carl Schmitt, everything is political). The relationship of “religion” to other “spheres” of human existence (if such divisions are to be accepted; a la political “science”) remains a problem to be explained not a phenomena to be taken at face value.