Pan‐Islamic ideals and national loyalties: Competing attachments amongst early Muslim activists in France

Abstract

Islamist movements are often considered the epitomes of transnational movements; however, little is known about the concrete workings of their transnational ambitions. In investigating the evolution of Muslim activists in France from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, this article shows that their embrace of pan‐Islamic ideals initially conflicted with strong investment in (Arab) homeland politics. Later on, their engagement with a French Islam signalled less the emergence of a de‐territorialised, de‐culturalised Islamic identity than it did the assertion of new nationally bounded (French) attachments. Overall, the analysis sheds light on a stimulating puzzle regarding cosmopolitanism: the persistence of national forms of identification in movements that aspire to bypass national affiliations.

Banal and everyday (inter)nationalism: French and Italian anarchist exiles in London, 1870s–1914

“…The adoption of theoretical categories from studies on nations and nationalism has proved fruitful in analysing the anarchists' perception and elaboration of the idea of nation and national belonging, problematising how the anarchists theorised and perceived the concepts of nation, national identity and internationalism, and how these concepts informed their ways of life, their ideas, propaganda and political activities, thus complicating the simplistic view of a monolithic ideological internationalism. Concurrently, the analysis of French and Italian anarchist exiles in London contributes to the broader interdisciplinary debate on competing loyalties in transnational movements (Dazey, 2020), responding to the need to 'bridg[e] macro and micro approaches to the study of nationalism' and explore individual agency 'in relation to the social organisational context within which individual practices take place' (Antonsich & Hearn, 2018, 595). The anarchist refugees' experiences in London combine both aspects, albeit at times in a contradictory way.…”

“…Focusing on the interplay between banal nationalism, everyday nationhood, and the internationalist ideologies and transnational cultural affinities, which bound the Italian and French groups of anarchist exiles in London between 1870s and 1914, we argue that the anarchists enacted an original synthesis through transnational community‐building—albeit one which did not fully resolve their competing national and internationalist attachments and was largely defeated by the patriotic surge of 1914. As such, anarchist conceptions, enactments and deconstructions of the nation present an important contribution to the intellectual and social history of nationalism and internationalism on the left, and a further illustration of ‘a stimulating puzzle regarding cosmopolitanism: the persistence of national forms of identification in movements that aspire to bypass national affiliations’ (Dazey, 2020, 1).…”