The United Arab Emirates: Nationalism and Arab – Islamic

نبذة عن كتاب The United Arab Emirates: Nationalism and Arab – Islamic

There is a wide diversity of identity constructs in the Muslim world, and within the Arab- Muslim world. Despite wide acknowledgment of this fact, mush of the recent debate on modern Muslim identity has tended to be based on narrowly defined images. An instance of such a narrow definition is that which to a large extent formed the assumption behind debates on Islamic identity presented at the 1998 International Conference on Muslim Identity in the 21st Century held in London. Here, although this was not a declared aim of the conference, discussion focused almost exclusively on the experiences of immigrant Muslims in the United Kingdom and United States. Since these same people constituted the majority of presenters and delegates, and the conference took place in the United Kingdom, this was to an extent understandable. However, the limited perspective failed to do justice what should have been a discussion of the whole range of modern Muslim identities. Moreover, these diverse identities were largely unacknowledged and to this extent, the perspective offered tended to be misleading. The way in which the national identity of the modern United Arab Emirates (UAE) has evolved, illustrates the inadequacy of such monolithic pictures. The example of the UAE is presented here in the context of my wider research into higher education and identity issues. Furthermore, its radically different circumstance from that which formed the context of debate in the aforementioned conference serve ideally to highlight the inadequacy outlined earlier. Emirati concepts of self and national identity challenge the vague but monolithic pictures of modern Muslim identity often found in literature pertaining to Islamic studies, whether from the Orientalist, non- Orientalist and Islamic Science perspectives or in the media generally.